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Sometime in the 1st century AD, a crass graffiti artist carved a 2m-long graffito into the wall of a stairwell within the House of Julia Felix at Pompeii. The mudslinger didn’t mince words. In it, they mocked a man who had held several jobs in his life – as a tavern-keeper, a potter (or chalk-worker), a fish-sauce dealer, a baker, a farmer, a copper-worker, a retailer, and a flask-maker. The lampooner then suggests that performing an explicit sexual act on a woman is the only job left for him to work. Dirty jokes aside, the graffito illustrates an important point about the working world of ancient Romans: they engaged in an intricate ‘hustle economy’ centuries before the rise of our own gig culture. In 2026, 39% of Americans and 19% of workers in the UK worked side hustles. Most said it was out of monetary need rather than artistic passion. As it turns out, the Roman Mediterranean was similarly a world of hustlers who had to negotiate the perilous line between survival and scarcity every month. These Romans often struggled to save money, worried over credit, feared getting sick in a world without public hospitals or socialised medicine, and dealt with a host of quotidian problems. In Surviving Rome, archaeologist and historian Kim Bowes elucidates the daily lives of these gritty workers. She also highlights their roles in the first ‘global economy’: one that underwent a consumer revolution that provided access to more products, ideas, and skills than ever before.
Surviving Rome sticks to the diverse archaeological, epigraphic, and bioarchaeological datasets of the ‘hands and households’ of the 90%. Although ancient demographics are notoriously difficult, this equates to around 54 million of the roughly 60 million who lived at the height of the Roman Empire. Bowes focuses on the period between 100 BC and AD 250 by using inscriptions, ostraca, skeletal remains, and archaeological data to populate the Roman world from below. Surviving Rome demonstrates to readers that the economic struggles, from debt problems to arthritic hands, of these men, women, and children were both foreign and familiar. Rome was a slave society with vastly different social, technological, and political systems than today. But it was also a society that, like our own, suffered from deep socio-economic inequalities. In her analysis, Bowes switches deftly between microhistory and macrohistory so as not to abandon the humanity of the people often erased by statistical models.
In a book market where Julius Caesar biographies outnumber accessible studies of everyday Romans to a disappointing degree, modern workers often know little about the lives of regular Romans. By compiling, visualising, and interpreting such disparate data, Bowes successfully introduces academics, field archaeologists, and the public to a wealth of evidence. Ancient writers like Virgil and Varro often excluded the enslaved rural farmers from their bucolic visions, but Bowes does not. And she has the data to back it up. Such transparency in a book meant for more popular readership means that Surviving Rome models the reasons why the information revolutions of the past three decades have been so transformative for the field of ancient history. The dramatic growth in archaeological data, analytical tools, and new methodologies in these years laid the groundwork to look more deeply into Roman workers than ever before, and Bowes has long been a key part of that movement. Surviving Rome will provide a durable foundation for those doing ‘history from below’ in the years to come. The book is hefty. There are 490 pages of prose analysis, graphs, and appendices on everything from skeletal evidence for infectious disease to labour-force estimations for various Italian farms. And yet every one of those pages substantiates Bowes’ unwavering argument that ‘[raising] up a working majority from the detritus of a distant and foreign past’ reveals the main accomplishment of these gritty workers: ‘their ability to wrest a living from a hard and complex world.’
REVIEW BY SARAH E BOND
Surviving Rome: the economic lives of the ninety percent
Kim Bowes
Princeton University Press, £35
ISBN 978-0691273334
