Book Club

About Invisible Romans

Robert Knapp seeks out the ordinary people who formed the fabric of everyday life in ancient Rome and the outlaws and pirates who lay beyond it. They are the housewives, prostitutes, freedmen, slaves, soldiers, and gladiators who lived commonplace lives and left almost no trace in history – until now. But their words are preserved in literature, letters, inscriptions and graffiti and their traces can be found in the histories, treatises, plays and poetry created by the elite. A world lost from view for two millennia is recreated through these, and other, tell-tale bits of evidence cast off by the visible mass of Roman history and culture.

Invisible Romans reveals how everyday Romans sought to survive and thrive under the afflictions of disease, war, and violence, and to control their fates under powers that both oppressed and ignored them. Their lives – both familiar and foreign to ours today – are shown against the tumult of a great empire that shaped their worlds as it forged the wider world around them.

Sunday, 27th July 2025, at 7pm (BST)/2pm (EDT)

SUMMER SPECIAL BOOK CLUB

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

Ancient Sicily. Enter GELON: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter LAMPO: lovesick, jobless, in need of a distraction.

Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads. They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food. And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry.

It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of. What could possibly go wrong?

A Sunday Times bestseller, Glorious Exploits was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024.