Descartes is reputed to have remarked that the best that historians of Ancient Rome could hope to achieve was to know what "Cicero's servant girl knew"; the point of the jibe being to contrast science's steady progress with the fruitlessness of the humanities. (That I can tell, the phrase itself is Vico's paraphrase of Descartes' beliefs, cited in the course of Vico's defense of the humanities; see Croce, "The philosophy of Giambattista Vico", (1913), p. 292.) In fact, today's historians would view Descartes' description more as an ideal than an affront; an account of daily life by Cicero's servant girl would tell historians much that they would like to know. It is a commonplace that historical sources rarely say directly what you want to know: you have to wring the information out of them by careful interpretation.