You may think about the Roman Empire every day, but I bet you rarely think about the plebs. The plebs were the commoners, the general populace and lower social classes, and as such their feelings, thoughts and voices are seldom captured in the sources. Most books about Ancient Rome treat the plebs as irrelevant ‘lowlifes’, which is indeed how they were viewed by the patricians at the centre of the existing popular histories. ‘Plebs Romana’ is a history of Ancient Rome to centre the class of people who made up the empire’s majority. A 700-year story that begins with the founding of the Roman Republic, historian Peter Jones traces the rise of the plebs, from being a powerless group to a political match for the ‘patrician’ elite.