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- [00:01]
Progressive Insurance Narrator
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History Extra Narrator
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- [01:25]
Kim Bo
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- [02:26]
History Extra Narrator
We know plenty about the lives of rich and powerful Romans, men such as Julius Caesar and Augustus. But Kim Bose is more interested in those who worked for a living. The so called 90%. In this episode of the History Extra Podcast, Kim tells Spencer Mizzen about her endeavours to unearth the lost voices of the Roman Empire's working people, from Egyptian farmers and entrepreneurial barmen to profit hungry pimps.
- [02:54]
Spencer Mizzen
Hi, Kim. Thank you very much for joining us today. Your new book is called Surviving the Economic lives of the 90%, which explores how working people and the poor navigated ancient Rome's economy. I wonder if you could start by telling us what you mean by the 90%. Who were these people and what kind of distinguished them from the top 10%?
- [03:26]
Kim Bo
Thanks for having me, Spencer. And great question. The 90%, as far as my book is concerned and the questions that it tackles are basically people who have to earn a living mostly through manual labor, but through their own labor. That is, the people who are different from people who make their living from rents, from investments, from other people's labor. And they're the 10%. You know, it's a little bit tricksy my calling them the 90%, because frankly, we don't know if they are the 90% or are they the 95%? And it's a little bit of riff off of David Graeber's 99% slogan, which became very popular during the Wall street protests. So it's our best guess as to how many people in the Roman world actually earned a living through their own labors and were, for the most part, right, not wealthy people, people who lived in some kind of precarity.
- [04:24]
Spencer Mizzen
So this is obviously an enormous body of people encompassing sort of a dizzying array of cultures, ethnicities and vocations. And also, I guess it has to be pointed out, the book covers a not insignificant span of time. So how did you approach the challenge of kind of ranging across such a diverse and disparate cast of characters?
- [04:46]
Kim Bo
It is a really diverse cast of characters. And one of the claims that the book makes is that, you know, the 90% as a umbrella is easily explodable into a whole range of different groups of people who had different kinds of challenges. One of the things that I really became impressed by both thinking about poor and working people in the ancient world, but also in the Roman world, is the way in which the kinds of identity categories that we use to slice up either people in the past or people in the present, through race, through gender, through ethnicities today, national origins for poor and working people, these things matter, but they matter sometimes a lot less than real economic nuts and bolts. Who owns their own land versus who rents, who makes wages by the day versus wages by the month versus someone who gets paid by the piece to do things. These things really matter. They matter for Your ability to survive. And they run over categories like slave or free or male or female or children. Lots of these other kinds of categories. And these challenges apply to the most immensely diverse group of people that maybe we tend to slot into different categories. So one of the things I wanted to do in this book is draw attention to how these big economic problems really matter in a way more than, say, profession or in some cases even slave free status.
- [06:20]
Spencer Mizzen
When you say there's a really diverse cast of characters, what time frame are we talking about here? What time frame does your book principally deal with? And geography as well. I mean, where are we talking about?
- [06:32]
Kim Bo
So the book deals with from the end of the first century bce, that is to say, the beginning of, if you know your Roman emperors, the reign of Augustus the first emperor, up until about the middle of the third century ce. And it ranges in, in theory, all over the empire. Now, the book really lands on some specific places because we have really good data for those places. One of them is Britain that we, even though it was the northernmost and one of the later additions to the empire, has been so beautifully studied that we actually know an awful lot about ordinary people's lives in Roman Britain. But it also draws a lot on data from Roman Egypt, which seems like a pretty different place from Roman Britain. But we also have lots of data because we have these extraordinary papyri that are preserved through the climate of Egypt. It also draws a lot on Roman Italy, both because I have worked there in the past and because we know a lot about it from this fortuitous explosion of volcano over a series of cities, including Pompeii and Herculaneum. So that's a really diverse set of geographies and it's a diverse chronology. In defense of lumping all of this together and the cut between the covers of one book, what's most interesting, I think, for us modern people today, I think would have been the way in which, unlike say in the Middle Ages, that world was okay, massive diversity, ethnic diversity, diversity of ecosystems, therefore agriculture, blah, blah, blah. But it was more unified and shared more things under the Roman world than probably any time before or after. The Roman hegemony had a kind of homogenizing effect, which limited was still really important. Everybody had to pay taxes whether you lived in Britain or whether you lived in Egypt. And everyone used more or less the same monetary system. So there are a series of things, particularly economic things, that really unify this group of people. And that's, I think, the argument for sticking them all together under the same
- [08:30]
Spencer Mizzen
Cover, how much of a challenge was it to shed light on the lives of these people? Because for centuries, histories of ancient Rome have been dominated by the rich and powerful. You know, everybody from Julius Caesar through Nero to Marcus Aurelius. And when we do get to hear about the 90%, we. We usually do so via accounts written by the rich and powerful. I mean, you call them in the book Cicero and Co. So how did you sort of overcome this problem to tell the story of the 90% from their own perspectives?
- [09:04]
Kim Bo
So when I first started working on this material, in a way, I started working on it just to prove that it could be done, because everyone said, well, we don't know anything about these people. They vanish from history. And I'm an archaeologist by training. And I thought, really? That seems wrong. I mean, you're an archaeologist, Go do something about it. Go dig these people up. And of course, it turns out that we've been digging them up for decades, and particularly commercial archaeologists have been excavating them for decades, because commercial archaeology hits everything indiscriminately. It excavates the rich villa right alongside the poor farmstead and records everything, particularly in great archaeological traditions like in Britain and France, with the same robustness. So we have a ton of archaeology, as it turns out, and we have been accumulating this archaeology over the last, say, 30 years. So that's one way of telling these people's story. The other way is a growing body of written evidence that, again, it's been growing for a while. We haven't maybe paid as much attention to it as we should have. And it's what my colleague Roger Bagnall has termed everyday writing. It's writing by ordinary people that they use to keep track of their expenses or the tax receipts that they keep or their land leases that they sort of shove in a drawer so that they have them, you know, when they have to prove that they've paid their rent. It is even graffiti. So the city of Pompeii is covered with ordinary people, you know, doxing other people and complaining about other people. But it's also overwhelmingly concerned by, with economic matters, keeping tallies of expenses or money that's come in. And this kind of everyday writing turns out to be really voluminous, increasingly accessible, and covers a surprising swath of people. Now, it's true that everyday writing obviously tends to cling to those people who can write in some way. But we have families of three generations of illiterates in Egypt that kept these kinds of records. So even if you couldn't read or write. And again, remember, that's not an on off button. That's like a spectrum of I put an X where my name is to I can make out a few words to I can copy some words to I can read Virgil, right? That's the. Virgil's the end of the spectrum. People along this end of the spectrum still had to use the written word. And above all, this is an argument I make in the book. They had to use numbers because this is a world in which everybody uses money, in which trade is happening at large and small scales everywhere. You need to be able to do accounts. And that, I think, is one of the things that drives people interaction with the written word. And this is why we have as much everyday writing as we do in the Roman world.
- [11:46]
Spencer Mizzen
And your book covers a period of history, and it saw the proliferation of coin money, the growth of a consumer goods market, the rise of what we might be called the world's first global economy. How did the 90% plug into this? And can they be described as active participators in this global economy?
- [12:08]
Kim Bo
So I would say absolutely yes. I think for a long time we thought absolutely no, right? We imagine that the majority of the population are smallholder farmers, called them peasants. And we imagine peasants are always the same thing, right? They have nothing to do with markets, and they live and die in the same place. They never use coins. And they're suspicious of all these things. And I certainly was trained with this as a sort of article of faith. And then I started excavating some of these people, and they were anything but this, right? They were drinking imported wine from Gaza while they were making their own wine. They were using perfume in their sheepfolds. I mean, these were people who, at any rate, were consuming the most extraordinary variety of stuff. And that stuff came from literally all over the Mediterranean, which was a shock to all of us who were excavating this, like, geez, these are not the people we thought they were. And then you start really opening up the archaeological record and you start opening up this archive of everyday writing, and you find people who are engaged in quotes, the global economy at every turn, not only consuming things, but also producing things that then get consumed by other members of the 90% on the other side of the Mediterranean. So the fact that it's a world unified by tax on the one hand, by the sword on the other, right? Let's not imagine the Romans are anything but tough people who enslaved millions of people and moved them around and forcibly resettled many people, all of which Also moves them around. All of this means that the 90% are globalized. In fact, you might even argue that they're the basis of this globalization. Either through enslaved people who've been moved long distances from where they come from, or working people who are producing goods that then gets consumed thousands of miles away. I'm not claiming that everybody's doing this all the time, but for a pre modern society, it's pretty astonishing.
- [14:05]
Spencer Mizzen
So this can't be described as a consumer culture then?
- [14:08]
Kim Bo
I certainly would describe it as a consumer culture. And it's a consumer culture that I think we would kind of recognize. I'm an American. We're super consumers, Right. We consume to sort of unprecedentedly large degrees. And certainly the Romans, even ordinary working Romans, which again, I think is something we didn't really understood. Right. We knew from all those rich people's writing that rich people consumed a lot because they talk about it all the time. You know, Cicero and Co are always talking about their consumption choices and being like, you know, you bought the wrong thing or you don't have the right clothes. Working people do too. And they're involved at both ends, unlike rich people. Right. They're both producing these consumer goods, making very low wages in unskilled artisanal jobs, and then they're consuming them on the other end. And I argue that not unlike certain aspects of our own world, you have to consume to belong in this world. So that poor and working people are making the same kinds of distinctions and social distinctions around what clothes they wear and what pots they have on their table and, you know, how they decorate their houses and that these things really matter to social belonging. That makes it a really expensive world to live in. And it's not unlike, again, in a modern American world in which if you don't have a cell phone, you cannot participate in society. That's a cost. Right. That adds to our cost of living. And Romans obviously had their own things that were sort of crucial social goods and they had to buy those too.
- [15:37]
Spencer Mizzen
Is that where this word that you use in introduction, Grit. You use that a few times. You've got to be pretty tough and durable to navigate this economy.
- [15:46]
Kim Bo
Yeah. Because, you know, it's really a complicated economy. I mean, we think of, you know, pre modern economies as basically barter or Spencer. I say, I'll give you this goat and you'll say, fine, I'll give you five chickens or, you know, whatever. Right. Like these are people who. And we have the evidence for this, right. I mean, they're running futures markets on their really low wages. So they're thinking about money all the time and they're trying to figure out ways to use different kinds of money or different kinds of way of thinking about money and squeezing the spaces between them for maximum benefit. They're constantly having to think, this is a real shock to me, right. In future terms. So they don't just live in the present. Right. They're always. Because they have to live in a world in which everything has a price and that price fluctuates at least seasonally on some kind of market. They're constantly having to think about what the cost of whatever it is that they're going to want to buy or sell is going to be in the future. That takes grit. Right. It's not only that it's a hard world, it's a world in which it's extremely difficult to save, but it's a complicated world. And so I sometimes also describe some of these people, like hedge fund managers, in that they are living with enormous amounts of risks that they're balancing through four different income streams in different kinds of money, all not in order to make a fortune, but just to make it to the end of the month. That's my definition of grit, anyway.
- [17:18]
Spencer Mizzen
And that's something that will ring true with a lot of people in the 21st century, isn't it?
- [17:23]
Kim Bo
That's right.
- [17:24]
Spencer Mizzen
Can you maybe give us a couple of examples of people who showed that grit?
- [17:29]
Kim Bo
Yeah, I'll give you some rough examples. And you know, when we get to see actual people whose names we know, they're very often from Egypt because we have the papyri, and the papyri preserve actual individuals and their families. There's a family that we know of who were a family of small time traders. They traded mostly in fresh fruits and vegetables and fish to the army. But they're not big army suppliers. They're just a family, small scale suppliers. Probably at least one member of the family was a slave or is a slave. Probably one of their sons is actually in the army. And so they have connections. Right. This is a world that gets by on connections. But it may be also that one of the other things they're training to the army are prostitutes. They're running a network of prostitutes that are working in the army camps in the Egyptian desert. And it could be that some of these prostitutes are actually some of their family members. So think of all the different, I call them in our modern term, right, hustles that this family is running. They're buying and selling fruits and vegetables and fish. They're moving it across the desert. As they're moving it across the desert, they're also carrying women. They're paying an immense array of taxes. So some of what we know about them is because of their tax records. Think about what these people are actually all the hustles these people are running in order to survive. And we may, you know, say, hey, prostituting your own family members, this is horrible. And you know, along one, certainly our modern logic, it is really horrible. We have the letters of these prostitutes and they write about their lives in the camps and the abuse that they're subjected to. So we have a sense of how hard these lives are. So that's an interesting example of one of these families that have some real grit.
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- [22:07]
History Extra Narrator
you can't
- [22:08]
Kim Bo
reason with the sun.
- [22:09]
History Extra Narrator
Trust us. We've tried.
- [22:11]
Kim Bo
This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute.
- [22:14]
History Extra Narrator
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Kim Bo
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History Extra Narrator
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- [22:21]
Kim Bo
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- [22:24]
History Extra Narrator
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- [22:27]
Kim Bo
time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion.
- [22:31]
History Extra Narrator
You're welcome Columbia. Engineered for whatever
- [22:38]
Spencer Mizzen
you write in the book, we can never pay enough attention to farmers and farming. Why is that? And can you give us an example of a farming family that you unearthed in your research?
- [22:51]
Kim Bo
Yes, actually, that was going to be next on my list of folks to introduce you to. You know, I really do think we can't spend enough attention on farmers. I've appreciated and sometimes show my students some episodes from Clarkson's Farm of, you know, how clueless modern people are about farming. Nobody farms anymore and so we don't think about farmers as much as we should. We pay attention to attention to people that have more in common with us. People who have professions, other kinds of professions. A great farming family that I got to know is a farming family whose head of household was named Satyricus and they lived in Egypt and they were so poor that they didn't actually own any of their own land. They rented, but they rented land along sort of hedge fund model, lots of small pieces of land, never from the same landlord, sometimes for short, long. Sometimes for short periods, and an immense array of crops, many of which are clearly being grown to sell on the market. I mean, they're not eating a field of thyme, which at one point, they go all into growing time. You get profoundly the sense of a family that is trying stuff out to see what they can do to make more than subsistence. They have to be buying a lot of what they need, and they rack up a huge amount of debt in order to do all of this. And then the head of household sotirchis dies, and ultimately the phthisis, who's his wife, they have four children, they clear their debts, they somehow manage to make enough money, almost certainly selling stuff on a market, being able to store away small amounts of that year to year to pay back all of the debts, and we find them all, you know, still. Still surviving some years later. So this is a good example of, again, a set of things that I certainly never thought about when I thought of smallholder farmers. I mean, growing stuff for the market, specializing in things. We always imagine people who just. They grow enough to eat. They eat everything that they grow, you know, farm to table, quintessentially, and that's their lives. When in fact, these people who, you know, are. This is. And this is the real bottom of the heap, some of these folks, they really survive by selling what they grow, not necessarily by eating it all. So that was. That was a big surprise to me, and again, an illustration of maybe how little we really know about the lives of some of these Roman farmers.
- [25:07]
Spencer Mizzen
Did you detect a sort of significant disparity between quality of life in rural areas as opposed to, you know, in cities, in metropolitan areas?
- [25:18]
Kim Bo
That's a great question, and it's one that I continue to puzzle over. It looks as though the people's diets are pretty different in city and country. What's interesting, though, is that those diets are seemingly different for rich villa owners living in the country as they are small farmers. In other words, it's the rural versus urban that really makes the difference as much or more as the rich versus poor. So that immense array of globalized foods from black pepper imported from India or citrus fruits, which have just been introduced into the Mediterranean by the Romans. Those don't make it into the countryside almost ever. And that's really clear, particularly in Britain, where this material has been so beautifully studied. So people who live in cities, whether they're rich or poor, have access to an immense range of goods, particularly foodstuffs. So their dietary variety is much higher and much less so in the countryside. I would like to say that that's still even a little bit true today. Right. I grew up in a town of 30 people in the middle of nowhere, and there's no way that you could eat the same things. Right. In my town of 30 people that you can eat in Philadelphia, there's just not the availability of different kinds of foods. That was certainly true in the Roman world, for sure. And so we can actually see this in people's bones. So the carbon that makes up their bones actually has a different isotopic signature for folks who lived in the countryside versus folks who lived in the city. So that's one of the big ways that if you, like, quality of life or certainly diet was really different in city versus countryside. The other thing, though, that rural people had going for them is not only that they're growing their own food, but all of that imperative to consume that you have to buy stuff or you're not going to fit in. That pressure was less in the countryside. I think that's true today, too. Right. You don't have to have 15 pairs of shoes if you live in the middle of Yorkshire versus if you live in London. And that was certainly true in the Roman world. And so farmers spent their money on things like a new wagon or tools, and they didn't have to. And they seemingly almost never have richly decorated house with beautiful mosaics and paintings. Whereas the same kind of person who lived in a city would have to invest in those things so that the cost of living and what we would call the costs of fitting in are less in the countryside than they are in the city. City.
- [27:39]
Spencer Mizzen
So it proves that some things never change, basically.
- [27:42]
Kim Bo
Some things, yeah.
- [27:44]
Spencer Mizzen
The first chapter of the book begins with a reference to someone with the wonderful name of Lucius Hotlover. Can you introduce us to Lucius, please?
- [27:54]
Kim Bo
Oh. So Lucius is a great guy with a great sense of humor. He's an innkeeper in a small town in central Italy, and we have an inscription from him that we used to think was his tombstone. But one of my brilliant colleagues figured out that in fact, it's an inn sign and he's advertising his inn. His name is almost certainly not Lucius Hotlover. It's probably his nickname. And he and his wife run an inn, almost certainly. Well, it's an inn that attracts travelers because one of the ways he advertises his inn is imagined set of exchanges with a traveler in which the traveler is accounting up his bill and what he has to pay Lucius for his Bill. And the joke in the sign to show that Lucius is both honest and has a sense of humor is that this traveler, he has more buyer's remorse for how much it cost to feed his donkey than the amount that he paid for a prostitute. So at Lucius is in. You can put up your animals, you can get a girl, and he won't overcharge you. And you'll have happy and comic bantering as you do all of these things. You know, we always forget that people in the past have a sense of humor. And the Romans are so funny, right? You spend a lot of time reading the graffiti from Pompeii. I mean, they're both fearless in their sense of humor. They really will pick on anyone for anything. And many of those jokes involve economics. They involve getting by, like Lucius's sign. And they're. They're wonderfully ironic and funny.
- [29:28]
Spencer Mizzen
He sounds like quite a character in the book. You note that historians of ancient Rome have often set enslaved people apart, often sort of dealing with them in separate books. But the enslaved play quite an important role in your book. How were they able to participate in the Roman economy?
- [29:51]
Kim Bo
So, you know, my own country's grim and dark record, not only of slavery, but also not coming clean about that record of slavery has had a big impact on the way in which enslaved people are imagined in the Roman world. And there's lots of good reasons for this, and then there's some not so great knock on effects. The transatlantic slave world was deeply racialized, and it produced a set of economies which actually took place in entirely different places than the economies of the free. And I think we for a long time imagined that to be true of the ancient Roman world. And the more we know, excavation wise, but also from a study of our everyday writing, we see these people working side by side with free people all the time. So, for instance, if you conjure up an idea of where, you know, an enslaved person might work in the Roman world, you probably think of the mines, right? The mines is the hardest work. It's the most grim. What free person would ever do it? Well, the best records we have for mining is actually a big quarry. So it's a granite mine. It's not underground. It's an open pit mine. It's run by the imperial state, and we have immense records from this. It's in Egypt again. And here you can see a maybe partially enslaved labor force, probably a mostly free labor force. They work right next to each other. They are sometimes paid differently, but not always. Sometimes we can't even Tell who's slave and free. And even in the underground mines in places like Spain, we see slave and free people doing the same jobs. Now, this does not mean they may be working side by side, but they're certainly not compensated to in the same way. And this is where the slave versus free status starts to really matter. Slaves, wages are paid to their owner. Sometimes they get to keep some of them, not always. And this is, we can see this in the mines in Spain. The punishments for violating the rules or not doing your work properly are different for slave and free. Right. Slaves can be beaten and can be killed and free people can't, especially if they're Roman citizens. So their protections before the law and their being subject to violence, I think is one of the things that really differentiates the two, even though they may be doing the same work. And I actually begin the book with a day that we know about, again thanks to the Egyptian papyri of a group of farmers going off to work in the countryside together. And they include a tenant farmer who both owns some land and rents some land, some enslaved workers whose wages he's partially paying, and some quote unquote, wage workers who are also farmers. So the categories that we use for all these people, when you actually try to inhabit their lives and peer into their world, a lot of times those categories, you're sitting there shoveling manure all day. Those categories matter less than the nature of the work that you're doing.
- [33:01]
Spencer Mizzen
Sure. What did your research tell you about the contribution of women and children to the ancient Roman economy? And did the research sort of paint a different picture than one that would have been conveyed by Cicero and co?
- [33:17]
Kim Bo
Yeah, well, Cicero looks down his nose, at least in the context of his writings, which is not the way he lived his life. Looks down his nose at all kinds of workers. Of course, Cicero owed his fortune in part to his wife, which he grudgingly admits. And certainly we get a sense of the way through even Cicero's letters, that women control the purse strings of large houses. It's still not easy to find women and children in the archaeological record and the record of the 90%. And I worked really hard to figure out what they were doing. Children work alongside adults and make wages like adults that we can see again in Egypt, but in other places as well. So the idea of child labor as like a separate category doesn't exist in this world, in fact. Right. It's only in England in the early parts, the of the 19th century that there's even develops the concept that childhood is A different category, and that therefore children should be protected in their work. We have an amazing story of. It's not a story, right? This is a family of smallholder farmers who also have some important roles in their village. And they basically lease out their kids for years at a time into what almost seems like debt slavery because they're doing it in order to get a loan. 6 year olds being let out to work in an olive press for years and years before. And she's never allowed to leave, she's never allowed to see her family. And yet somehow she survives this and comes home and has kids of her own. And so that's an example of some of the many kinds of things that children did. I think one of the most exciting discoveries I made was to actually figure out how much women might earn in terms for their work. This has been really hard to find. Most of our wage records, just like in the early modern and medieval periods, are about men. But we can get some clues about what women made. And as you can imagine, they might make money through textile work, spinning particularly. And if you run the math on how much a woman might make spinning or girls. Right, because girls can spin too. They actually can make as much as a low paid man can make. And if they can really spin, if they're fast, they can make more. So I think one of the conclusions I came to is that women and children's labor is break even income for poor families. Without their work, the family can't survive on male wages alone because they're too low. So I think this puts women and children in a different light in terms of not only their functioning in the overall economy. The textile business is probably the second biggest business in the Roman world after farming. And that is a business that is really underpinned by women and girls. So just that fact alone means that they are super critical to the functioning of this world.
- [35:56]
Spencer Mizzen
And earlier, Kim, you mentioned that this is very much consumer culture. Would it be possible to give us five examples of kind of must have items for Romans back in the day?
- [36:06]
Kim Bo
Must have items. That's a great question, Spencer. So it's absolutely key that you have multiple tunics and you don't wear one at a time, you wear two at a time and you layer them and that's how you show that you're not a slave. They have to be of a certain length as well. If they're really short, then that suggests that you're either a slave or a prostitute. You have to have certain other items of clothing. You have to have some Kind of jewelry. You can get really cheap jewelry in this world. So you have to have some kind of ornaments on you if you want to fit in. You have to have. And this is the archaeologists, I think, have done a brilliant job at elucidating this. When you sit down to eat, you can't just have a basic set of pots or plates, right? You have to have lots of different ones. And probably you have different plates for different courses. Even if you're really poor or if you're an agricultural slave or whatever, you're not just eating out of your cooking pot. An awful lot of people are drinking wine that they didn't make. And this blew my mind. The idea that even a farmer in the middle of Yorkshire might actually be drinking wine from France. I'm not sure that that's a must have. But about half to over half of people in Britain for whom this is a big luxury import are actually drinking imported wine. So that's certainly on the must have list. And then. And this is. This is something I think that people who live in modern Mediterranean countries will really recognize. It's really important that you have little gifts to give to your friends. So if you invite someone over, even if it's for the most modest meal, that you have a little gift of food that you can leave them with, or that you're able to participate in a religious sacrifice with your community, and so that you maybe buy a chicken or contribute a piglet or something to this sacrifice. You probably have to save for a couple months in order to do this if you're a member of the 90%. But it's absolutely key that you make those expenditures that are not just for you, but that help bind you to your community. And if you don't do this, then you definitely fall on the outside of your world. So those are some key expenditures that you better have on your expense list at the end of the month.
- [38:19]
Spencer Mizzen
Amazing. Thank you very much. And one last question for you, Kim. If there's one fact, something you learned about ancient Rome during your research for the book that really made an impression on you, really stayed with you. Would you mind sharing it with us, please?
- [38:38]
Kim Bo
Well, Spencer, I'll tell you the one thing that still blows my mind, and I still don't understand it very well, or the degree to which I should, is the astonishing complexity of these people's use of money. Theirs is a monetary system which is complicated to use. It has three different metal currencies. They're very often dealing with coins from different periods that different weights they are able to think in all of these different coins. They're able to think, think in terms of interest rates and fractions of interest rates. They do all of this math in their head even as they are constantly also running a kind of separate set of currencies in their head, which is the price of agricultural goods, that is to say, commodities as money. I have no idea how they do all of this. It requires a kind of mental math that we are rapidly losing in our age of first the calculator and now AI. And no one can do this kind of math in their head anymore. And then your ability to leverage this into really complicated what we might call financial instruments, particularly loans. This just blows my mind that these people do this and they do that all the time, and they do it without necessarily being able to read. That just confounds all of our expectations about what constitutes education, what constitutes knowledge. And certainly it makes us realize that these are such sophisticated people, even though they may have been, you know, living month to month at the very edge.
- [40:13]
History Extra Narrator
That was Kim Bo speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Kim is an archaeologist and a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her new book, Surviving the Economic lives of the 90%, tells the stories of a diverse cast of working people across the Roman Empire.
- [40:36]
Kim Bo
Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.