Archaeology is now revealing the grit and hustle of the Roman middle class, reminding us that civilizations depend not on elites, but on the conditions that allow ordinary people to thrive.

For most of us, especially those of us who think about it a lot, the Roman Empire conjures up famous names of such men as Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Marcus Aurelius, and a few others of the imperial elite. We might also think of grand structures like the Colosseum, the Appian Way, and the Pantheon, or massive spectacles from gladiator duels to races at the Circus Maximus. Dozens of books explore the Empire’s wars against Dacia in southeastern Europe, the Iceni in Britannia, Germania in northern Europe, and the Jews in Palestine.

The point is, we tend to think of the extraordinary, not the ordinary or, to put it another way, the macro, instead of the micro. Why? As Kim Bowes, a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, explains in Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, until recently the ordinary lives of ordinary Romans eluded us for lack of evidence. Only in the last three or four decades, thanks to an explosion of archeological digs often triggered by construction projects across Europe, have we been showered with new knowledge about the lives of what Bowes labels “the 90 percent.”

“It’s a delicious irony,” she writes, “that more information about the rural Roman 90 percent has emerged from the construction of Euro Disney [about 15 miles east of Paris] than from the well-intentioned excavations designed to find them.”

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