What were the Greeks and Romans like? Their letters suggest they weren’t so different from us

By Konstantine Panegyres, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, researching Greco-Roman antiquity, The University of Melbourne

When we read about the Greco-Roman world, we often hear the stories of famous and wealthy men and women. But the letters of ordinary people, preserved on papyri in Egypt, show us what they were thinking and doing. Human nature, their contents suggest, hasn’t changed much.

Sometime in the 3rd century AD, in Egypt, a man called Zoilus wrote a letter to his mother Theodora about family news. He had just visited his sister Techosous, who was sick:

Zoilus to my mother Theodora, greetings. When…

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© The Conversation - Wednesday, January 1^st 2025

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