What were the hardships involved ?
Well , we began writing in March 2020 , so that was definitely hard ! The CLC is an incredibly complex piece of work , and managing the writing process during the pandemic was incredibly difficult . I am so grateful to my team and our collaborators for their amazing work and never-wavering commitment . Other than that , I ’ d say the hardest element of this work is also one of the most interesting ; the gaps in the historical record . The CLC used good historical knowledge to underpin its stories and cultural material , but this is one reason it lacked diversity ; so much of our historical knowledge focuses on rich , upper-class men .
I found that overcoming this was sometimes not hard at all , for example several of the images in the old editions of Unit 1 are from the House of Julia Felix and yet nowhere was this mentioned . Giving this successful Pompeian woman her rightful place in the historical record was therefore simply a matter of adjusting some image captions . Much more difficult was finding ways to reflect ordinary people and those who were held in slavery . Luckily , our work reflects the wider work of the academic community in its endeavors to elevate the voices of the unheard majority in history and we have been ably supported by our academic colleagues from all over the world . Our storylines have changed to consider the world from more points of view and avoid always having the reader ‘ looking at the world through Roman eyes ’. We also increased sources from non-elite contexts , such as graffiti . I was especially keen to increase the amount of sources which reflected the lives of enslaved people , these have included letters , dedications to the gods and tombstones .