IMAGINE ONE CORNER IN A ROMAN CITY. A FREEDMAN, ADJUSTING HIS toga, emerges from his newly bought house and steps into the street, head held high, for a dinner at an associate's house, a handsome slave in tow. Meanwhile, a girl pours murky dishwater from a nearby apartment, narrowly missing the priestess drinking from a fountain. Family members attend to an ancestor's bronze statue on his birthday, carefully polishing it as he prescribed, but vendors hawking goods and sharing gossip force the mourners to raise their voices. Young men linger around a tavern sipping wine; one makes eyes at the barmaid; another scratches a face in the plaster façade; two more share their dislike of an arrogant entrepreneur down the street.

Among these streetgoers, there are certainly profound differences, most obviously status, gender, and age. Yet they are all united by their shared use of the same space, a corner common to their lives. In Roman Italy, similar scenes played out daily on innumerable corners and along countless streets. But so much of that quotidian texture remains beyond our reach; the evidence rarely permits even an impressionistic sketch. On occasion, when it does, however, a unique glimpse of urban life emerges, one that grants us insight into the strategies of and the contests among a neighborhood's inhabitants. Part III of this book presents two such cases, one near Herculaneum's monumental heart, the other along a more commonplace Pompeian thoroughfare. The next two chapters – as they each present the story of one slice of urban life – are not meant to be stand-ins for all corners and all Romans, but only what they are: cross-sections as closely examined as the evidence allows and reasonable reconstruction permits.

In urban sociology and anthropology, an in-depth investigation of one specific section of a city represents a powerful method of inquiry. One of its most successful practitioners is Mitchell Duneier, who worked among the scavengers of used magazines and books near the intersection of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues in Greenwich Village. His book Sidewalk – almost a location-specific ethnography – opens an alternative world on Manhattan's streets and thereby disrupts normal assumptions about joblessness, the homeless, and their interactions with other New Yorkers, be they police, female pedestrians, or lawmakers.