Degrees of poverty
The 50 million or so inhabitants of the Roman Empire did not fall into one single category. Roman society was not divided simply into a small group of the very rich and the rest, a fairly undifferentiated mass, struggling on the breadline. Among those who must count as the non-elite there were different degrees of privilege, status and money, and they included plenty of ‘ordinary’ or ‘middling’ types as well as the very poor. It proves much easier to get a glimpse into the lives of some of these types than of others.
The majority of the 50 million would have been peasant farmers, not the fantasy creations of Roman writers but smallholders across the empire, struggling to grow enough to feed themselves in some years, doing better, with a small surplus to sell, in others. For these families, Roman rule made little difference, beyond a different tax collector, a bigger economy into which to sell their produce and a wider range of trinkets to buy if they had any spare cash. In Britain, for example, so far as we can tell from the archaeological traces, there was little significant change in the lives of peasant farmers over more than a millennium, from the end of the Iron Age immediately before the successful Roman invasion in 43 CE, through the Roman occupation, and into the Middles Ages. But there is almost no evidence surviving for the attitudes, aspirations, hopes or fears of these farmers and their families. The only ordinary people in the Roman world we can get to know in that sense, or whose style of life we can begin to reconstruct, are those who lived in the towns and cities.
There was certainly extreme urban poverty. Roman laws expressly forbade any squatting in tombs: ‘Anyone who so wishes may prosecute a person who lives or makes his dwelling in a tomb’, one Roman legal opinion runs. The implication is that there were homeless people, whether locals or foreigners, citizens, new immigrants or runaway slaves, doing exactly that, camping out in the grand tombs of the aristocracy that lined the roads into most big cities of the empire. Others, it seems, preferred to put up lean-to huts against any convenient wall, from arches to aqueducts, which according to other laws could be demolished if they were judged to be a fire risk or charged a rent if not. The outskirts of many Roman towns may have been not far different from those of modern ‘Third World’ cities, covered in squatter settlements or shanty towns populated by the nearly starving and those who begged as much as worked for their living. Roman moralists make numerous references to beggars – often to the effect that they are better ignored – and a series of paintings in Pompeii depicting life in the local Forum includes a cameo scene of a hunched beggar, with dog, being handed some small change by a posh lady and her maid, who are not obeying the moralists’ advice.
77. This cartoon captures one view of the impact of Roman power on ordinary peasants in the provinces. They are living life in round huts just as they always have done, but can put on an act of embracing Roman culture when, occasionally, required.
There is, in fact, rather less evidence for this kind of borderline destitution than we might expect. But the reasons for that are clear. First, those with nothing leave very few traces in the historical or archaeological record. Ephemeral shanty towns do not leave a permanent imprint in the soil; those buried with nothing in unmarked graves tell us much less about themselves than those accompanied by an eloquent epitaph. But second, and even more to the point, extreme poverty in the Roman world was a condition that usually solved itself: its victims died. Those without some support mechanism could not survive. Even the corn dole in the city of Rome, the descendant of Gaius Gracchus’ initiative in the 120s BCE, did not provide that. It certainly underlined the responsibility of the state for the basic food of its citizens. But the beneficiaries were a large but still limited and privileged group, of about 250,000 male citizens in the first and second centuries CE, who received enough to keep about two people in bread. The dole was not a safety net for all comers.
78. A drawing of one of the now very faded scenes illustrating life in the Forum, from the House of Julia Felix in Pompeii (first century ce). This is a rare image of interaction between rich and poor in the Roman world. The bearded beggar is unmistakably ‘down and out’, semi-clad, only in rags, and with a dog for company.
79. The well-preserved apartment block which stood next to the splendour of the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Now it is overshadowed by the huge Victor Emmanuel monument (visible behind) and overlooked by most passers-by.
Many more people occupied the next rungs up on the ladder of wealth, and they have left clearer traces of their lives. There is still a wide spectrum of privilege and comfort. At one end were those with a relatively secure livelihood, often from manufacturing, producing and selling anything from basic bread to fancy clothing; they were families living in several rooms, sometimes above the shop or workshop, possibly with a couple of slaves, even if (as was often the case) they were ex-slaves themselves or the children of ex-slaves. A particularly intimate view of lifestyle at this level comes from a cesspit excavated underneath a small block of retail units and apartments in the town of Herculaneum, Pompeii’s neighbour, also destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. The contents of the cesspit, still being analysed, are what came down directly from the simple lavatories of the modest flats above, having already passed through the digestive tracts of the roughly 150 residents. It was a varied and decent diet: among other things, they were eating fish, sea urchins (fragments of the spikes survive), chicken, eggs, walnut and figs (the pips go straight through intestines, undigested). Those living on upper floors also used the lavatories as rudimentary waste-disposal units, to get rid of broken glass and crockery, as well as accidentally dropping their gemstones down them. These were people who had some money to spend, household utensils to spare and jewellery to lose.
At the other end of the spectrum were those in a much more precarious position – men, women and children with no permanent trade or particular skill, who must have tried to pick up casual work in bars and restaurants or the sex industry, as porters or hauliers at the docks or as navvies on building sites. Plenty of such labour was needed. One rough and ready estimate, calculating the total quantity of staples – oil, wine and grain – that must have been imported to keep a million people in the city of Rome alive, reckons that it would have taken more than 9 million single ‘porter loads’ to get the stuff from ship to shore, in sacks or amphorae, each year. Those loads alone would have provided enough work for 3,000 men for about 100 days. But it was seasonal, hence the use of free labourers on a casual basis rather than slaves, and it meant an uncertain livelihood. Many of these people must have often gone hungry; telltale lesions in surviving skeletons (especially in their teeth) point to various forms of malnutrition affecting not only the very poorest in the city. They would have lived in the ancient equivalent of hostels, renting by the hour, or sharing a single room with several others and sleeping in shifts. They would probably not even have enjoyed many of the entertainments often supposed to have been the staple and the passion of the Roman poor. The seating capacity of the Colosseum, vast as it seems, was around 50,000, which in a city of a million probably means that the audience for gladiatorial shows and bloody beast hunts was relatively upmarket. It was not made up of these people, who, if they only fell one rung lower, would have been camping in a tomb or in a squatter settlement.
The huge multistorey apartment blocks (insulae, or ‘islands) common in Rome and its port of Ostia symbolise this hierarchy among the more ordinary Romans and capture the spectrum from the reasonably comfortable to those only barely hanging on. Insulae provided rented accommodation at a high density, which is how such a large population managed to cram into a relatively small area in the city of Rome. They were attractive investment opportunities for their owners and provided a job for ruthless rent collectors. The epitaph of one tenant, Ancarenus Nothus, an ex-slave who died at the age of forty-three and whose ashes were buried in a shared tomb just outside the walls of Rome, hints at common complaints in some simple lines of verse, as if spoken from the afterlife: ‘I’m no longer worried that I shall die of hunger / I’m rid of aching legs and getting a deposit for my rent / I’m enjoying free board and lodging for eternity.’ But even if the landlord came down heavily on all of them, some tenants lived much more comfortably than others.
The basic logic was always that the lower down in the building you lived, the more spacious and expensive your accommodation was, and the higher up in the building, the cheaper, pokier and more dangerous, with no facilities for cooking or washing and no means of escape in the (frequent) event of a fire. As Juvenal jokes, someone living at the top (‘with nothing to keep him from the rain but the roof tiles’) was simply the last one to die if a blaze started further down. The logic is exactly the reverse of that of the modern apartment block with its luxury penthouses, and it is perfectly illustrated in one of the best-preserved insulae in the city of Rome, still visible just underneath the Capitoline Hill and within a few metres of the shining temples that once stood there (literally shining: by the end of the first century CE the Temple of Jupiter was roofed with gilded tiles). In this block, shops with living accommodation on a mezzanine occupied the street level. The first floor, or piano nobile, contained a few spacious apartments; by the fourth floor, which still survives, there were a series of small bedsits, though each probably housed a family rather than a single person; and above, it must have been worse. The city’s lack of zoning meant that some of the grandest public celebrations on the Capitoline took place within a stone’s throw of what was on its upper floors a slum.
It is the world of the people who occupied these blocks, and others like them, that is the theme of the rest of this chapter. Realistically, it will be more the world of those on the lower floors than those on the upper: the more disposable income that people had, the more evidence they have left for us. We will look at the world of work, of leisure, of culture and of anxiety: not just where and how the non-elite lived but also how they faced the inequality of Roman life, what fun they enjoyed and what resources they had against adversity of all kinds, from petty crime to pain and sickness.