James Ker

“Everyday Life,” the topic of many popular books about Rome, can be refined for studying Roman culture in an anthropological framework. Scholars have illuminated Roman calendrical and historical time, but works such as Carcopino’s "La vie quotidienne à Rome" (1937) prompt questions about Roman "Everyday" time. However simplistically, they build upon a prior set of important ancient Roman representations; and the concept of the “everyday” has been productive in social theory. This project focuses on the role of morningtime in the Latin language and in Roman religion, politics, social organization, economics, practices of leisure, and literature. Morningtime had a privileged function in Romans’ strategic representations of the Roman city and its communities, and of individual selves.