Hello, i need help is writing my roman society article assignment which is due on February 28th 2020. I have attached the files that includes the guidelines on how to write the article review and what

Questo saggio prende in considerazione un gruppo particolare di commercianti non appartenenti all‘élite: i barbieri. Intende indagare attraverso la loro figura parte della cultura popolare, soprattutto nella città di Roma nel primo Impero. Lo studio prende le mosse analizzando il significato che i barbieri avevano nel più ampio contesto sociale. La cura dei capelli rientra nelcultus, termine dall’ampio significato che ha a che vedere con tutti i tipi di ornamento e raffinatezza. La possibilità di vedere attraverso le maglie della costruzione letteraria, frutto soprattutto dell‘élite, comprendendo così in parte la vita quotidiana delle realtà socialmente inferiori, è una questione chiave per lo studio dell’antica cultura popolare. Nel saggio si sostiene come sia possibile giungere a qualche ricostruzione plausibile e si evidenzia quali caratteristiche possano essere poste in luce in merito alla vita della non- élite.La‘socialità popolare’nel negozio del barbiere creava preoccupazione tra gli scrittori dell‘élitee il saggio esamina queste preoccupazioni come un modo attraverso il quale comprendere la natura delle relazioni tra le culture popolare ed elitaria.

This paper looks at one particular group of non-élite tradesmen—barbers—to see what they can tell us about popular culture, primarily in the city of Rome in the early Empire. 1The problem is that this task involves using texts that were written almost entirely by members of the élite. Not only that, but barbers were 1 The idea for this paper came out of the conferenceLocating Popular Culture in the Ancient World organized by Dr Lucy Grig at Edinburgh University in 2012. My thanks go to the participants of that conference who provided so much fertile discussion and thought-provoking debate, above all with respect to this piece Pavlos Avlamis for his paper‘Élite and popular voices in Imperial Greek literature’, and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira, for his paper‘Communication and plebeian sociabilityinlateantiquity’. Roman barbers have been the subject of two brief studies before but, dating from 1891 and 1932, these works reflect the generalizing and antiquarian interests of scholars from an earlier age. The focus was on trying to establish some of the factual details of real life, such as what kind of haircut was widely adopted and what kind of shears were used to deliver it. See F.W. Nicolson,‘Greek and Roman barbers’,Harvard Studies in Classical Philology2 (1891), 41–56, and D.B. Kaufman,‘Roman barbers’,Classical Weekly25.19 (1932), 145–8. Papers of the British School at Rome83(2015), pp. 91–109 © British School at Rome doi:10.1017/S0068246215000057 intimately caught up with the complex attitudes Roman authors had towards cultus, that difficult umbrella term that related to all manner of adornment and refinement. 2 Nevertheless, what I hope to show is that it is still possible to make some level of plausible reconstruction of certain aspects of how the non- élite lived and what they believed. This kind of plausible conjecture is a contentious matter, as for many classicists this approach is too speculative. I would argue that using what evidence we do possess to try and tease out elements of ordinary life and then build them into a coherent model of non-élite culture is the only way we can hope to say something about these lower social groups. I am certainly not going to deny that there are many difficulties and pitfalls; but this is an important task in the effort to see beyond the élite section of society, and the result can yield some interesting results. 3 Following Holt Parker, we can divide the types of evidence we have about the non-élite into three clear types: that which comes from élite texts written for other members of the élite; texts that were written by members of the literary élite for a non-élite or cross-social audience; and texts that were produced by the non-élite themselves. 4Almost all the evidence for barbers comes from the first group. Most of the evidence is literary, with the usual suspects lining up to provide details of social life in the great city: Martial, Ovid, Suetonius, Seneca and Petronius. Many other details are provided from the Greek-speaking part of the empire, especially through Plutarch and Lucian. The barbershop certainly had a major part to play in Greek popular culture, and this seems to have been as true in Cyril’sAlexandriaasithadbeeninLysias’s Athens. Other more 2 Oncultus, see L.J. Archer, S. Fischler and M. Wyke (eds),Women in Ancient Societies: an Illusion of the Night(Basingstoke, 1994), 143; Ovid,Ars Amatoria Book 3, ed. R.K. Gibson (Cambridge, 2003), 128–30; K.A. Lefebvre,With You in That Dress:Cultusand Elegy in Rome (University of Wisconsin, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 2013). 3 A recent development that is helpful here is the resurgence in interest in the study of‘ordinary Romans’, often using the notion of‘popular culture’: see N. Horsfall,The Culture of the Roman Plebs(London, 2003); T. Morgan,Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire(Cambridge, 2007); M. Beard,Pompeii: the Life of a Roman Town(London, 2008); J. Toner,Popular Culture in Ancient Rome(Cambridge, 2009); L. Kurke,Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose(Princeton (NJ)/Oxford, 2010); H.N.

Parker,‘Toward a definition of popular culture’,History and Theory50 (2011), 147–70; S. Forsdyke,Slaves Tell Tales: and Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece(Princeton (NJ)/Woodstock, 2012). On particular topics, see J. Toner,Leisure and Ancient Rome(Cambridge, 1995), 65–88; N. Purcell,‘Literate games: Roman urban society and the game of alea’,Past & Present147 (1995), 3–37; T. Habinek,‘Singing, speaking, making, writing:

classical alternatives to literature and literary studies’,Stanford Humanities Review6 (1998), 65–76; I.A. Ruffell,‘Beyond satire: Horace, popular invective and the segregation of literature’, Journal of Roman Studies93 (2003), 35–65; I. Marchesi,‘Traces of a freed language: Horace, Petronius, and the rhetoric of fable’,Classical Antiquity24 (2005), 307–30; P. Avlamis,‘Isis and the people in the life of Aesop’, in P. Townsend and M. Vidas (eds),Revelation, Literature, and Community in Late Antiquity(Tübingen, 2011), 65–101; J.C. Magalhães de Oliveira,‘Popular justice and street theatre in late Roman cities’, in L. Grig (ed.),Popular Culture in the Ancient World(Cambridge, forthcoming); and M. Flohr,The World of the Fullo(Oxford, 2013). 4 Parker,‘Toward a definition of popular culture’(above, n. 3).JERRY TONER 92 problematic sources include the much later joke-book,The Laughter-lover (Philogelos), in which barber jokes are a regular feature and may reflect a long tradition of such humour reaching back into the early Empire and beyond. There is also a small body of epigraphical material. The risk is that using this broad range of sources can suffer from the problems of old-fashioned studies of‘daily life’, which lumped together a wide range of sources into one seemingly coherent whole and ignored the methodological problems inherent in such an approach:

that differences in time, geography, context and register all make it necessary to interpret texts on an individual basis. And that is to say nothing of the significant random element in what evidence has happened to survive and, indeed, the reliability of what does. 5Trying to build a coherent model of popular culture will not eradicate all of these problems; but it does bring three clear benefits. First, the approach is alert to these risks and so can try to avoid using the exceptional as evidence of the ordinary. Second, it creates a model of lower-class culture that is internally consistent with the social context in which those people lived. It therefore reflects non-élite concerns and tries to understand their culture as a broadly rational reaction to the social problems they faced. And thirdly, the picture of popular culture that emerges provides a benchmark against which local nuance can be applied. Yes, it is a model that tries to incorporate such evidence as exists in a plausible way, but naturally that does not mean that it should be taken as claiming to be an accurate picture of every detail of the past as it really was.

But before we start, some broad definitions need to be established. By‘non- élite’I am referring to the mass of people who comprised the labouring and artisanal classes, and by‘popular culture’to the set of beliefs and practices that filled their lives. 6By élite, I mean the highly literate, politically powerful group of the senatorial and equestrian classes or a little below who produced most of our literary sources. It goes without saying that these are reductive terms and should be taken as heuristic shorthands. In reality, the degree to which these two groups were culturally distinct is a matter of dispute, as is the question of how well they were integrated with each other. Indeed, one of the main purposes of this paper is to reveal something of the more complex workings of how popular culture interacted with that of the élite. WHAT WAS A BARBER?

The Latin term for barber istonsor, with a barbershop being referred to as a tonstrina. The Greek words arekoureusandkoureion. These blanket terms, however, were used for a wide variety of tradesmen and establishments. Barbers 5 For a clear overview of the problems of using evidence in this way, see M. Beard,The Roman Triumph(Cambridge (MA)/London, 2007), 37–41. 6 Discussion of the definitional problems relating to the concept can be found in Toner,Popular Culture in Ancient Rome(above, n. 3), 1–10, and Parker,‘Toward a definition of popular culture’ (above, n. 3). BARBERS, BARBERSHOPS AND SEARCHING FOR ROMAN POPULAR CULTURE 93 seem to have been sufficiently uniform to have formed a group in Pompeii (possibly acollegium), where an election graffito has them supporting one particular candidate. 7But not all barbers plied their trade in the same way. Some operated out of shops, which varied considerably in terms of their grandness. 8 Some barbers based themselves in a particular neighbourhood, attracting a local clientele, others took advantage of the concentration of consumers in the central areas of the city of Rome and the commercial district of the Subura. 9One area where barbers have been found is in the vicinity of the Circus Maximus. 10 A surviving slave-collar states that if the wearer is found having run away, he should be returned to the barbers by the Temple of Flora. 11 Excavation of the drainage channel of atabernabuilt into the podium of the Temple of Castor and Pollux identified it as a barbershop. 12 But not all barbers possessed barbershops.

Many carried out their work wherever they could set up their stool, had access to water (which was straightforward in Rome), and could attract custom, and so were found throughout the city. 13 Other‘shops’were little more than marked-off areas of public space. In Aphrodisias, two barbers, called Alexander and Zenon, marked their places of trade on columns in the east portico of the theatre baths, which also acted as a primitive form of advertising. 14 As Angelos Chaniotis has argued, this type of unofficial, semi-temporary inscription contested the use of official public space, reclaiming the portico for the business of daily life. Claire Holleran suggests that it was perhaps only barbers with a wealthier clientele or financial backing from a patron who worked fromtabernae, while others simply worked in the street or in the colonnade or arcades. But the sharp divide between permanent and itinerant barber was lessened by the fact that shop-based barbers spilled out from their rooms onto the street. An edict of Domitian banned occupants oftabernaefrom operating beyond their thresholds, meaning, in Martial’swords,that‘razors were no longer rashly drawn in the middle of a dense crowd’. 15 But in reality the practice clearly continued, and Ulpian uses such a theoretical case in a legal discussion. He questions who would be liable under theLex Aquiliaif a customer were injured while being shaved in a public 7 CILIV 473. 8 One in Alexandria supposedly had a hydraulic mechanism that could raise or lower a large mirror at will; see Vitruvius 9.8.2 on the invention of Ctesibus the son of a barber, who was ‘marked out by his talent and great industry’. 9 See C. Holleran,Shopping in Ancient Rome: the Retail Trade in the Late Republic and the Principate(Oxford, 2012), 52; and on barbers more generally, pp. 125–7. 10 CILVI 31900. 11 CILXV 7172. 12 See K.A. Nilson, C.B. Persson, S. Sande and J. Zahle,The Temple of Castor and Pollux: the Augustan Temple(Rome, 2008). 13 Holleran,Shopping in Ancient Rome(above, n. 9), 53. SeeCILII 5181 for the termcircitores applied to barbers. 14 See A. Chaniotis,‘Graffiti in Aphrodisias: images—texts—contexts’, in J.A. Baird and C. Taylor (eds),Ancient Graffiti in Context(New York/London, 2011), 191–207, at pp. 194–5 and 201–2. 15 Martial 7.61.7.JERRY TONER 94 space,‘when some people were playing with a ball, one of them hit it hard and it knocked the hands of a barber with the result that the throat of a slave whom the barber was shaving was cut by the jerking of the razor’. 16 Barbers did not only cut hair and shave. They provided a range of personal services, such as trimming finger- and toe-nails, the removal of unwanted hair from various parts of the body, and making wigs, although not all can be expected to have offered the full range. In order to carry out these tasks, barbers possessed a variety of implements, including a comb, half-moon razor, scissors, mirror, tweezers, soap and cosmetics. 17 Curling irons were available to enable a barber to style longer hair. 18 Perfume might be kept also to scent the hair after it had been cut. Operating such rudimentary tools required considerable skill. In Classical Greece, it seems that the customer had to puff out his cheeks to stretch the skin and make the job of shaving easier. 19 Apprentices used blunted razors with which to learn their trade and to give them‘the courage of a barber’. 20 Even so, the bungling apprentice was a common enough figure to feature in the joke-book,The Laughter-lover:‘A bungling apprentice made a mess of cutting a customer’s hair and was cuffed away when he made an equally bad start on manicuring him.“Master,”he complained,“Why won’t he give me a chance to learn?”’. 21 Skill levels no doubt will have varied. Some might have been‘skilled to cut streaming locks and shave hairy cheeks with steel that barely touched them’, but these were probably in the minority. 22 Unsurprisingly, minor wounds were common even with an experienced barber operating, and spiderwebs could be used to stop bleeds. 23 Alternatives to the primitive razors were also available in the form of powerful depilatory ointments, especially when used for removing hair from the torso and limbs. 24 BARBERS ANDCULTUS These are relatively uncontroversial factual points. Once we move beyond them, we quickly run into the main difficulty involved in trying to use barbers to find 16 Digest9.2.11.pr. 17 See Alciphron 3.66.1; Lucian,The Ignorant Book-collector29; Pliny,Natural History35.112.

Plutarch,Antony1, suggests that soap was not always used, although other references imply it was more common: Palatine Anthology 6.307; Martial 7.83,‘While the barber Eutrapelus moved round Lupercus’face and painted his cheeks...’. 18 Plautus,The Weevil577–8; Martial 2.36.1. 19 Aristophanes,Thesmophoriazusae218–21. Further details of the tools can be found in Nicolson,‘Greek and Roman barbers’(above, n. 1). 20 Petronius,Satyricon94. 21 The Laughter-lover199. 22 Martial 6.52. 23 See Martial 11.84 on the perils and pain of having one’s beard shaved; on spiderwebs, see Pliny,Natural History29.114. 24 Martial 3.74.1–4; Pliny,Natural History32.135; Martial 6.93.8–9. BARBERS, BARBERSHOPS AND SEARCHING FOR ROMAN POPULAR CULTURE 95 out about the non-élite: that the representation of barbers was bound up intrinsically with élite attitudes towards the ambiguous and difficult issue of cultusin Roman life. The cultural importance of this management of personal appearance has been recognized since the important work of Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu. 25 Fashion has come to be seen as being inherently bound up with the workings of socio-economic systems, reflecting both what individuals can afford to pay but also how they choose to manipulate the world around them in order to accumulate social capital by means of displaying status and wealth and of creating a particular self-image. The transformative power of clothing and hairstyling in the ancient world to create various personal images also has been noted. 26 Barbering, therefore, needs to be understood as one of the range of civilized urban practices—ranging from bathing and cleanliness to hairstyling and dress—that reflected the complicated nexus of attitudes Romans had towards self-image. Indeed, attitudes towards barbers were themselves affected by opinions concerning other commercial traders who cleaned and attended to the Roman body, whether they were fullers, bath- attendants or masseurs.

27 Barbering seems to have been imported from the Greek world, and there is no evidence for barbers in Rome until about 300 BCE .28 Common in classical Greece, it is reasonable to link the introduction of more widespread Roman barbering to immigration and cultural importation from this source. Fashions relating to beards began to change in Rome, with more Roman men going beardless, although that did not imply that they shaved on a daily basis. The Elder Pliny claims that it was Scipio Aemilianus, who died in 129 BCE , who first took up the practice of shaving every day. 29 The importance ofcultusmeant that the hair and its treatment acquired a range of symbolic meanings. Shaving and wearing the hair short became marks of civilization, whilst having a long straggly beard was often considered a sign of squalor. Even if there was no etymological link between the Latin words for beard,barba, and barbarian, barbarus, the terms acquired shared connotations of rough, rustic unkemptness. 25 R. Barthes,Système de la mode(Paris, 1967); P. Bourdieu,La distinction: critique sociale du jugement(Paris, 1979). 26 See A. Corbeill,Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome(Princeton (NJ)/Oxford, 2004); K. Bradley,‘Appearing for the defence: Apuleius on display’, in J. Edmondson and A. Keith (eds), Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture(Toronto/London, 2008), 238–56; K. Olson, ‘The appearance of the young Roman girl’, in Edmondson and Keith,Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture(above), 139–57; and E. Fantham,‘Covering the head at Rome: ritual and gender’, in Edmondson and Keith,Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture(above), 158–71. 27 On fullers, see M. Bradley,‘‘It all comes out in the wash’: looking harder at the Roman fullonica’,Journal of Roman Archaeology15 (2002), 21–44; and Flohr,The World of the Fullo (above, n. 3). On attitudes to bathing, see F. Yegül,Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge (MA), 1992); and Toner,Leisure and Ancient Rome(above, n. 3), 53–64. 28 Pliny,Natural History7.211; Varro 2.11.10. 29 Pliny,Natural History7.211.JERRY TONER 96 But letting the beard grow long was also used to indicate that the wearer was suffering from a range of ills. It was a sign of mourning. After the destruction of Varus’s legions in the Teutoburg forest, Augustus did not cut his beard or his hair for several months. 30 Those who stood accused in court might not shave to show the negative impact the case was having upon them and so arouse the pity of jurors. 31 Philosophers often wore their hair and beard long:

this might have been to highlight their indifference to normal life or to exaggerate their appearance of wisdom. 32 Whatever the reason, the shaggy beard became a philosopher’s trade-mark, with different schools of philosophy adopting different kinds of beard to distinguish themselves. 33 Beards, therefore, were not simple texts to read. Caroline Vout has highlighted the problems involved in interpreting the Emperor Hadrian’s beard, as having as much to do with militarism as philosophy.

Hairstyles and attitudes toward facial hair were linked closely with ideas of gender and identity. I do not intend to examine the details of how Roman fashion developed over time. What I want to emphasize here is how barbers operated within a wider context of attitudes towards facial hair, head hair, and body-fashioning involving other hair. Ovid’sCosmetics for the Female Faceand Art of Love, for example, underline how complicated female hairdressing had become among the wealthy by the early Empire. 34 For men, the barber played an important role in the establishment of the male public image. This was particularly true for young men. A young man’s‘first shaving’(depositio barbae) represented an importantrite de passageand usually took place at about the age of twenty or when thetoga viriliswas assumed (and therefore often post-dated the growth of actual facial hair by some years). It was celebrated publicly with sacrifices and partying, with the shorn hair being consecrated to the gods. 35 When Augustus first shaved, he held‘a magnificent entertainment himself, besides granting all the other citizens a festival at public expense’. 36 In typical fashion, Nero put the hair from his own first shave in an extravagant gold box, set with pearls, and dedicated it to Jupiter, with a great 30 Suetonius,Augustus23; cf.Julius Caesar67. 31 Martial 2.26.3. 32 See Aristophanes,Birds1282; Lucian,The Death of Peregrinus15. 33 See Dio Chrysostom 72.2; Alciphron 3.55. On the ambiguity of meanings relating to beards, see C. Vout,‘What’s in a beard? Rethinking Hadrian’s Hellenism’, in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (eds),Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece(Cambridge, 2006), 96–123. 34 See, especially, Ovid,Art of Love3.135–68 (see above, n. 2); Ovid,Cosmetics for the Female Face29; cf. Juvenal,Satires6.58–9. See also M. Bradley,Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 2009), 174–8. On female adornment, see K. Olson,Dress and the Roman Woman:

Self-presentation and Society(Abingdon/New York, 2008). 35 Petronius,Satyricon29; Suetonius,Nero12; Censorinus,On the Birthday1.10. On the literary tradition of blond‘down’on male adolescent cheeks, see Bradley,Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome(above, n. 34), 1–3. 36 Dio Cassius 48.34. BARBERS, BARBERSHOPS AND SEARCHING FOR ROMAN POPULAR CULTURE 97 sacrifice of bulls. Similarly, the vulgar freedman Trimalchio owned a large golden box to hold his first trimmings. 37 The barber also served as a means for alternate male identity creation in the urban environment. The barbershop was a place for the young man to enhance sexual identity and attractiveness. Ovid emphasizes the importance of good personal grooming in the task of attracting young women:‘now let your stubborn locks not be spoiled by bad cutting; let hair and beard be dressed by a practised hand. Do not let your nails project, and let them be free of dirt; nor let any hair be in the hollows of your nostrils’. 38 Seneca complains about the use of new ways of trimming the beard as a means of self-promotion. 39 Similarly, his well-known account of living above a bath-house highlights the noise of the depilator as one of the main problems of this voluntary body-change.

40 The fact that Seneca complains about such novelty reveals how such manipulation of the male image generated tensions in Roman society. Exotic and novel ways of trimming the beard were part of the creativity of the sophisticated urban metrosexual that was on display in Imperial Rome:‘Part of your jaw is clipped, part shaved, part plucked. Who would think it is one head?’. 41 But by blurring differences between traditional male and female practices, the barber played a part in the wider discussion about the problematic boundaries of gender.

These sexual connotations meant that barbers recur within wider debates about the link betweencultusand morality. An individual’scultuswas thought to provide evidence of his or her moral standing. The barbershop’s role as a place where individuals could adjust their sexual identity therefore made it a particularly sensitive spot for moral traditionalists. Seneca contrasts the unshorn Romans of old with those who see themselves in the full-length gold mirrors of his own time, when‘luxury, encouraged by sheer opulence, has gradually developed for the worst, and vices have taken on enormous growth’, even amongst soldiers. 42 Lucian complains about the imposters who conceal their lack of skill with numerous razors and magnificent mirrors, whereas the skilled practitioners have just the razor, scissors and mirror that their work requires. 43 This cultural sensitivity was exploited by sophisticated poets like Ovid and Martial to give their work a sense of sexual adventure and edginess. We find an attack on Gargilianus, who smoothes his face and scalp with depilatory cream:

‘For shame’, Martial complains,‘stop making a show of your wretched pate.

This is what is usually done with a cunt, Gargilianus’. 44 Or there is the young 37 Petronius,Satyricon75, although in this case it could have been motivated by an attempt to evade the sexual attentions of his master, whose‘favourite’Trimalchio was for fourteen years. 38 Ovid,Art of Love1.517–20. 39 Seneca,Moral Letters114.20–1. 40 Seneca,Letters56.1–2. 41 Martial 8.47. See Artemidorus 5.67 for an interpretation of a dream that also seems to display connotations of a linkage between barbers and sex. 42 Seneca,Natural Questions1.17.7–10. 43 Lucian,The Ignorant Book-collector29. 44 Martial 3.74.JERRY TONER 98 woman barber who sits right at the entrance of the Subura,‘where the bloody scourges of the torturers hang’, and shaves her clients, not just literally but by prostituting herself to them too. 45 Martial also can be the outraged older man who is under threat from his young male lover, to whom the barber is compared: ‘When you see that I want it, Telesphorus...you make large demands’.‘Suppose I want to refuse, can I? And unless I say under oath,“I’ll give it,”you withdraw those buttocks that let you take many liberties with me. What if my barber, with razor drawn above my throat, were to ask for freedom and wealth?’ 46 In fact, Martial takes on a variety of personae with regard to facial hair. He can be contemptuous of the hairy-faced farmers who fill Rome and press on you‘with a strongly-scented kiss’. 47 And he can ridicule the hypocrisy of the supposedly stern moralists who publicly condemn the soft behaviour of contemporary Romans in comparison with the great men of yore, but who themselves make full use of the facilities for personal grooming that Rome has to offer: You carry depilated testicles, Chrestus, and a cock like a vulture’s neck and a head smoother than prostituted arses, there is not a hair alive on your shins and the cruel tweezers purge your white jowls. But your talk is of Curius, Camillus, Quinctius, Numa, Ancus, and every hairy worthy we ever found in books. 48 Maud Gleason showed the ways in which élite Greek and bilingual Roman orators during the Second Sophistic used physical appearance, including the hair, to construct a suitably aggressive form of masculinity at a time of marked anxiety over manly deportment. 49 The literary use of the barber motif makes it clear that a societal debate was taking place about how men should best present themselves in public. In this context, we can see the barber as a liminal figure who acted as a vehicle for the expression of various societal tensions: he was a non-élite artisan who altered identity, removed masculinity, and enhanced male good looks in an almost feminine way.

However, we should remember just how complicated some images of the barber could be. A neat example of this can be found in Horace’s story of how the powerful Philippus (usually identified with the consul of 91 BC ) tried to recruit Volteius Mena, a mere auctioneer (praeco), as his client. 50 Philippus saw Mena sitting in an empty barbershop: the man was close shaved and was paring his own nails. A simple enough scene, but Philippus was impressed by Mena and so wanted to enlist him to his cause, even going so far as to greet Mena himself the next day, rather than having the socially inferior Mena greet 45 Martial 2.17. 46 Martial 11.58. 47 Martial 12.59; cf. 7.95. 48 Martial 9.27. 49 See M.W. Gleason,Making Men: Sophists and Self-presentation in Ancient Rome(Princeton (NJ), 1995), 55–81, 131–58. 50 Horace,Letters1.7.46–98. BARBERS, BARBERSHOPS AND SEARCHING FOR ROMAN POPULAR CULTURE 99 him, as would usually have been the case. Why was he impressed? As ever with Horace it is hard to unpack. The image of Mena, clean-shaven but paring his own nails, seems to be a combination of two images: one that he is enjoying a form of sophisticated leisure (the letter concerns Horace’s desire to recuperate for a month longer in the country despite his patron Maecenas’s desire for him to return to Rome), the second that Mena is a man of impressive simplicity who is happy to do such simple personal tasks himself rather than wastefully pay a barber (even the miser in Plautus has a barber do his nails for him). 51 In this respect we can see it as another story that places the barber squarely in the realm of discourse concerning the problems ofcultus. But there are of course other layers of meaning here: for example, the nature of Horace’s unequal friendship with Maecenas as well as political comparisons with the way Augustus has forced his‘friendship’onto all Romans with some dubious results. The passage shows that Roman authors used barbers for a wide range of uses, most of which have nothing to do withcultus, let alone perceptions of the non-élite. The best we can do for our purpose is to try and pick out those parts that do seem to relate to popular culture. BARBERS AND POPULAR CULTURE On that basis, peering through the muddy waters of élite discourse oncultus,what can we hypothesize about the reality of barbers and Roman popular culture? We might begin by trying to do a basic demographic calculation. If we were in possession of any data regarding the size of the male shaving-age population, frequency of shaving and haircuts, and barber’s earnings, we could estimate how many of these non-élite artisans it would have taken to keep the Roman male population neatly trimmed and closely shaven. Of course we have no data, and even educated guesses quickly reveal how little we know about how often Roman men shaved or had their hair cut, and whether they often did this themselves with a pair of shears or a razor of their own. Some of the wealthy clearly owned slave barbers and so probably rarely visited a commercial establishment. 52 Or if the wealthy did not own a slave barber, they could pay for a barber to visit them in their homes, rather than having to slum it with others by visiting a barbershop.

But the sheer numbers of shaving-age men who did live in Rome mean that it is reasonable to suggest that barbers were always near at hand, a recurrent feature in the urban landscape, whether operating out of a shop or itinerant, and so represented a moderately important part of the city’s service economy.

It also seems safe to say that the quality of haircut broadly will have reflected social status. We can easily imagine that the rich were prepared to pay handsomely for talented barbers, rather than risk some unskilled apprentice hacking away at 51 Plautus,The Pot of Gold312–13. 52 See, for example, Martial 6.52.1–4.JERRY TONER 100 their hair and faces. The wealth gap that enabled the élite to cut themselves off from the rest of society in this way is reflected in their sneering attitude towards more humble folk’scultus. Horace mocks the appearance of a man who was rusticus tonsus, and warns that you will be ridiculed if you have badly cut hair of unequal length. 53 It is likely that there were also detectable class differences in the quality of individual establishments.

The barbering business also may have offered opportunities for non-élite financial improvement. At the two denarii fee level stipulated in Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices, it would have have taken 25 customers for either a haircut or shave for a barber to earn as well as other comparable artisans such as a carpenter, baker or shipwright, which was double the going rate for a labourer. 54 A later story of a barber’s payments in John Cassian, introduced for the sake of recognizing the devil’s illusions, suggests that a barber earned the equivalent of 33 payments daily plus sufficient to buy his food. 55 Twenty-five or 33 basic haircuts and shaves in a day is manageable, at least according to my local hairdresser. This seems to have provided a livelihood well above that of the day labourer, and also a modest surplus income comfortably above subsistence levels. Competency in a trade therefore can be seen as a key way for the non-élite to acquire a source of modest social mobility.

Barbershops seem to have been a male bastion. We find almost no references to female customers visiting barbershops or working in them. Martial’s reference to a female barber makes it clear that her work also involved providing sexual services to her clients and should not be seen as evidence for the existence of numerous female barbers. 56 There is some evidence for female hairdressers, such as the ‘beautician’(ornatrix) Nostia Daphne from thevicus longus, who presumably served a primarily female clientele. 57 That barbershops were often in public spaces actually reinforces the impression that this was mainly a man’s world.

The fact that barbers required their customers to spend a reasonable amount of time in their premises, where there was a steady flow of customers, also seems to have made them a place of popular male sociability. Barbershops were widely used by men as places to hang out. As with other forms of shop, these premises provided semi-private, semi-public meeting-places outside the house where men could meet in an informal setting. 58 Acting as a social-networking site for the male population, they provided a place to meet friends, lounge around, chat, 53 Horace,Satires1.3.31;Letters1.1.94; cf. Martial 7.95.7–13; 12.59.4–5. 54 Barbers are listed with vets and shearers, who were paid by animal, but are included in the section on both manual labourers and more skilled artisans, so it seems reasonable to assume that they would have earned at levels comparable with those with skills. 55 John Cassian,Conference of Abbot Abraham13. 56 Martial 2.17. 57 CILVI 37469; see also VI 9736. 58 See S. Lewis,‘Barber’s shops and perfume shops: symposia without wine’, in A. Powell (ed.), The Greek World(London, 1995), 432–41, and also S. Lewis,News and Society in the Greek Polis (London, 1996), 15–18. See Flohr,The World of the Fullo(above, n. 3), 242–87, on the social networks of fullers. BARBERS, BARBERSHOPS AND SEARCHING FOR ROMAN POPULAR CULTURE 101 argue, gossip and do business, even when the work of the barber himself was done. 59 This important role as a place of sociability is reflected in their description as being‘wineless symposia’. 60 The great reputation as a place for news meant that a trip to the barbershop served as a common device in Plautine comedy to move the plot along, with the characters describing events and gossip they had picked up there.

61 Barbers themselves acquired a reputation for being full of chat. 62 Indeed, the loquacity of barbers was proverbial. 63 One joke has a talkative barber ask his wag of a customer,‘How shall I cut your hair?’,‘In silence!’came the stern response. 64 The sociable aspect of barbershop culture was reflected in the status of the barber as a joker. One joke tells how an an egghead, a bald man and a barber were on a trip together. Having camped in a remote spot, they agreed that they would each keep watch over their belongings in shifts of four hours. The barber happened to draw the first watch. Wanting a bit of fun, he shaved the egghead’s head as he slept, then woke him up when his own shift was done. Rubbing his head as he came to, the egghead found that he was bald.‘What a great fool that barber is’, he grumbled,‘He’s woken up Baldy instead of me!’. 65 Barbers and barbershops were also vehicles for jokes. So we find jokes such as the one about an incompetent barber who was applying plasters to customers he had cut. When one of them kept on complaining, he rejoined,‘you’ve got no cause to complain.

I only charge one denarius for a shave, but you’ve got plasters worth four denarii out of me!’. 66 Or Martial’s anecdote of the barber Eutrapelus, nicknamed ‘nimble’, who was so slow that a second beard grew while he was removing the first. 67 The ByzantineSudarecords that the comedian Philistion of Prusa, who died of unstoppable laughter, wrote a joke-book with the title‘At the barber’s’. 68 59 See, for example, Plautus,Asses343–4;Epidicus197–8; Plutarch,Timoleon14;Morals716. 60 Terence,The Parasite89; see also Plutarch,Dinner Conversations2.679a:‘for this reason Theophrastus in jest used to call barbershops‘wineless symposia’on account of the chatter of those sitting around’. 61 For example, Plautus,Asses394. 62 For example, Plutarch,Morals508; Horace,Satires1.7.1–3; Polybius 3.20.5; Plutarch,On Talkativeness13; Ovid,Metamorphoses11.153. 63 See Plutarch,Morals509a; Plutarch,Nicias30; Lucian,How to Write History24; Lucian,The Ignorant Book-collector29; Alciphron 3.66; Petronius,Satyricon64. 64 The Laughter-lover148; cf. Plutarch,On Talkativeness13, for the same joke but with King Archelaus of Macedon delivering the punch-line. The politician Enoch Powell also once used this witticism in the House of Commons barbershop, and it was subsequently widely attributed to him. As a classicist, Powell himself would, of course, have been well aware of its true origin. 65 The Laughter-lover56; translation based on that from B. Baldwin,The Philogelos or Laughter- lover(Amsterdam, 1983); see also Alciphron 3.30. 66 The Laughter-lover198. It is worth noting that he is charging half the rate suggested by Diocletian’s Edict. Obviously there are great difficulties in assessing different prices from different periods, but it may be that part of the joke is that the customer has gone to a cut-price barber and so is getting what he deserves. 67 Martial 7.83. 68 SudaPhi 364; or it could conceivably mean that it was written for a man named Koureus.JERRY TONER 102 The barbershop represented a prime site for popular sociability, where tales could be swapped, opinions could be formed and disseminated, and personal reputations enhanced and managed. The style of such debate seems to have been very different from that of élite rhetorical discussion. It was informal and full of rough banter and swearing. It involved having a laugh at other people’s expense and the harassment of passing women. Clement of Alexandria urges that men should not waste their time chatting and‘in banter at the barbershops and the inns, and let them finally stop chasing after the women who pass by.

For they do not stop even swearing at many people for a laugh’. This kind of male aggressive behaviour was also accompanied by a great deal of gambling, both with dice and knuckle-bones, which added to the barbershop’s status as a bastion of public male sociability. 69 The barbershop, like the tavern, therefore offered a place for popular leisure, where non-élite men could enjoy the benefits of urban civilization and put their own personal qualities on public display. A man was expected to be vigorous and aggressive in publicly protecting and asserting his social status. It was a popular take on the more cross-social values of a patriarchal, male society.

We can see this chat culture as also providing a means for the non-élite male to establish his identity within a competitive group environment, with the clever and quick-witted acquiring a reputation for possessing such attributes. As such, visits to the barbershop were frequent rituals that required the participants to show off the skill-set that a member of the non-élite needed to exhibit in order to prosper in the tough urban environment. The context also provided a means to reassert group norms and police each other’s behaviour. So if a member of the group was perceived as having transgressed, it could be made forcibly clear to him by the barbed comments of his friends. Or nicknames could be used to ridicule certain personal shortcomings. The famed garrulity of the barbers themselves ensured that these norms and opinions were disseminated widely. Far from being a place to get a simple shave, then, the barbershop was probably a form of public arena for the discussion of local issues and politics, and for interpersonal rivalry. It is this role as a facilitator and disseminator of opinion and news that created the social power of the barber himself, and having the support of the barbers in an election must have been a powerful aid.

The public consumption of the civilizing services of the barber was itself a social investment in individual identity and communal networks of sociability.

By offering a place for popular sociability, the barbershop played an important role in the everyday culture of the lower classes. It seems clear that this culture was a street culture. 70 The barbershop was not the only place we can find evidence for this dynamic and socially engaged world. The fountains, forum, 69 Clement of Alexandria,Christ the Educator3.11.74.4–75.1. 70 On ancient street life, see B. Kellum,‘The spectacle of the street’, in B. Bergmann and C. Kondoleon (eds),The Art of Ancient Spectacle(Washington, 1999), 283–99; and C. Holleran, ‘Street life in ancient Rome’, in R. Laurence and D. Newsome (eds),Rome, Ostia, Pompeii:

Movement and Space(Oxford, 2011), 245–61. BARBERS, BARBERSHOPS AND SEARCHING FOR ROMAN POPULAR CULTURE 103 taverns, shops and baths all offered similar spaces for popular culture to express itself. 71 According to Pliny the Elder, Cato the Elder expressed the wish that the forum were paved with nothing but sharp-pointed stones as a way to stop people lingering there. 72 Others hung around the rostrum to hear and spread news. 73 It was the public nature of such activities that characterized popular sociability. These were the daily sites for the lived social life of ordinary people.

Largely, this was a function of the fact that the cramped urban conditions and high cost of rents in Rome meant that space was at a premium. It was for this reason that the public nature of popular culture stood in stark contrast with the privacy that characterized the élite culture. 74 ÉLITE VERSUS POPULAR CULTURES I want now to examine how these tentative structural conclusions about the characteristics of Roman popular culture can be used to analyse the ways in which popular and élite cultures interacted in Rome. For, as will become clear, in many of the élite texts concerning barbers these seemingly harmless tradesmen generated a variety of cultural anxieties in addition to those that stemmed from the ambiguous position ofcultusin Roman culture. We can see these as resulting from cultural frictions between popular and élite.

Perhaps the first, most basic, reason for élite concern about barbers was their potential to be, in fact, extremely harmful. Cicero tells the story of Dionysius the Elder, the paranoid tyrant of Syracuse from 405 to 367 BCE , who had his daughters taught to cut hair because he feared to put himself at the mercy of a barber. 75 Placing his neck under the barber’s blade was a highly vulnerable position for an autocrat to assume. We find similar concerns revealed in the story of when some people were critical of Trajan’s close friendship with Licinius Sura and the influence he had over the emperor. Trajan proved Sura’s loyalty by turning up uninvited at his house, and having dismissed his bodyguard, ordering Sura’s barber to shave him. 76 Financial concerns also seem to have existed. Some élite texts portray certain barbers as accumulating great wealth. The low fees make this unlikely for most barbers but the trade does seem to have offered a means for modest social mobility. It is significant that Trimalchio states that he would consider teaching his son to be a barber, which was a sign of both his vulgarity in the eyes of the 71 See, for example, the list of places in Plautus’sEpidicus(198–9) when looking for someone known to like spending his time in such popular leisure. 72 Pliny,Natural History19.24. 73 Cicero,Letters to Friends8.1.4 on thesubrostani. 74 See Toner,Leisure and Ancient Rome(above, n. 3), 75. 75 Cicero,On Duties2.25; see alsoTusculan Disputations5.58; Plutarch,On Talkativeness13; Jerome,On Illustrious Men5. 76 Dio Cassius 68.15.JERRY TONER 104 literary élite and that barbering was perceived as a potentially lucrative business and a means of delivering success to the socially aspirational non-élite. 77 Stories of seemingly impossibly large fortunes made in barbering therefore can be seen as exaggerated ways to highlight the problems of such social mobility. It made Juvenal take a moral stand in a literary, fictive way. When he saw that the man ‘who made my stiff beard rasp while he shaved me in my youth can single- handedly challenge all the aristocrats with his wealth’, then it was‘hard not to write satire’. 78 There is an interesting story of the fourth-century emperor Julian summoning a barber to trim his hair, which shows a continuity of such financial–moral anxiety. The barber duly arrived, wearing a splendid outfit. The emperor was amazed and said,‘I sent for a barber, not an accountant [rationalem]’. Quizzed as to how much he earned, the barber revealed that he made the equivalent of twenty daily allowances of bread and the same amount of fodder for pack animals, as well as having an annual salary, not to mention many generous tips. Incensed by this, Julian discharged all attendants of that kind as being unnecessary to him. 79 It is also noteworthy that this decree covered barbers, eunuchs and cooks. These were the kinds of worthless people who pandered to individual luxury and vice and, in Julian’s eyes, had corrupted the palace with dissolute life and the lavish use of silk and fancy food; military discipline had weakened as a result, with soldiers practising effeminate tunes in place of war-songs and sleeping on feather beds. As with Juvenal’s decision to write satire, the super-rich barber is the final straw before Julian’s open conversion to the worship of the traditional pagan gods.

We can suggest that, as in Greece, Roman barbers also represented a focal point of a distinct popular culture, which could cause concern among the élite. 80 Barbershops were an area, privately owned (often by the élite themselves presumably), that was widely accessible to the public but impossible for the authorities to control politically or culturally. As such, the unease that we find so often in the sources conceals the sociable uses of barbershops, preferring instead to highlight the potential for moral disorder that these places represented. What for the non-élite was a place of ordinary life, of creating social networks, local hierarchies and informed informal opinion, was for the élite a potentially dangerous place of softness and political subversion. The dubious status of the barber, therefore, can be seen as reflecting his status both as an élite symbol of popular decadence and as an arbiter in popular debates. It was the barber who acted as the focal point for popular discussion, who 77 Petronius,Satyricon46; see Holleran,Shopping in Ancient Rome(above, n. 9), 252 n. 113. 78 Juvenal,Satires1.24–5; cf. 10.225–6 on the same barber’s many villas. It is significant that in John Cassian’s above-mentioned story he chose a barber to serve as the example of an aspirational and money-hungry member of the non-élite. 79 Ammianus Marcellinus 22.4.9; cf. Socrates,Church History3.6. 80 Cf. Lewis,News and Society in the Greek Polis(above, n. 58), 17–18 on the Greek motif of shops as a centre for conspiracy and popular dissatisfaction. BARBERS, BARBERSHOPS AND SEARCHING FOR ROMAN POPULAR CULTURE 105 moderated disputes, and, by choosing which views to spread more widely, effectively edited an oral popular news-sheet.

Aware of this important popular role, we can see the élite culture as being keen to limit and confine the problem. One of the ways it tried to achieve this was to condemn the popular knowledge created in the barbershop as worthless.

Discussing how to write history, Lucian criticizes one historian who gets his geography completely wrong, because he did not even listen‘to the stray information you sometimes pick up at the barber’s’. 81 Polybius goes even further in his attack on the works of the writers Chaereas and Soslyus:‘they rank in authority, it seems to me, not with history, but with the common gossip of a barber’s shop’. 82 Or, in a similar vein, the news and information of the barbershop was dismissed as mere rumour. The élite condemned this as resulting from an almost pathological popular habit of endless chatting:‘It is not strange that barbers are a talkative clan, for the greatest chatterboxes stream in and sit in their chairs, so that they are themselves infected with the habit’. 83 Clearly the largely oral nature of popular culture would always mean that information exchange easily could be characterized as gossip-mongering.

But for ordinary people, such media provided the fastest and most accurate source of information available. Plutarch describes how, in Classical Athens, it had been a barber who first announced the great disaster that happened to the expedition to Sicily, having learned of it in the Peiraeus from a slave who had escaped from the island. He condemns the garrulity of the barber for spreading such stories; but such élite disdain of rumour ignored the fact that this tale was, in fact, correct. What the élite condemned as rumour in reality represented the best source of information that most people could access. No doubt that was not always the case; but correct or not, rumour represented a source that lay outside élite control and could engage critically with the official version of events. It reflected the fact that élite and popular interests did not always coincide.

84 In the later empire we find such élite attitudes continuing, with Augustine criticising his flock for finding out information by their own means, rather than having it first censored by his guiding hand: There seems to have been a major disturbance in Jerusalem and we have received very upsetting news that two monasteries in Bethlehem seem to have been burned down in a popular uprising. I would not have told you that, if I had not known that the news had already reached some of you. It was better for you to hear everything from me than to rely on obscure rumours for your knowledge. 85 81 Lucian,How to Write History24. 82 Polybius 3.20.5. 83 Plutarch,On Talkativeness13. 84 Tacitus’s use of rumour in his texts shows that the élite too could find uses for rumour, particularly when trying to create an impression of cross-social unpopularity about a particular emperor. On this type of‘polyphonic’text, see J. Toner,Roman Disasters(Cambridge, 2013), 112–13. 85 Augustine,Dolbeau Sermons30.7.JERRY TONER 106 His claim that they would have heard‘everything’from him is more than somewhat undermined by his statement that he would not have told them if they not found out already.

In this view, some of the concerns of ancient sources about what went on in barbershops reflected the unauthorized nature of the sociability that took place in them. 86 The portrayal of the barber as a worthless gossip represented a way for élite sources to dismiss a figure who was central to the daily enactment of popular sociability. It certainly cannot be taken as a reflection of social reality.

By treating barbers as rumour-mongers, the élite attempted to denigrate popular knowledge and place it at a level far below that of serious culture. This reflected a desire to maintain control over urban political discourse, above all that that was occurring in places associated with non-élite leisure and the consumption of services connected with the body. The level of élite condemnation can also be read as an index of failure. By dismissing the daily discussions of the non-élite as being useless and dangerous, such condemnations merely served to underline how powerless the élite were to stop them. But it is also worth noting that, in contrast to the approach taken with taverns, the élite made no legal attempts to restrict barbers or their activities. Taverns, with their associations of alcohol-fuelled violence, were seen to pose a real threat to order.

The barbershop may have annoyed the élite, but it did not do so sufficiently to necessitate sumptuary legislation. 87 POPULAR AND ÉLITE CULTURAL CONTACT This oppositional analysis of the relationship between élite and popular cultures needs to be qualified by the fact that neither barbershops, nor the popular culture they represented, were completely autonomous. The élite did have access to such facilities, even if it is unclear how often they used them. This emphasizes that there was no simple divide between élite and popular cultures.

Whether it was peering in from the outside, like Philippus did with Mena, or actually frequenting one, the barbershop was not closed off from the élite. But that did not mean that members of the élite understood, engaged with, or agreed with everything that was discussed there. It is unlikely that they could fully access the popular culture that surrounded them in that context of popular sociability: they could not get all the jokes or understand all the latest gossip or even want to. In this way, we can see the barbershop as providing us with a glimpse of how everyday social interaction between élite and non-élite worked on the ground. The tensions exhibited in the texts of the literary élite can be 86 On élite concerns aboutcircitoresmeeting up to talk about matters of interest or pass the time, see P. O’Neill,‘Going round in circles: popular speech in ancient Rome’,Classical Antiquity22 (2003), 135–65. 87 On sumptuary legislation relating to taverns, see Toner,Leisure and Ancient Rome(above, n. 3), 79–83. BARBERS, BARBERSHOPS AND SEARCHING FOR ROMAN POPULAR CULTURE 107 seen as resulting from the friction generated by the chafing of those two different subcultures. Such tensions arose because barbers represented the other end of the cultural spectrum; they were symbols of popular otherness. The frequent appearance of the barber as a joker and his shop as a place for jokes also may reflect these social and cultural stresses—for the barbershop was a site where cultural contestations were both widely accessible and highly visible to all; it was a zone of overlap where cultural symbols clashed.

It was this symbolic role that also allowed the figure of the barber to carry such an important cultural burden in élite texts. The trope of barbershop garrulity was deployed by élite writers to help them discuss themes of social conflict in Rome. It highlighted how the traditional model of social relations, where the non-élite were tied in by patronage relationships to their social superiors, had failed. The distaste shown in such texts for barbers and their behaviour highlighted that there had been a breakdown in communication between the classes in the urban context.

Not a complete collapse, to be sure, but a deterioration none the less. Instead, the barbershop reflected a zone where the potential for violence against superiors always existed. The ruler placing his neck under the common man’s razor acted as a powerful metaphor for the potentially vulnerable position of the élite among the countless masses of the vast imperial city.

The image of the chatty barber therefore transformed the simple daily act of shaving and haircutting into a ritual that served to represent non-élite culture and identity. For élite writers, this was an identity that was vulgar, depraved and symbolized the gulf that the conditions of the city of Rome had sometimes created between the classes. Ironically, despite all the chat, this was a place where communication between the classes was difficult. Élite texts tried to stamp down on this subculture by denying that its conversation was meaningful or useful. It was seen as worthless gossip, the very opposite of élite rationality.

Instead, the barbershop appears as a place where the moral corruption of the urban populace was most conspicuous. This moral decline had been brought about by the leisure and the consumption of personal services that the urban environment had permitted the non-élite to enjoy. The social solidarity that the élite liked to believe characterized the old Rome was seen as having fractured in the competitive macho world of the common barbershop.

This machismo is perhaps one of the main reasons why Roman authors particularly liked the trope of the barbershop. It was a place that symbolized the male solidarity and bonding that traditionally had been found among the yeomen legionaries. But the barbershop also represented the new urban society of Rome, along with all the benefits it had to offer. Barbering offered a means for members of the non-élite to achieve personal advancement, which added to its symbolic appeal as a metaphor for social change. But élite writers were not all rigid traditionalists. They knew that the world had moved on and that they had changed with it. The cultural stereotype of the barber, therefore, acted as a vehicle for the display of a certain mock morality. There was no real belief that the clock could be turned back. Indeed, the porosity between the cultures meant that the sophisticated, edgy literary work of writers such as Martial and Ovid JERRY TONER 108 was probably full of the influences of popular culture. 88 What we often are seeing, then, in such texts is an unofficial élite culture: a literary culture influenced from the bottom up. That the barbershop belonged to a world that was uncontrolled probably added to the attraction of these places for such writers. It gave them a way to make their writing exciting and risqué.

In this final section concerning the relationship and interaction between popular and élite cultures, I hope to have shown how messy and unclear-cut was the reality. No simple border can be established and social relations between the élite and non-élite often seem to be located in a grey area. Even if much of what we find in the sources represents an élite image of the popular created to suit their own literary purposes, the visibility of barbershops and fact that the élite had ready access to them means that we can still discover in their texts some of the characteristics of the urban popular culture, however tentative and even speculative some of these reconstructions necessarily must be. The life of the barbershop was not entirely a literary creation. Needless to say, teasing out what might be considered, at one end of the spectrum,‘social fact’from, at the other extreme, upper-class sneering is never going to be an exact science.

But perhaps even more importantly, what we can find in the various representations of barbers, and how these were deployed, distorted and exaggerated, is a public reproduction of the set of complex social relationships that existed in Roman society between the cultural subgroups of the élite and the popular. Address for correspondence:

Dr Jerry Toner Churchill College, Cambridge, CB3 0DS, United Kingdom.

[email protected] 88 On the reciprocal nature of élite and non-élite relations, see Ruffell,‘Beyond satire’(above, n. 3). BARBERS, BARBERSHOPS AND SEARCHING FOR ROMAN POPULAR CULTURE 109