The Lives of Ancient Villages: Rural Society in Roman Anatolia

Our conception of the culture and values of the ancient Greco-Roman  world is largely based on texts and material evidence left behind by a  small and atypical group of city-dwellers. The people of the deep  Mediterranean countryside seldom appear in the historical record from  antiquity, and almost never as historical actors. This book is the first  extended historical ethnography of an ancient village society, based on  an extraordinarily rich body of funerary and propitiatory inscriptions  from a remote upland region of Roman Asia Minor. Rural kinship  structures and household forms are analysed in detail, as are the  region's demography, religious life, gender relations, class structure,  normative standards and values. Roman north-east Lydia is perhaps the  only non-urban society in the Greco-Roman world whose culture can be  described at so fine-grained a level of detail: a world of tight-knit  families, egalitarian values, hard agricultural labour, village  solidarity, honour, piety and love.