While powerful figures tend to take up the most space in our history books, the vast majority of people in the ancient world were regular working class folks, and most people’s lives revolved around the daily grind. A new book sheds light on working life in the Roman Empire, offering insights into a complex society that spanned three continents and incorporated dozens (if not hundreds) of cultures.
To learn more about what has (and hasn’t) changed for the working class, we talked with Jordan Rogers, an assistant professor of history at NC State, and Del Maticic, the Blegen Fellow in Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar. Rogers and Maticic are the co-editors of the book “Working Lives in Ancient Rome.”
The Abstract: What drew you and your co-editor to push forward with a book on working life in ancient Rome? What’s your fascination with the subject?
Jordan Rogers: The original idea came about as we grappled with the vagaries of the academic job market. We were still in our respective graduate programs when we were first having these discussions. What would our jobs be? How did we define those jobs? Would there be jobs for us when all was said and done? If we didn’t get the academic job, would our identities as academics and intellectuals be compromised?
This got us thinking, too, about how these questions are essential, fundamental ones about human relationships with work, and the effects that work inevitably has on human lives, both now and in the Roman world. The fascination, I suppose, is that we keep making a distinction between these two spheres of existence – work and life – which of course changes over time and between cultures. But we still feel compelled to do so. Why? And what does that say about culture more generally? About the worldview of people? About what’s important? These are questions that not many people have asked, or at least not in these specific formulations, about the Roman world. So, we thought it would be useful.
Del Maticic: I also had a personal interest in work and labor given my research on raw materiality in Latin literature. Literary artists are depicted as artisans working figurative raw materials into completed works. I had an abiding interest throughout the project in how new approaches to labor can help shed new light on the Roman understanding of literature and its place in the world.
TA: What made this book project timely now?
Rogers: We began this project with a workshop series in 2020. We had originally planned for it to be in-person, but the pandemic restrictions and realities of that time required us to hold those workshops digitally, via video call. That new reality of work – where work and life were co-existing in the same, tight spaces – as painful as it was, was surprisingly fertile ground for us. It encouraged us to think more critically about what work was in its most basic sense, and where we drew the line (or didn’t) between living and working.
I think a lot of the discourse in the U.S. labor market in the past few years – about “quiet quitting,” return to office mandates, etc. – can still be seen as a result of this reassessment. So, our book uses the Roman world as an added opportunity to ask provocative questions about both Roman work and our own work today.
Maticic: Since our workshop in 2020, there has been a swelling of interest in work and labor in the ancient world. Recently a prominent classicist at Johns Hopkins taught a graduate seminar on Labor in Latin that was directly inspired by our project, and panels on topics like precarity in the Roman world are being organized at classics conventions. Our book, I feel, tapped into a growing interest in inquiries like this.
TA: Many writings and artifacts survive from the time of the Roman empire. What sort of new technologies, tools or techniques are helping us garner additional insights from these objects? Or are there new philosophical approaches that are helping us – such as paying attention to aspects of Roman society that earlier historians overlooked?
Maticic: The primary ancient technologies that we present in our book are concepts. The Latin word labor, for instance, referred to “work” and “toil,” but also to a wide range of figurative actions and processes taken by humans of different strata – from elites to enslaved peoples – as well as nonhuman living things. The labor of plants, for instance, is to grow. We think that concepts like this are useful in the context of late-stage capitalism, in which work and labor become such important buzzwords for thinking about the role of work in the world.
Rogers: To add to Del’s point about “concepts,” especially of work, one of the things we endeavor to do in this volume is to illuminate the many perspectives regarding what work meant in ancient Rome (and, as a result, what it could mean now). These perspectives are often contradictory, but they do cohere. The incredible metaphor that Del conjured to explain our approach in the book is arboreal: we see these numerous, individual perspectives like the “tangled understory” of a dense forest. While the roots, branches and boughs tussle individually for space and resources, when you take a step back you can see the forest as a whole.
TA: At its height, the Roman Empire was incredibly vast – it stretched from Morocco to Iran, from the U.K. to Egypt. Were there commonalities across the empire? In other words, did Roman culture affect the working lives of everyday people?
Rogers: There were of course commonalities, most notably imposed by the Roman legal system. So, for example, making work contracts, according to Roman legal standards, would look the same across the empire. Still, the reality is that the Roman empire was a multicultural one, where regional differences can be observed. Some of our papers explore these regional differences in some detail, especially with regards, for instance, to the networks of skilled professionals – like teachers, doctors, or architects – who moved about the Roman world, and typically in more circumscribed areas.
Maticic: Relatedly, the system of Roman enslavement had a distinct effect on a wide range of people’s working lives. Unlike slavery in the Atlantic world, it was much more common for enslaved people to be manumitted. This process of manumission was an engine of enculturation in the Roman world. Professional slaves could literally work their way into Roman identity, though freedmen would never be treated the same way as freeborn Romans. Still, this shows an interesting and unusual way of thinking about the relationship between labor and civic identity.
TA: You’ve spent your career studying the ancient Mediterranean world, and you’re co-editing a book on the working lives of Rome because it’s a subject you already knew a lot about. What are one or two things you came across while editing this book that you found particularly surprising or fascinating?
Maticic: I learned a lot about the ancient world, but the most valuable new material that I learned over the process of editing the book involved contemporary theories of labor, professional identity and even human resource management. The theories in the latter field about what constitutes a job, profession and role create interesting categories of professional life that are surprisingly useful for humanists. For example, concepts like “work/life integration” ended up being quite useful for our introductory work for the book. I would have expected this body of work to be banal and boring, but I fell in love with it!
Rogers: Actually, the surprising and fascinating thing I learned had nothing to do with the ancient world. One of our contributors, Caroline Cheung (Princeton University), wrote a chapter on the production and repair of large ceramic storage vessels. In her chapter, she discusses David Drake, an enslaved potter in 19th century South Carolina, as a comparative example to try to reconstruct the agency and experience of ancient potters, who themselves were often enslaved or freed. I had never heard of David Drake before reading her chapter; I have since become enthralled with his story and life. This confrontation with the unexpected and anomalous is, I think, the true beauty of these types of collaborations.
TA: Everyone who contributed to this book spent time examining the lives of working people who lived more than a thousand years ago. Many things have changed over the intervening centuries, from cell phones to airplanes. What hasn’t changed? What would ancient workers recognize in their modern peers?
Rogers: Just like now, there were many different responses to work. Some Romans considered any work to be a form of slavery to another (consider, e.g., the modern notion of the corporate “wage-slave”). Others saw their occupation as the most important part of their identity, and therefore placed great social value on the work they did. Still others considered work to be the natural state of things, imposed by divine will, while others, especially the enslaved, would actively design ways to avoid the work forced upon them. So in that sense, not much has changed as far as the variety of stances that can be occupied vis-à-vis labor, and usually these are defined by an individual’s proximity to power in their world of work, then as now.
Maticic: I’ve sometimes heard it said that the cultural obsession with work in the modern world is a phenomenon associated with the capitalist present. But even in the ancient world people’s work was so important to their understanding of themselves that their professional identity was frequently mentioned on their tombstones. As someone who loves my job and derives a lot of my personal identity from my professional identity, it was affirming to think about work as a positive aspect of identity in the ancient world and not just a source of despair and drudgery.
This post was originally published in NC State News.
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