For most of us, especially those of us who think about it a lot, the Roman Empire conjures up famous names of such men as Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Marcus Aurelius, and a few others of the imperial elite. We might also think of grand structures like the Colosseum, the Appian Way, and the Pantheon, or massive spectacles from gladiator duels to races at the Circus Maximus. Dozens of books explore the Empire’s wars against Dacia in southeastern Europe, the Iceni in Britannia, Germania in northern Europe, and the Jews in Palestine.
The point is, we tend to think of the extraordinary, not the ordinary or, to put it another way, the macro, instead of the micro. Why? As Kim Bowes, a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, explains in Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, until recently the ordinary lives of ordinary Romans eluded us for lack of evidence. Only in the last three or four decades, thanks to an explosion of archeological digs often triggered by construction projects across Europe, have we been showered with new knowledge about the lives of what Bowes labels “the 90 percent.”
“It’s a delicious irony,” she writes, “that more information about the rural Roman 90 percent has emerged from the construction of Euro Disney [about 15 miles east of Paris] than from the well-intentioned excavations designed to find them.”
Perhaps we assumed that “everyday working people” in ancient Rome didn’t write much about themselves. Certainly, the well-known chroniclers of the day — Sallust, Livy and Tacitus — didn’t focus on them; they mostly wrote instead about the big names who wielded political power. But thanks to discoveries of the past four decades — including graffiti, and writings on broken pottery and wooden tablets, coins and documents and farm implements, and scientific analysis of soil samples and ancient ruins — we’ve learned more about the lives of ordinary people in the Empire than historians ever knew before.
This “shower of information about Roman farms and fields, crops and herds, and the geology and soil science,” Bowes argues, is transforming our understanding of life at the time. Her book is the first notable effort to tell the world what these recent findings reveal.
Let’s remember that the history of ancient Rome did not begin with the Empire. For 500 years before its first emperor, it was a remarkable res publica (a republic) known for the rule of law, substantial liberty, and the dispersion of power. When that crumbled into imperial autocracy late in the first century BCE, what we know as “the Empire” took root and lasted another 500 years. Weakened internally by its own welfare-warfare state, the Western Roman Empire centered in Rome fell to barbarians in 476 CE. Bowes’ attention is drawn exclusively to that second half-millennia.
The Empire evolved into a very different place from the old Republic. By the dawn of the second century CE, it would have been unrecognizable to Roman citizens of the second century BCE Loyalty to the state and one-man rule had largely superseded the old republican virtues. Many emperors were ghastly megalomaniacs to whom earlier Romans would never have groveled.
Despite the general decline in morals and governance that characterized much of the imperial era, ordinary Romans fared better than you might surmise, at least until the decline overwhelmed them in the late fifth century. Bowes attributes this to “cagey managers of small resources” who lived in “precarity” but “doubled down on opportunities.” The picture she paints with recent evidence is one of hard-working, resourceful farmers, tradesmen, and shopkeepers making the very best of a tough situation and, for the most part, doing remarkably well at it.
Ongoing excavations at Pompeii, destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 79 CE, have yielded fascinating details of commerce and coinage in the city:
Bar and shop owners did more of their business in bronze and less with the prestige metals. Resellers of bulk oil and wine, and above all artisans producing for larger-scale markets, used gold and particularly silver.
Bowes reveals that much of the Roman world experienced a “consumer revolution” as the Empire stretched from the border with Scotland to the Levant and across north Africa. Roman roads and trade, even while government grew more tyrannical in Rome, facilitated it. Consider this finding:
New data from archeology, and newly reconsidered texts like the Pompeii graffito, find working people, even some of the poorest, consuming far in excess of our previous expectations. From small-time traders to enslaved servants, farmers to craftsmen, Romans ate more and different foods, purchased rather than made many of the items they used…Their levels of household consumption were thus historically quite high…
The immense quantity of data gleaned from the recent discoveries shows up in numerous tables, charts, graphs and illustrations in Bowes’ book. From those entries, we learn of the accounts of a Roman beer-buyer; the percentage of farms with lamps, candlesticks and window glass; which cereal crops were grown on small farms; the real incomes of artisans and shopkeepers; the prevalence of metabolic disease among children, and so much more.
For comedians who often poke fun today at British teeth, there’s this tidbit: Data suggest that the Roman conquest of Britain brought dramatic declines in dental health and that “British urbanites had the same or perhaps even worse dental health as the mostly urban Italian sample.”
Nonetheless, new evidence suggests that “the majority of Romans were consuming a relatively robust caloric package.” Bowes tells us,
This meant a lot more energy to do work, and thus a lot more work could be done. The Coliseum was not built on 1,900 calories per day…The Coliseum was not built by workers scraping their porridge out of a single pot.
So, we now know that ordinary Romans during the Empire likely lived better than historians previously believed. They exhibited “relentless persistence and shrewdness,” “perseverance and ingenuity,” a degree of “grit and hustle” we can appreciate more than ever. For several hundred years, their accomplishment “was their ability to wrest a living from a hard and complex world.”
We also know that it didn’t last. As the Empire disintegrated in the fifth century, it became ever more difficult for many, and impossible for a great number, to eke out a living. The “Dark Ages” that commenced with the fall of Rome saw economic and cultural decline and a massive depopulation. Life spans shortened, mortality rose, and standards of living plummeted. At its height, the city of Rome itself was home to a million people; a few centuries later, it plunged to a nadir of barely 30,000.
Though Bowes falls short of saying so herself, I think the moral of the story is this: A resourceful people can endure a great deal before they throw in the towel, but a thriving civilization depends on what the Roman Empire ultimately forfeited: peace, freedom, property rights, and the rule of law.
