A Classics professor at UC Berkeley, Dr. Knapp has spent his career studying the history of the Roman Empire away from its capital city.  He is also a specialist in ancient coins, ancient inscriptions, tomb stones, and graffiti.  (Since there was no paper in the ancient Western world graffiti was used the way later eras would use flyer, handbills and yard signs for local elections.)  Well prepared by this background (and able to mine art history and the passing comments contained in the usual Classics reading list of works written by the most privileged people in the Empire) Dr. Knapp has written a highly readable and well-illustrated book on how the subjects of the Roman empire lived (and sometimes how they felt about it.)  He covers the lives and attitudes of middle-class and poor men, women, slaves, freedmen, and soldiers.  (Most people could not write so reconstructing their lives is not an easy task for any historian.)  Dr. Knapp includes early Christian and Biblical (i.e. New Testament) sources in his chapter and provides at excellent look at how early Christians did (and did not) break free from the common opinions of their time.

After reading this book you will not read the New Testament in the same way:  you will read the letters and gospels more in the way its original hearers did (very few people could read).  You will understand something of the sheer strangeness of the early Christian message for its contemporary hearers.

If you know nothing about the Roman Empire, this book is an engrossing and non-technical introduction.  If you are an expert you will learn something (or at least be reminded of a source you had not thought about recently.)

This book is written to be read out of order:  jump in at any chapter that interests you.  (Or, if you are a teacher, assign the best chapter(s) for your class.)  For this reason the book is a little repetitious when read straight through — but having discarded many excellent book chapters from class syllabi over the years because they were overly technical mush when read on their own, I am grateful for Dr. Knapp's thoughtfulness in designing this book.

Highly recommended for anyone who has ever wondered what Caesar's solders thought of all this, or what the silversmiths in Ephesus were so upset about (Acts 19), what ancient women looked for in marriage, and how slaves gained their freedom.

-Kushana