Useless builders, smug charioteers and

480pp, Abacus, £19.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£25, ebook£14.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

For all the glory of their empire, the Romans knew the significance of the mundane. The Greeks gave us tragedy, lyric, elegy; the only literary form born in Rome was satire. While Greek choruses addressed the immortal gods, Roman writers trained their focus on the neighbours. Dinner guests who steal the napkins, bath-goers who scream when they get their body hair plucked, women obsessed with the predictions of fortune-tellers – all fall prey to ridicule at the hands of the great satirists Juvenal and Martial.

Roman life in all its familiarity and absurdity is the subject of Guy de la Bédoyère’s rollicking new book, Populus. Drawing on letters, inscriptions, plays, poems, architecture, coinage and the preserved contents of Herculaneum’s sewers, de la Bédoyère sets out to reconstruct how people of all stations lived. What they ate, smelt, saw and believed; how they supported, entertained, protected and thought about themselves.

There is an immense amount of evidence. The Romans rival us in their obsession with self-promotion and recording the minutiae of life. The tombstone of the charioteer Gaius Apuleius Diocles records every detail of his extraordinary career: transfers between three of Rome’s four major chariot teams, first place in 1,462 of his 2,900 races, the granting of his freedom, a fortune of 36 million sesterces won on the track.

More mundane details were recorded daily in correspondence, graffiti and accounts: at a distance of more than 2,000 years, we can still hear Cicero rant about a builder named Diphylus and how unevenly he’d installed the columns in the country villa of Cicero’s brother. This culture – combined with the luck of survival – has given Rome a strange and