When we read about the Greco-Roman world, we often hear the stories of famous and wealthy men and women. But the letters of ordinary people, preserved on papyri in Egypt, show us what they were thinking and doing. Human nature, their contents suggest, hasn’t changed much.
Sometime in the 3rd century AD, in Egypt, a man called Zoilus wrote a letter to his mother Theodora about family news. He had just visited his sister Techosous, who was sick:
