SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  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 imag
e of the nobility of labour, a pride in its execution and a sense of belonging, that Cicero would never have dreamt of.

  Bar culture

  Elite Romans were often even more dismissive – and anxious – about what the rest of the population got up to when they were not working. Their keenness for shows and spectacles was one thing, but even worse were the bars and cheap cafés and restaurants where ordinary men tended to congregate. Lurid images were conjured up of the types of people you were likely to meet there. Juvenal, for example, pictures a seedy drinking den at the port of Ostia patronised, he claims, by cut-throats, sailors, thieves and runaway slaves, hangmen and coffin makers, plus the occasional eunuch priest (presumably off duty from the sanctuary of the Great Mother in the town). And writing later, in the fourth century CE, one Roman historian complained that the ‘lowest’ sort of person spent the whole night in bars, and he picked out as especially disgusting the snorting noise the dice players made as they concentrated on the board and drew in breath through their snotty noses.

  There are also records of repeated attempts to impose legal restrictions or taxes on these establishments. Tiberius, for example, apparently banned the sale of pastries; Claudius is supposed to have abolished ‘taverns’ entirely and to have forbidden the serving of boiled meat and hot water (presumably to be mixed, in the standard Roman fashion, with wine – but then why not ban the wine?); and Vespasian is said to have ruled that bars and pubs should sell no form of food at all except peas and beans. Assuming that all this is not a fantasy of ancient biographers and historians, it can only have been fruitless posturing, legislation at its most symbolic, which the resources of the Roman state had no means to enforce.

  Elites everywhere tend to worry about places where the lower orders congregate, and – though there was certainly a rough side and some rude talk – the reality of the normal bar was tamer than its reputation. For bars were not just drinking dens but an essential part of everyday life for those who had, at best, limited cooking facilities in their lodgings. As with the arrangement of apartment blocks, the Roman pattern is precisely the reverse of our own: the Roman rich, with their kitchens and multiple dining rooms, ate at home; the poor, if they wanted much more than the ancient equivalent of a sandwich, had to eat out. Roman towns were full of cheap bars and cafés, and it was here that a large number of ordinary Romans spent many hours of their non-working lives. Pompeii is again one of the best examples. Taking account of the still unexcavated parts of the town and resisting the temptation (as some archaeologists have not) to call any building with a serving counter a bar, we can reckon that there were well over a hundred such places there, for a population of perhaps 12,000 residents, and travellers passing through.

  84. Looking out from a typical Roman bar, in Pompeii. A counter faces the street with large bowls, from which food or drink could be served to takeaway customers. The steps on the left acted as a display stand for more food.

  85. A brawl in a bar over a game of dice. In this nineteenth-century copy of some of the paintings from the Bar of Salvius in Pompeii, the argument starts in the left–hand panel. ‘Exsi’ shouts one of the players, ‘I’ve won, I’m out’, while his opponent disputes the throw. In the next scene, the landlord, on the right, is not only telling them to get out, but man-handling them towards the door.

  They were built to a fairly standard plan: a counter facing the pavement, for the ‘takeaway’ service; an inner room with tables and chairs for the eat-in, waiter service; and usually a display stand for food and drink, as well as a brazier or oven for preparing hot dishes and drinks. In a couple of cases at Pompeii, in the same way as in the fullery, their decoration includes a series of paintings depicting scenes – part fantasy, part real – of life in the bar itself. There is not much evidence of the terrible moral turpitude that Roman writers feared. One image shows the wine supplies being delivered in a large vat, another some snacks being consumed underneath sausages and other delicacies strung from the ceiling. The ‘worst’ signs are one full-on image of sex (hard to make out now because some modern moralist has defaced it), a number of graffiti along the lines of ‘I fucked the landlady’ (whether statement of fact, boast or insult is impossible to say) and several paintings which show customers playing dice games, presumably for money, snorting or not. On the walls of one bar, where speech bubbles accompany the pictures to flesh out what is going on, the game is leading to a fight and to some decidedly ungentlemanly language. After a disputed throw (‘It was a two, not a three’), the landlord has to intervene: ‘If you want to fight, get outside,’ he is saying, as landlords always do, while the pair start to foul-mouth each other (‘Scumbag, I had the three, I won’, ‘No, come on, cocksucker, I did’).

  Gambling and board games were one of the most extreme cases of Roman elite double standards. Some of the loftiest aristocrats were keen gamers. According to Suetonius, the emperor Claudius was such an enthusiast that he wrote a book on dice games and had his carriage specially adapted so that he could continue playing on the move, while the first Augustus was so addicted to gaming – but so mindful of the purses of his friends – that he would simply give his guests large quantities of cash to use as their stake (though Suetonius hints at his own disapproval when he observes that Augustus did not seek to deny his habit, and compares it archly to another of the emperor’s supposed hobbies: deflowering virgins). Board games were not only a man’s pastime, either. They were a favourite recreation of the elderly Ummidia Quadratilla too – whether played for money or not, Pliny does not say. But, as Juvenal observes, on this occasion pointing a well-directed finger at Roman hypocrisy, when the ordinary people indulged in these games, the elite were outraged and thought it ‘a disgrace’.

  One of their main objections was that dicing was a gateway to crime. The brawl depicted in the Pompeian bar points to that on a very small scale; on a grander scale, the prominence of ‘dicers’ (aleatores) among Catiline’s followers suggested a connection with conspiracy and treason. But, in the heads of the rich and powerful, the destabilising effect of gambling was a major factor too. In a world where the hierarchy of wealth had always directly correlated with political power and social status, the possibility, however remote, of the established order being upturned by money that was obtained solely by chance was dangerously disruptive. The riches of Trimalchio were bad enough; the idea that a fortune might be obtained by a throw of the dice was far worse. So there were attempts to control gambling among the general population, to restrict it to particular times or occasions and to limit the legal responsibility for recovering the debts incurred. This legislation had about as much effect as the restrictions on bars. Gaming boards are found all over the Roman world. Those that survive are in durable stone and come from tombs, bars and army barracks or are carved into pavements and into the steps of public buildings – presumably intended as an amusement for people with time on their hands.

  Dice games had different names and were played by different rules and on different designs of board. No one has ever managed to reconstruct quite how any of these games worked in detail (it is rather like trying to figure out how to play Monopoly without the instructions or any of the pieces or the cards). But, despite that, one common type of board offers some memorable glimpses of the atmosphere of play and the attitudes of the players. These boards were made for a game that clearly involved moving pieces across thirty-six points, arranged in three rows of twelve, each row divided into two groups of six. But taking the place of the ‘squares’ that are usually found on a modern board are letters of the alphabet, and the players moved their pieces from letter to letter. The letters are often carefully arranged to read as words, so that the boards proclaim some snappy slogans: in six words of six letters each. These were some of the mottoes of bar culture and of the gamers themselves.

  A few are slightly dourly moralising, reflecting on the downsides of the very activity that the boards were designed for. ‘The nasty dots on the dice compel even the skilled player to pl
ay by luck’ (INVIDA PUNCTA IUBENT FELICE LUDERE DOCTUM) or ‘The board is a circus. Retire when you’re beaten. You don’t know how to play’ (TABULA CIRCUS BICTUS RECEDE LUDERE NESCIS). More are triumphalist in a very Roman way, even if they hark back to rather old triumphs. ‘The Parthians have been slaughtered, the Briton conquered, play on, Romans’ (PARTHI OCCISI BRITTO VICTUS LUDITE ROMANI), as one board probably of the third century CE proclaims. Others stress a down-to-earth popular hedonism, referring to the races in the Circus Maximus (‘The circus is packed, the people shout, the citizens are having fun’, CIRCUS PLENUS CLAMOR POPULI GAUDIA CIVIUM) or to even simpler pleasures of life. On the steps of the Forum at Timgad, one board sums it all up with ‘Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing: that’s living’ (VENARI LAVARE LUDERE RIDERE OCCEST VIVERE).

  These slogans undercut some of the stern disapproval of the Roman elite, capturing the banter and zest of bar life, the pleasure that ordinary people could take in being Roman (from circuses to conquest), and a no-nonsense view of what amounted to good living and contentment. It was with slogans like these that the average Pompeian laundry worker sat down in the evening in his local bar, with a glass or two of wine (mixed with hot water), a friend, a board and some dice – and dreamt about gambling his way into a better life.

  86. Another variant on ‘The Circus is packed …’ Here the last line (now broken on the right) reads IANUAE TENSAE – ‘the doors are heaving’.