Sarah Bond has produced an exciting book that focuses on marginality — that is, as she defines it, ‘anyone who encountered legal or social barriers within Roman society’ — whilst at the same time examining Roman society's ‘notions of disrepute, pollution and attitudes toward profit’ (3). The book is composed of five case studies of stigmatised occupations: criers, funeral workers, tanners, mint workers and bakers.

As the title of the book suggests, Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger is a key reference point for B., and is a focus of discussion in the introduction (11–16). B. uses the recent marketing slogan ‘If you're not whitening, you're yellowing’ (equally relevant to ancient dental hygiene: Ov., Ars am. 3.197–8 and Catullus 39) as the starting-point for a succinct discussion of recent work on pollution. She could perhaps have made more of the contrast between the ancient use of urine in teeth whitening and modern conceptions of the drinking of urine as an example of ‘matter out of place’. B. goes on to connect these concepts to the ancient sensorium as a means (albeit ‘imperfect’, 14) of organising and approaching such taboos, and the senses will serve throughout the book as a ‘loose framework’ to organise her approach to the case studies. This five-page discussion of methodology will certainly be used in one of my seminars as a key introduction to the study of pollution in antiquity.

There are further key methodological points made in the book. Serious disjunctures emerge between literary texts on tanners and tanning and the actual material practice itself (not to mention the apparent pride with which the profession is attested in inscriptions); we may conclude that it is simply impossible to regard the ‘literary landscape’ as a means to understanding smell in antiquity. This is an important point, given that publications in ‘Classics’ on the ancient senses (e.g. M. Bradley, Smell and the Ancient Senses, 2015) have tended to privilege literary sources. It would seem logical that modern scholars can fall into the trap of ignoring the ‘disconnect between the literary landscape and the actual physical one’ (18).

The book contains a wealth of examples that juxtapose literary perceptions (or elite fears) with contemporary epigraphic, legal and material culture. So while exploring the prejudice against criers for exploiting or monetising the use of their voice, found in both orators (Cicero) and poets (Juvenal), we can also see how the crier was connected to all sectors of society from the senator to the slave, and indeed even developed, through their collegium, ‘a rather posh meeting place’ (28–9). This detailed examination of different types of evidence is the book's great strength, and is supported by appendices of texts with translations relating to each case study (181–216).

However, this is not one of those books in which the wood cannot be seen for the trees, and wider implications are often brought out. Having established the crier as an essential feature of the Roman city, as a distributor of information, B. goes on to argue that he had a role in the spread of ‘Romanisation’, information and propaganda: it was, for example, such men who announced the news of an emperor's death (52–3). The crier thus becomes a stigmatised ‘buffer’ between the emperor and his people, and integral to the workings of the Roman Empire.

B.’s book is as much about the way modern scholarship marginalises people in Roman history, as about how the elite marginalised parts of Roman society in the past. When turning to the mint workers of Rome, she points out that treating coins primarily as art involves a privileging of the visual over all the other senses, and also tends to isolate the artisans from the production of these images (128). The point of marginality can also be made with reference to the study of epigraphy, legal texts and even archaeology. Much of Roman Studies is focused on literature at the expense of these other categories of evidence, a focus which leads to the effective marginalisation of those whom the elite saw as marginal in antiquity. The book sets straight some of these problems, but all too often we still see the use of literature as evidence for what happened in daily life. As I read the book, I had to wonder how far Classics in the twenty-first century may still tend to marginalise academics working on law and/or epigraphy, thus marginalising certain kinds of history as a result. Looking at the UK, I have a strong feeling that archaeology is still seen as a form of pollution (or dirt), and so remains excluded or ignored or marginalised. (For more on this, see R. Laurence, Roman Archaeology for Historians, 2012.)

B.’s book is chronologically wide-ranging, covering the period from the late Republic to the death of Justinian. B. takes care to plot changes over this time-period, exemplified by the change in status of mint workers, who in the Republic were of low status, but by the sixth century enjoyed a much higher status in both East and West. Similarly, the legal stigma regarding criers had disappeared by Late Antiquity. By contrast, the elite perception of tradesmen found in Cicero's De officiis can be found alive and well right down to the end of antiquity.

This is an engaging book, and B. ensures that students will know where she is coming from, with nice succinct conclusions and arguments clearly set out. I have, though, one substantial complaint: no images — not even one, which is strange, given that B. uses these extensively in her blog, History from Below (https://sarahemilybond.com/).