Surviving Rome : the economic lives of the ninety percent / Kim Bowes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bowes, Kimberly Diane, 1970- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Labor--Rome--History.

Labor.

Working class--Rome--History.

Working class.

Poor--Rome--History.

Poor.

Rome--Economic conditions.

Rome.

Rome--History--Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D.

Physical Description:

xv, 490 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Other Title:

Economic lives of the ninety percent

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2025]

Summary:

"The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor. Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children's toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans' most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status. Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today's laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: Getting down to work

Let's settle up

A world full of things

Farmer Soterichos goes to market

Eight jobs

The 90 percent and their money

The load-carrying mother

The bottom line

Weights and measures of the Roman world

Appendix 1. A world full of things : consumption data

Appendix 2. Smallholder farms and their outputs

Appendix 3. Cost of living calculations

Appendix 4. Tebtunis grapheion, transaction types and averages

Appendix 5. Human skeletal remains, Italy and Britain : data and bibliography.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 409-470) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Bowes, Kimberly Diane, 1970- Surviving Rome

ISBN:

9780691273334

0691273332

OCLC:

1473689389

Publisher Number:

90103445862