/lit/ - Literature

>>22403247
Depends on how ancient. There are definitely things like epitaphs and speeches from the ''middle'' class of Rome, but the further back you get, the rarer it is. Regular people through history were usually less literate than the upper class, and even IF they were literate, usually it was for business/private affairs rather than writing. Maybe China has something?

>>22403247
satyricon
daphnis and chloe

>>22403247
>notice elitist bias in
>thucydides' Peloponnesian War
??

>>22403247
Why do you think normal people matter, why would that be interesting? There is some metric of historical worth and it's highly concentrated, for most people it's a flat zero to such an extent any author in any period couldn't help but project his own sensibilities onto them in the same way you would write a narrative about a cow.

>>22403487
>Why do you think normal people matter, why would that be interesting

>>22403489
His post was the opposite of edgy, though.

>>22403247
It's not ancient, but Machiavelli still remain the best

>>22403247
History is written by the (((victors)))

>>22403247
Hesiod writes from the perspective of a struggling farmer

>>22403247
Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800

>>22403247
Aristophanes and Hesiod. Maybe some comic fragments.

>>22403272
How is it not? There are like two passages where he details the impact of the war on the mass of people. And he certainly portrays the mass of Athenian citizens as impulsive and foolish, which is why he praises Pericles who controls them but doesn’t like the later leaders who he says let themselves be led by the people.

>>22403692
>And he certainly portrays the mass of Athenian citizens as impulsive and foolish
Is this portrayal a matter of prejudice to you? It seems pretty clear that it was a fact.

>>22403247
The Golden Ass is probably a good candidate.

St Augustine's confessions are from the 4th century, but they're a pretty candid autobiography of an average ranking North-African Roman citizen during that time.

>>22403692
>the impact of the war on the mass of people.
Athens is a total conscription democracy. You serve or you're not part of the mass.
>let themselves be led by the people
That's just realistic. People do not deal well with their kids going off to war. They like to execute good leaders who chose the best plan because their boy died, even if it meant three other people's kids came home. This was a big problem in Athens where the Attic navy frequently lost captains who had refused to sail their boats into storms which would have killed their entire crew to pick up people adrift from other wrecks.

>>22403699
I think it’s probably accurate, but even if it wasn’t due to personal bias, he still focuses totally on the leaders of the democratic faction, so in that sense he does have an elitist bias, even if that elite is the democratic elite. You could just say that’s because they didn’t matter, but that’s op’s point, we can’t even tell because they weren’t really written about.

>>22403741
(1) Every *person* in Athens wasn’t in the military, there were women, and men who weren’t serving at the time for whatever reason, like producing supplies, and even there, the only passage from the top of my head that details the horrors of a soldier’s life is the one where the remnants of the Athenian army gets enslaved in Sicily. We don’t get much on the daily life of the soldier like the Anabasis has.
(2) Yeah in some cases those happened, but they’re not really relevant, I was more thinking of Alcibiades’ speech for the Sicilian expedition where they overwhelmingly supported him, and his Alcibiades & Cleon v Pericles comparison, which was more due to their personalities than deeds in war.

>>22403769
If you made a history of the war about the noncombatants or simply a depiction of everyday life you're going to have to write off all the other cultures involved and gain no understanding of their overarching values.
>they're not really relevant
It pretty much is because the mass opting to think charity start at home, including other people's, is the whole of the Melian dialogue. You keep that in check or it starts eating itself.

Bumb

Plautus
Some roman fragments

>>22403247
Not a work per se.
But they recently found a treasure trove of documents from a late roman syrian petty landowner

>>22403247
I remember in college, my professor pointed out that the New Testament was very unusual in that it focused around the lives of the common people and not the aristocracy at all. Outside of maybe some parables, he might just be right.

A normal person in classical antiquity was an illiterate slave. Maybe some of Plautus?