The common man in the Roman street is beginning at last to attract the attention he deserves from specialists;his active, noisy role in the politics of the late Republic has been restored to him and now the time has come to try to look a bit further inside his head, at his culture, not in the conventionally book-defined sense of what - if anything - he read and wrote, but of the songs he sang, the dances and music he preferred, the shows he saw, the games he played, the scraps of knowledge he picked up, the Greek he learned from the Syrians across the landing, the odds and ends of the history of Rome he had picked up from statues, processions, plays. This is the first attempt to reconstruct what your average Roman talked about in the bar or in the multi-seater latrine. All Latin is translated and all due care is taken of the non-specialist's requirements.