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ROMAN TALES, by Alberto Moravia (229 pp.; Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; $3.75), seems to concern the ignoblest Romans of them all. Moravia's people live in small tenement rooms, work in brickyards, junkyards and poor taverns by the summer-shrunken Tiber. On Moravia's showing, at least, it is easy to see how their ancestors managed to run the world with very little show of conscience. Yet, though Moravia's characters lack conscience—though they are bent on mean personal advantage and are forever trying to trip their fellows into the gutter—they are all also victims themselves. In Taboo, a story about a shop clerk who steals his friend's girl with fancy talk of his own mysterious powers. Author Moravia suggests his moral: the poor must resign themselves to being cheated. The best of the 27 stories is The Girl from Ciociaria, about a simple peasant wench who works as a maid for a professor and steals books from him. One day, in a fit of conscience, she decides to make good her theft—but while the books she stole were on archaeology, the ones she returns are about law. The girl cannot understand her employer's anger: "They're the same bindings . . . They weigh just the same . . . Five there were, and five there are now." Not all of Author Moravia's works weigh the same; these stories are considerably lighter than the best of his novels (The Fancy Dress Party, Conjugal Love). But while Moravia's stories may lack charity and depth, his settings are hauntingly real, and his characters are as convincing in their speech as they are moving for their philosophy of resignation.