Roman Civilization

CMS 206 /History 206

Poor Guys

It is far easier for a Roman historian to describe the life and society of the rich than it is to do the same for ordinary and poor Romans. The rich had the resources and time to write and inscribe, and thus they dominate the evidence that has survived to us. Members of the Roman elite, as we we have seen, also subscribed to an ideology that denegrated the value to society of those who depended on a wage. Cicero, for example, in de Officiis, opined that no workshop could have anything worthy about it. Why would he say this? Because the man who earned a wage, in essence, sold his body to a master. Working for a living to a wealthy Roman was, at least metaphorically, a kind of slavery. While a poor Roman citizen might legally be a free man, his condition deprived him of libertas - the right to speak one's mind, according to the ideology of the elite.
Thus, we do not simply lack the abundant literary evidence that would allow us to reconstruct the daily lives of ordinary Romans (from their point of view) as completely as we can for members of the elite. We are also tempted to read the evidence we do have the prism of the ideological scorn the Roman elite felt for the working man. Moreover, even if we correct for this bias in the literary evidence, we still have to correct for our own bias. Modern western cultures exist primarily within political democracies and industrial market economies. Our ideology has the opposite bias of that of the Roman elite. We idealize the working man and scorn the unproductive, yachting, rich folks. Furthermore, despite the fact that Rome was neither a political democracy nor an industrial market economy, we are tempted to impose our categories (craftsman, artisan, factory etc) on evidence of the ordinary Roman's working life, even though these categories don't always fit.
The irony of all this from a historian's point of view is that the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Roman empire were not members of the economic or political elite (nor did they live in Rome). Wealth differentials between the senatorial class and the urban plebs were staggering. The kind of wealth we read of in the pages of Cicero and Sallust were in fact enjoyed by only the tiniest portion of the population. Thus, the lives of the wealthy, which we can document so well, don't really represent the life most Romans experienced. More frustrating, physical evidence of ordinary Roman life abounds . Who, after all, made all those bricks and togas and vases and statues and spears and shields we see in wall paintings and find in archeological digs. Not Crassus. More likely a man like Faustus, a Roman lampmaker of the 1st century CE who inscribed his name on the bases of lamps he made. Archeologists have found his lamps in sites from the eastern part of the Roman empire (Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, and Israel). The dispersion of his lampware (and its good artistic quality) suggests either that Faustus had the resources to move easily around the empire or that he had the resources and name recognition to set up shops around the empire. He did not, however, leave a collection of letters behind - and so we know nothing of his life. Similarly, archeologists have found graffitii on the walls of buildings which are tantalizing, but frustratingly brief: names, expressions of support for favorite gladiators, notices of agricultural sales, obscene references to an enemy, declarations of love.
One good place to start looking for the life of ordinary Romans, is in the archeological digs. Pompeii, whose ruins were preserved by the famous volcano (79 C.E.), was filled with streets of shops, taverns and factories. The fora of Rome were similarly crowded with shops. We learn from the archeologists that the first floors of the houses of most wealthy citizens were divided up and leased as shops, where ordinary folks worked during the day, and slept at night. The Romans used the word taberna to refer to both retail shops and taverns. The word tabernius seems to refer to someone who was in a retail business for himself. Insulae, or apartment blocks we would call tenements, similar devoted their street level space to tabernae.
We shouldn't assume, however, that daily worklife in these shops would have been particularly familiar to us. Slaves might work in assembly style mass production making tools, equipment, armor or building tiles and bricks. Conversely, a shopkeeper and his family might run a tavern. Or a Roman freedman who produced clothes (vestarius), might grow successful enough to hire citizens as mercennarii (wage laborers) and purchase slaves who would work along side him in his shop. A particuarly successful shopkeeper, moreover might be engaged in a variety of businesses. Quintus Remmius Palaemon, a former slave, began his life in textile manufacturing. He became a grammaticus (teacher of language and literature to the sons of the Roman elite), famous for the high fees he charged (and received), and then purchased vineyards where his innovative agricultural techniques were wildly successful. Romans we might call craftsmen and artisans, moreover, did not generally enjoy the same level of prestige the quality of their work would merit today. Credit for a brilliant objet d'art went to the man who had commissioned it before the man who had actually made it.
At least this is what Romans of the elite class said. But we also find contradictions in the sources. Cicero knew a man named Vestorius who had invented a technique for dying clothes a particularly beautiful blue. It's clear that Vestorius enjoyed great commercial success which Cicero has to admit even as he derides it ("he knows nothing of philosophy, but the man is experienced enough in accounting"). Another Roman author, Vitruvius, concedes, Vestorius' success was "admirable enough."
Not all shopkeepers lived lives of eternal obscurity, moreover. We find in Rome, for example, the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, a man who began life as the slave Eurysaces, was freed by his owner, Marcus Vergilius, and became a baker. As the inscription indicates, however, Eurysaces moved up in the world, becoming first a contracter, and then a minor public official. Marcus (like Horace), despite his success, never forgot his roots. His tomb is shaped like a panarium - a bread bin, and engraved with scenes showing life in the bakery. Quintus Haterius Tychicus similarly enjoyed commercial success as a building contractor and had his tomb engraved with a picture of a crane and of buildings in Rome he had worked on. Lucceius Peculiaris of Capua also celebrated his work life as a building contractor on his tomb. One of the most interesting testimonials to a Roman merchant is in fact dedicated to a woman, Eumachia of Pompeii. Her family earned its wealth through vineyards and opus doliare (manufacturing of amphoras, bricks and tiles - the only socially acceptable manufacturing activites in which members of the elite could engage because of the purported link to farming. Eumachia ran a highly successful textile shop and was honored with the office of city priestess and a sculpture in her honor, donated by the local fuller's guild.
These men, of obscure origin and spectacular success figure prominently in the Cena section [The Banquet of Trimalicho] of Petronius' Satyricon. Petronius lampoons the freedman merchant with pretensions, preceeded by lictors (an honor given only to elected magistrates) and attended by a gang of slaves and hangers-on (for clients), who because of his wealth has earned (bought?) the extraordinary honor of a local priesthood. When we read Petronius, however, we must keep two rather contradictory points of view in mind. On the one hand, the success of men like Palaemon, Eurysaces and Vestorius (which in itself may have been recorded because it was unusual, not typical) whose mere existence threatened the the traditional link between money, land, office and manners, clearly outraged the sensibilities of members of the Roman elite. On the other hand, Petronius appears, in the Satyricon to actually (and quite cleverly) satirize the court of the Emperor Nero. Under this reading, the parvenues who dominate the Satyricon are actually foils for caricatures of the Roman elite. The burlesque, nevertheless, offers some interesting insight at least into the complications of the ideology of the elite. Compare, for example, the idealization of Roman femine virtue offered by the Laudatio Turiae and the satirization of it offered by the Widow of Ephesus? Did Romans like to say that widows remained virtuously loyal to their husbands' memory but know or at least fear, that this might not be so? Did members of the Roman elite liked to think their political and social prominence was natural, but know or at least fear that it was based in good part simply on cash, and thus their lives of good taste were no different than Trimalchio's vulgar excesses?
One interesting thing to note about the Satyricon is its setting. The satire takes place in Campania, an area of Italy (modern Naples) originally settled by Greek colonists that had become by the end of the 1st century BCE a resort area for wealthy Romans (Bar Harbor, but warm) [Pompeii and Herculaneum were in Campania]. It is possible that the social scorn members of the Roman elite felt for the merchant and manufacturers was not so widely or deeply shared in regions of Italy and the provinces at a distance from the capital (do natives always share the prejudices of "summer people")? There is some evidence of local merchants making good and their sons or grandsons rising to the equestrian order. Aulus Umbricius Scaurus of Pompeii, for example, manufactured garum (a disgusting paste made of rotting fish that Roman ate in everything) and achieved the office of duumvir (roughly equivalent to mayor). Either he or his father was a member of the local equestrian order.
Nor was the experience of the wildly successful freedman necessarily typical (indeed, one suspects the opposite) of that of ordinary Roman citizens who earned their livings. Evidence from Pompeii suggests that the average tabernius struggled to make wages that would meet the expenses of daily life. Similarly, the price list of Diocletian (a fourth century Emperor who tried to restrain rampant inflation by price controls)shows that while a highly skilled textile worker might make 40 denarii a day, his employer could sell the silk tunic or wool cloak he made for 30 to hundreds of times the price of his wages. Similarly, the evidence of female laborers indicates that "sweat shops" were then as now a harrowing mode of existence. Prostitution was also a possibility. There is also evidence of women working in traditionally male worksites: brickyards and tile factories In one case, the evidence consists of a graveyard for infant and stillborn burials.
In fact, the vast majority of people living in the Roman empire sustained themselves by farming, not crafts or trades. As Vigil's first eclogue indicates, the farmer's life did not offer much economic security. During the difficult period of the Roman revolution (last half of 1st century BCE), what little economic security farming did offer could easily be lost in the political proscriptions. Buccolic poetry is a literary genre that begin in Greece hundreds of years before Virgil. Typically, the poet (a member of the elite) idealizes the simple agrarian lifestyle of farmer and shepherd. Virgil's eclogue is interesting in that it offers the perspective of the farmer, Meliboeus, who has been ordered off his holdings so that a supporter of a victorious general may be rewarded. His friend Tityrus, in constrast, may stay, because of the patronage of another general. In contrast to the uncertainty of crafts and farming, the Roman military offered recruits decent and steady wages.
There are other literary sources that offers us a view of the life of ordinary people living under the Roman Empire. The Gospels (and other scripture) of the Christian bible offer an amazing amount of detail about the lives of people living in Judea during the first century of the common era (paypri from Egypt similarly provide evidence of an ordinary person's life). The perspective is quite a corrective. If the publicans (tax collectors) were the flower of the equites, for Cicero, they are the bane of the existence of poor people living in Roman provinces. Consider Luke's delicate and amusing depiction of the rich tax collector Zaccheus (whom the locals called, "a sinner"). Similarly, the daily circumstances of the widow depicted in Mark, are clearly much different from either that of Turia or the Widow of Ephesus. What do you think these sources can offer a historian of the Roman empire? What difficulties do they present?

Pompeii Uncovered / A conjectural map of Pompeii / Maecenas pictures from Pompeii /

Prof. Damon's course on Pompeii and Herulaneum (a great place to explore)

brothel exteriors #1 and #2 / brother interior rooms #1 and #2 / a covered market / bakery #1 and #2

Vesuvius:

accounts #1 (Pliny, Ep. 6.16) and #2 (Pliny, Ep. 6.20)

Graffiti:

#1, #2, #3 (inscriptions and graffiti); #4 (from a tavern); #5 (from a basilica) #6 (inscriptions and graffiti from the amphitheater) #7 (inscriptions and graffiti from a temple) #8 (from Ostia)

Spanish tabernae: #1, #2, #3

Female laborers:

Eumachia / Women's work (primary sources)

Petronius

The Petronion Society Ancient Novel Page / notes on the Satyricon / Petronius resource page

Juvenal

Satire 3 (on the decline of Rome)

Ostia - good analysis of shipping and trade in the Roman economy of Ostia

Virgil

bio + links / bio / Donatus' life of Virgil / Virgil org home page / Virgil home page

exhibition of Virgil manuscripts / Virgil bib 1 / Virgil bib 2 /

Eclogue # 4 and # 2 in translation

Roma Page / Course Description / Course Requirements / Resources / Calendar / Week 6 Class 2 Lecture / Imber's Home Page

Roman Civilization

CMS 206 /History 206

Vesuvius:

Graffiti:

Female laborers:

Petronius

Juvenal

Housing

The Christian Bible

Roman Trade

Roman economics:

The Roman Forum:

Roman Transportation:

Virgil