It is not hard to imagine something of the day-to-day world of Polybius in Rome, as he pondered on the funerals he attended or shrewdly decided to claim sickness on the day a fellow hostage made his escape attempt. Nor is it hard to recapture something of the fun that the elder Cato must have had thinking up his stunt with the Carthaginian figs dropping out of his toga. But it is only in the first century BCE that we begin to have rich evidence for all the things that preoccupied the Roman elite beyond war and politics. These range from curiosity about
