The world of work
Cicero and most of the elite professed to despise wage labour. But for the majority of the urban inhabitants of the Roman world, as now, their job was the key to their identity. It was usually tough. Most people who needed a regular income to survive (and that was most people) worked, if they could, until they died; the army was an exception in having any kind of retirement package, and even that usually involved working a small farm. Many children worked as soon as they were physically capable, whether they were free or slave. Skeletons of the very young have been discovered in excavations with clear signs in their bones and joints of hard physical labour; one particular cemetery just outside Rome, near an ancient laundry and textile works, contains the remains of young people who obviously had years of heavy work behind them (showing the effects of the stamping and the treading needed in the treatment of cloth, rather than of skipping and ball games). Children are even commemorated as workers in their epitaphs. Modern sensibilities might hope that the simple tombstone in Spain of a four-year-old child, shown carrying his mining tools, was put up in memory of some young local mining mascot. Most likely he was an active worker.
Only the offspring of the rich spent their youth learning grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and how to make speeches – or the less meaty syllabus, from reading and writing to spinning and music, offered to girls. Child labour was the norm. It is not a problem, or even a category, that most Romans would have understood. The invention of ‘childhood’ and the regulation of what work ‘children’ could do only came fifteen hundred years later and is still a peculiarly Western preoccupation.
Their tombstones make clear how important work was to the personal identity of ordinary Romans. Whereas Scipio Barbatus, and others like him at the top of the social hierarchy, emphasised the political offices they had held or the battles they had won, many more people blazoned what they did as a job. More than 200 occupations are known in this way from the city of Rome alone. Men and women (or whoever commissioned their memorials) often summarised their careers in just a few words and images, with a job description and some recognisable symbols of their craft. Gaius Pupius Amicus, for example, an ex-slave and by trade a dyer of ‘purple’ – a notoriously expensive dye, extracted from tiny shellfish and according to law used only to colour cloth worn by senators and the emperor – proudly described himself as a purpurarius and had various items of his craft equipment carved on the stone. Other tombs displayed sculptured panels depicting the deceased in action at their job, from midwives and butchers to a particularly splendid seller of poultry.
80. This rather battered memorial is one of the few tombstones apparently to commemorate a child worker. In his hands the four-year-old holds a basket and a pick, similar to objects found in excavations at the Spanish mining sites.
81. The tombstone of a ‘dyer of purple’ from North Italy. Underneath his portrait are the tools of his trade, including scales, phials and hanging skeins of wool.
Occasionally the whole tomb was designed even more ambitiously, to display the craft of the dead person, as if to equate the man or woman with the job itself. In the late first century BCE one enterprising baker was responsible for a large memorial to himself and his wife in a prime position just outside the Roman city walls. Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces was likely an ex-slave, and – to judge from the scale of the tomb, 10 metres high – he had made a large amount of money from his business. The inscribed epitaph describes him as a ‘baker and contractor’, which points at the very least to a chain of bakeries and probably some lucrative public contracts for bread supply. The whole edifice is constructed in the shape of bread-making equipment, and around the top, where on official monuments you would expect a sculpted frieze depicting something like a religious procession or a triumph, there are instead scenes from the working life in one of Eurysaces’ bakeries; a figure in a toga directing operations is presumably meant to be the man himself. If Eurysaces knew of Cicero’s disparaging words on the nature of trade and of wage labour, then this tomb would be the equivalent of two fingers put up to such snobbery. Equally, a passing aristocrat might well have thought that there was a touch of Trimalchio about it.
82. A marble relief showing a poultry seller’s stall from Ostia, perhaps from a tomb or perhaps a shop sign. The man second from the left seems to be drumming up trade, and behind the counter a woman is serving customers. The stall is constructed from cages (containing a couple of rabbits), on which a pair of monkeys sits.
But more than individual identity was at stake here. There were communal and social aspects too, as trades and crafts provided a context for joint activities among their workers, for promotion of the interests they held in common and for a shared sense of identity. All across the empire, local trade associations (collegia) flourished, with members who were both slave and free, a combination reflecting the usual mixture of statuses in most kinds of work. In one collegium based just outside Rome, rules drawn up in the second century CE stipulated that any slave member who was granted his freedom had to donate ‘an amphora of good wine’ to the others, presumably for the celebratory party. Sometimes they had impressive headquarters, usually a defined administrative structure, rules and regulations, entry fees and annual subscriptions, and they could act as political pressure groups, talking shops, dining clubs and burial insurance agencies. For one element of the members’ subscription to the association regularly went towards guaranteeing them a decent funeral, which may partly account for the prominence of job descriptions on epitaphs. You were buried as a carpenter, in a funeral paid for by carpenters.
83. The tomb of Eurysaces the baking contractor; dating to the first century BCE, it was preserved because it was built into a tower of the later city walls. The strange roundels on the façade almost certainly represent the kneading machines used in large scale bakeries.
These were a long way from guilds in the medieval sense; they did not set qualifications for practising particular crafts or impose what was effectively a closed shop. Nor were they exactly the ancient version of a trades union or business cartel – although it seems, from a surviving ruling of the provincial governor there, that the bakers of Ephesus, in what is now Turkey, did cause a riot in the middle of the second century CE by going out on strike, and Petronius has one of his characters in the Satyricon complain that the bakers (again) are in league with the local officials to keep the bread prices high. But at some point an historic stake in Roman society was invented for these associations. There was a tall, but important, story that it was the second king of Rome, Numa, who first established them, to include the builders, bronze workers, potters, goldsmiths, dyers, leather processers and musicians. Whoever dreamt this up, and it was a dream, was giving the craftsmen and their organisations a genealogy that went back almost as far as it was possible to go in Roman history.
Evidence for the public profile of trades and workers can still be found at Pompeii. The electoral slogans visible even now on the walls of the town, the temporary painted signs urging the voters to back this or that candidate in the elections to the local council, provide one example. These are not unlike modern political posters, though they are rather more standardised, usually taking the form of a simple sentence along the lines of ‘Crescens asks for Gnaeus Helvius Sabinus as aedile’. Variations on the theme include a few traces of negative campaigning (‘The little thieves ask for Vatia as aedile’ was presumably much the same as saying ‘Don’t vote for Vatia’); but there is also a series of notices that give a candidate the backing of a particular group of tradesmen, including the bakers, carpenters, chicken keepers, laundry workers and mule drivers. How formal this backing was is uncertain. We should not necessarily imagine some official vote of endorsement by the local association, though that might have been the case. But at the very least some of them had got together to decide that as laundry workers (or whatever …) they were supporting one candidate rather than another.
Pompeii also allows us a rare view into the working environment of some of these people, in particular into the laundries. Roman laundry work and textile processing (a combination conventionally known as ‘fulling’) was not a glamorous trade. One of the staple ingredients in this process was human urine, which was the source of the joke attributed to the emperor Vespasian about money not smelling. And the young skeletons found in the cemetery near the textile works outside Rome show the intense stresses and strains of the physical labour involved. But one of the many fulleries in Pompeii gives an alternative picture of the industry, for the consumption of the fullers themselves. Decorating the working areas where the men – and it was mostly men – pummelled and processed the cloth, in whatever foul-smelling mixture they used, were paintings of exactly those elaborate and messy processes going on. It was these paintings that the men saw – a version of what they were doing reflected back to them in a sanitised, even glamorised, form – as they went about their long days’ work (see plate 18).
Cicero’s rivals may have mocked him, incorrectly or not, for being the son of a laundry proprietor. But in this laundry at Pompeii, as in many others, no doubt, across the empire, the launderers were offered an image of the nobility of labour, a pride in its execution and a sense of belonging, that Cicero would never have dreamt of.