Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman MediterraneanTrade and Taboo addresses the legal, literary, social, and institutional creation of disrepute in ancient Roman society. Tracking the shifting application of stigmas of disrepute between the Republic and Late Antiquity, it follows particular groups of professionals—funeral workers, criers, tanners, mint workers, and even bakers—asking how they coped with stigmatization. In this book, Sarah E. Bond reveals the construction and motivations for these attitudes, and to show how they created inequalities, informed institutions, and changed over time. Additionally, she shows how political and cultural shifts mutated these taboos, reshaping economic markets and altering the status of professionals at work within these markets. Bond investigates legal stigmas in the form of infamia and other marks of legal disrepute. She expands on anthropological theories of pollution, closely studying individuals who regularly came into contact with corpses and other polluting materials, and considering communication and network formation through the disrepute attached to town criers, or praecones. Ideas of disgust and the language of invective are brought forward looking at tanners. The book closes with an exploration of caste-like systems created in the later Roman Empire. Collectively, these professionals are eloquent about economies and changes experienced within Roman society between 45 BCE and 565 CE. Trade and Taboo will interest those studying Roman society, issues of historiographical method, and the topic of taboo in preindustrial cultures. |
Contents
Roman Pride and Prejudices | 1 |
Criers Status and Soundscapes | 21 |
Chapter 2 Touch Pollution and the Mortuary Trades in the Roman Mediterranean | 59 |
Tanners in the Ancient Mediterranean | 97 |
Legal Disrepute and Associations of Mint Workers | 126 |
Sensual Trades in the Later Roman Empire | 142 |
Inheriting the Prejudices of Rome | 167 |
Appendices | 181 |
The Dissignatores | 197 |
The Coriarii | 203 |
The Mint Workers | 208 |
Notes | 219 |
| 279 | |
| 311 | |
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Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean Sarah Bond Limited preview - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
Ancient Rome apparitores apparitorial praecones Artemidorus attitudes auctions bakers Bodel Brill burial butchers Caesar Cambridge University century BCE chapter Cicero CIL I2 city of Rome civic clerics coinage collegia corpse criers culture dead death Diocletian disrepute dissignator dissignatores early Christian early empire economic Egypt Egyptian elite emperor epigraphic epigraphic evidence epitaph f(ilius fourth century freedman funeral workers Granius Greek hides imperial indicates inscription Italy Jewish Julius Caesar l(ibertus L(ucius Late Antiquity late Republic later empire leather lex Julia lib(ertus Libanius Libitina literary M(arci magistrates marginalized military minters mints monetae municipal necropolis necropolis workers notes Oxford University Patermuthius patron perhaps pollution Pompeii populace praeco profession professionals Puteoli Quasar Republican role Roman Empire Roman society Roman world Rome’s Routledge second century ser(vus served slaves social status stigma Studies taboos tanners tanning Theod tion tomb tradesmen urban Vegetius Verres voluntary associations καὶ