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Kim Bowes, "Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Dr. Kim Bose
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- [00:31]
Morteza Hajizadeh
welcome to the new Books Network. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh. Today we're talking about another interesting topic about ancient Rome. The book we're going to discuss today is called Surviving the Economic lives of the 90%. The book is written by Dr. Kim Bose. Dr. Kim Bose is professor of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvan. She's the author of Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire and another book called Private Public Values and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. The book was published in 2025 by Princeton University Press. Kim, welcome to New Books Network.
- [01:19]
Dr. Kim Bose
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:21]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Morteza, before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your field of expertise, how you became interested in the history of in antiquity and more importantly, the economic history of that time.
- [01:37]
Dr. Kim Bose
Sure. I had a kind of circuitous route to do what I do, like many of us do. You know, I went to university thinking I was going to be a doctor. I did a lot of science, particularly biological sciences, which actually find a place in this book as well. There's a whole chapter on health and well being, which I draw on a lot. The things that I learned as an undergraduate studying biology and chemistry and sort of found my way to archeology somewhat later. And then, you know, I was an archaeologist and I wrote a bunch of books that you've just mentioned. And then at one point I kind of had this epiphany like I'm reading all these books about rich people in the past and like this is such a tiny percentage of the population. Why don't we, why don't we write books about everybody else? What about the 90% of people that we never write about? And I'm like, well, you're an archeologist, you could do something about this. Go, go find these people, go dig them up. And that sort of occasioned a big shift in the kind of work that I do. I got together with two Italian colleagues and we decided we were going to go find poor people and excavate them, which no one had really done systematically before, particularly for the Roman world. The Roman world is, of course, you know, full of all kinds of really sexy things associated with rich people, their rich houses and, you know, their temples and all that beautiful archeology that you see when you go to Rome or Pompeii. And no one had really paid any attention to poor people, certainly not poor people in the countryside. And. And that really sort of launched me on a completely different way of doing what I do. And that's really the sort of origin story, if you like, behind the book that we're talking about today.
- [03:21]
Morteza Hajizadeh
That's fascinating. I must confess that I guess, like many other people, I had that image of Rome, that rich city of opulence. And I guess it mainly came from the movies that I watch. And also a lot of history books focus on the political history of Rome, which is all about the senators and the wars and all the logistics and the money they needed. So you're absolutely right. And I also find it interesting that you're focused on large proportion of population there. Let's say that 90% that you mentioned, that is not really talked about in history books. And if I'm not mistaken, a few years ago, there was a book about the economic history of. It was called the Donkey on the Boat.
- [04:05]
Dr. Kim Bose
Yes. By Chris Wickham.
- [04:07]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yes, that's right. Yeah. But again, that was more about. I don't think it was about the everyday, let's say people in those areas. But he covers a vast area, geographical locations, let's say. But anyhow, let me ask you another question. So I. I don't think it was easy to write about everyday people because of lack of resources. Maybe. So I'm keen to know
- [04:36]
Dr. Kim Bose
how.
- [04:37]
Morteza Hajizadeh
What were some of the challenges involved with it. And then in your book. So you don't really focus on that elite text, those elite texts, but you talk about everyday writing. That's a phrase you use in the book. And this shift, how does it change the way we look at Roman economy?
- [04:56]
Dr. Kim Bose
It completely shifts it. This is. You know, I think one of the things that I found when writing this book is that not only do you hear different voices and the term everyday writing, which is a term that was coined by my colleague Roger Bagnall, and I sort of paraphrase this everyday accounting, because an awful lot of that ordinary writing by ordinary people is actually them doing their accounts. You not only hear different voices when you try to find sources that are not written by wealthy elite men, which is the majority of our literary sources, but actually when you start to Run the math on those sources, which is one of the things I try to do in this book. So there's a lot of math. It's all digested into, hopefully easily. To read graphs and images, you find a really different sense of the way that the economy actually worked. You find a world where actually people, ordinary people, ordinary farmers are producing a lot more than we thought. Artisans are producing a lot more than we thought. It's a more productive place, interestingly, than if we just run the economic history of the top 10%. Is it easy to do this kind of economic history? No, it's really hard. And there's a lot more out there than I certainly thought, and I think most people thought. There's a lot more of this everyday writing. There's so much archaeology. I'm also an archaeologist, as I mentioned, and the amount of archaeology that pertains to the 90% is just vast. And it's possible now, really, to write the book that I wrote because there's been so much archeology done over the last 20, 30 years that pertains to ordinary people. If you had wanted to write this book 30 years ago, it would have been extremely hard. Um, now that we have all this new data, it's certainly easier. But you know what? I think the biggest challenge is to actually shift your viewpoint. As you said in the beginning, you know, we have an image of Rome that's given to us by the elite authors who have written its history. It's really hard to sort of see your way out from under that. And it's. It's. It's not only. I mean, okay, we could say, all right, well, we care about all these ordinary people, so let's go write about them. But when we do that, we tend to carry a lot of baggage, a lot of assumptions about those people. And it's just as important to get rid of all those assumptions and actually trying to hear them on their own terms. And I think that was the most challenging part of writing this book, is to set aside all the assumptions, everything that we think we know about peasants, everything that we think we know about people earning wages. Right? Don't make any assumptions about those people. Just look at the sources that they've left us and see what they have to say about themselves. And that's actually where all the fun starts.
- [07:59]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I think you have sort of answered my next question, but I think it's an important one, so I'll phrase it anyhow. But I'll leave it to you if you want to expand on that or not, but it's mainly for the benefit of the listeners. So that approach of everyday writing, so you kind of shift from that macroeconomics, which is kind of familiar today we talk about pricing dices for gdp, you don't talk about that. And then you more focus on micro, which is an example of that is let's say shopping list, expense lists that I guess these are the archaeological findings that you discuss. Wooden tablets. I'm originally from Iran myself and to me I listened to a professor of history, Iranian professor of history in the States a few years ago because my assumption was that after Islam entered Iran, wine was completely forbidden. But then he says for three or four hundreds after that there are wooden tablets, sorry, clay tablets. We have discovered that people talk about money that is for example, borrowed from neighbors to buy purchased wine, more or less the same thing. So it completely changes even our perspective of not only economic history, but also the social history of the time. Yeah, and one of the things that I found interesting in the book, and that's also point you make, that when we look at all these sources, the, the economy, Roman economy, more or less, more or less seems familiar even to ordinary people, working class people, let's say today, small scale finances, you know, sometimes they confront of volatility or uncertainty in their economic situation. Can you talk about that aspect, expand on that argument that you make that it's familiar. Roman economy 2000 years ago was familiar, is familiar to us today.
- [09:56]
Dr. Kim Bose
Yeah, I think there are a whole bunch of things that if we were, you know, we got into time traveling machine and went back in time and you know, wound up on a street in Pompeii and not 79 AD, 78 AD before Vesuvius explodes, there'd be so many things that would be familiar to us. And particularly I think if you come from cultures maybe since you're from Iran, right. That are sort of mercantile cultures. Right. In which there's a lots of buying and selling that happens in a kind of public forum that would, you know, you would see this all around you. You would see money lending all around you. You would see people engaged in sort of credit transactions even at a tiny scale in ways and using money in ways that even though the money would be unfamiliar to us, modern money is completely different from ancient money in the way that it works. But the idea of lending at interest, at actually using forms of futures, maybe of engaging in creditary relationships in which you have a really complicated bureaucracy backing you up so that if someone defaults on their loan, you can actually get your Money back. All of this would seem really familiar to us. I think that the certain aspects of people's economic thinking would be familiar to us. And this is a controversial claim, right? Because for a long time historians have said, you know what, in pre capitalist societies, people didn't actually think the way that we think about economic activity. In fact, they wouldn't even distinguish something as economic as opposed to everything else in their ordinary life. Frankly, I think we don't necessarily think of things as economic in a special way either. We also think about them as bound up with our status and. And lots of the other things that we do every day in ways that, you know, I think ancient people probably did as well. Then I think we would run up against some places where this would be the strangest of foreign worlds to us. You know, while people's. Many of people. Aspects of people's economic behavior might have been similar. You know, this is a brutal world, Morteza. It's so brutal. And I think in writing this book, I came to believe even more than I already do in, you know, in human progress. You know, we don't, as a rule, mostly live in a world. And it just. It's widely accepted that enslaving other human beings and making a living through their labor is okay. And an enormous swath of people in the ancient world did enslave other human beings, even people who were not themselves terribly rich. The life expectancy in this world was astonishingly low. And because it's a world where economic activity overwhelmingly took place through manual labor, people's bodies were aged before their time, if you like, so that the body of someone your age or my age would look like the body of an 80 year old because of the immense amounts of labor that it took to drive this economic engine. And you know, I said before that one of the things you learn when you start taking the lives of the 90% seriously is how very productive this economy was, which I think it was. But there was a price to be paid for that productivity, and it was really paid with people's bodies. This comes out of all the amazing human skeletal material that we have from the Roman world. And it's pretty astonishing how the wear and tear on people's bodies to do all the work that made this world run. And that's one of the places I think that we would be brought up short and pretty shocked and surprised if we were to go back to Pompeii of the Roman period.
- [14:03]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Another part of the book that I really enjoyed, and I think you kind of expand on that in the introduction of the book is those shared, let's say, survival strategies. You mentioned that there are categories that we look at such as peasants, urban workers, slave people, or free people. But looking at these categories might hide the shared survival strategies that they have in common. Such as, for example, most household had a mixed. I mean, the way the production work in the households or wage work, or trading or reciprocal credit. Can you tell us what those survivalist strategies are? Just a few examples maybe.
- [14:50]
Dr. Kim Bose
Sure. And actually, I think this is becoming more and more familiar to many people today. The idea that a single profession or a single person or a single wage isn't enough to live on. And you know, I think we assumed that these categories of peasant or slave or butcher, baker, whatever, were really how people lived in the ancient world. Both because we see these terms used a lot in the sources that we have and because especially in Western countries, we identify ourselves through our professions. I identify myself as a professor. That's not necessarily the way that people survive. That is to say that that one, you know, professional identity is not necessarily the way you make all of your income. And that's of course becoming true for more and more people, both in the gig economy, but also in economies like my own in the United States where a single wage is not enough to support a family. And in the Roman world, one of the things that my research found is that wages, for instance, are almost never a whole living. They're too low. And with a very high population, there's too many people competing for a limited number of wage spots that in order to make a living, you would have had to combine either working yourself or having other members of your family, including your children, work for wages, doing some farming on your own. Most people had, you know, access. I'm not going to say most people had access to land, but many people could either rent or own small plots of land, maybe that didn't quite produce enough of a living either. So you would then have various family members who might do make things. One of the things I argue in this book is that women's income, particularly from making textiles, form the kind of break even income for many very poor families that allowed them to survive. And the amount of money that women might earn spinning, turning wool into thread that then would be woven into cloth was actually a significant portion of the poorest family's income. So you would have to cobble together all of these different kinds of activities in order to survive. And you know, that's another one of those places that is unfortunately becoming all too familiar to modern people, many of whom. And this is really true in the United States today, but it's also true in lots of, you know, developing economies where, you know, everyone has to. Every member, every family member has to contribute income for the family as a whole to survive. And many times individuals are doing multiple jobs as well. And I think that's. That's especially true in the Roman world. It's especially true in the Roman world for a couple reasons. For one, it's a dense world where there's a huge demand for consumer goods. It's a consuming world. The Romans love to consume stuff. They have loads of things, and someone has to make all those things. And there's a lot of unskilled labor jobs that go on around making pots or glass or, you know, jewelry or whatever. So it's possible to get jobs doing those kinds of things. It's also a world where there's a lot of moving around. And so you can actually. There's roads, there's the possibility of lots of mobility. You can actually move around to go find this work, which isn't necessarily true in all historical periods. So I think that while what we might call multitasking, or what I call in this book, hustling, is probably true in most historical periods, I think it was particularly true and particularly necessary in the Roman world.
- [18:41]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And you mentioned women, and that I find fascinating because again, in those macro histories, the role of women in economy is usually ignored. And it's not only in ancient times, when you move all the way up to maybe industrial revolution, they played a huge role in household economics, but that's usually ignored. Did you find anything that was in your archeological research that you found particularly surprising or interesting about how much women, ordinary women, contributed to family economics?
- [19:14]
Dr. Kim Bose
So it's hard to find women. It's hard to find them in the archaeological record and know that you're looking specifically at women. And it's hard to find them in the textual record, not least because most of our, for instance, wage data does pertain to men. So the account books that we have, and we have some extraordinary accounts, wage account books only mention men and boys. And so finding women wasn't easy. And lots of times we find them by looking at those things that they did that are specific to women, that were culturally assigned to women in the Roman world. And those things tend to be. This isn't. This doesn't mean that this is the only thing that women did. Right. It's the. It's just that because women were exclusively assigned to these tasks we can be more certain that we're actually talking about women. And one of those things is spinning. I know of no instance. I'd love to hear if anyone knows of any in which we find men spinning. We find men weaving, but we don't find men spinning. And so there's very little data on how much a woman might earn spinning. I think the data that I have is pretty solid, but it's little. But when you actually run the math on it, it's a really significant income that someone might make by spinning. And that opens up the whole world of thinking about families as a whole, particularly about girls. If we've paid very little attention to women's role in economic history, we've paid even less attention to girls. Of course, prior to child labor laws of the later 19th century, children worked, right, and they worked alongside their parents doing age appropriate tasks. And spinning is something that even pretty young girls can do. And so if you imagine, I think we always used to imagine that girl children, because they didn't have income earning potential, were kind of weight on their families. If you think about girls as spinners, they actually become really important income earners, depending on how much time they have to do it, obviously. So that was a total revelation to me. And it really made me imagine really poor families as I'm not going to say that they were equal earning partners, but far more equal, I think, than I had imagined.
- [21:37]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Let's talk about consumption in Rome in your book. I think I found in chapter two, there was something that I really found interesting. You make a reference to sewers, and you said that in the Pompeii there were. So archaeological findings from sewers shows that there were 77 types of fish and shellfish and 19 different varieties of legumes, fruits and vegetables, which again, completely changes the way, or let's say bust some of those myths about those times that people only survived on bread or wheat. But you say that consumer revolution or consumption was central to the life of ordinary people there. It was not only wheat that they consume, it was oil, wine, cheese, meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, pretty much the same as what we do today. Can you tell us what do these. And you know, you analyze expense lists. Can you tell us what do these new. What does this new archaeological evidence tell us about the everyday diets that these people use and the sources and what was available to them, what wasn't available to them? And do you see similarities between the way we consume products today?
- [22:58]
Dr. Kim Bose
So the work that you cited was done by a colleague, Erica Rowan, this extraordinary Study of the contents of a sewer in the town next to Pompeii, Herculaneum, which additionally. Right. It's a sewer running underneath an apartment building. So it's not a sewer belonging to a wealthy house. It's a sewer that contains the refuse of a kind of modest group of people. And it's such an important study. Cause it really, you know, completely transform the idea. Our idea about what at least city people might eat and more work in Pompeii and lots of other places has really, you know, shown this extraordinary variety in people's diet. They don't eat the same thing that richer people eat. They have a more limited diet. In particular, the kind of really expensive luxury things that are imported foods like black pepper, right, which had to be imported from the east, or citrus, which the Romans were just beginning to cultivate in Italy, which, again, they had imported from Asia. Poor people didn't really eat that stuff, or they ate it only very infrequently. This is another thing that Erica discovered in that. In that sewer. A little bit of this stuff, but not a lot, but nonetheless. Right. Like, as you say, this immense dietary variety, including seafood, which we assume that poor people just never ate, even in places by the sea. Now, all that being said, we now have enough data to start to see a lot of variability in that picture. So if you lived in the countryside, where, of course, you're growing all this food or raising all these animals, it seems as though your diet is a little bit more limited. Now, what's interesting is that that's true for both rich people and poor people. Right. Everyone who's in the countryside just has access to a slightly narrower band of food. And you know what? I grew up in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York in a town of 30 people. And we certainly didn't have access to all the different kinds of food that you have. If you live in New York, right. If you live in New York, you can eat anything, right? Like you have Chinese food one day and Vietnamese food another day. And, you know, if you want to cook with, you know, every different kind of ingredient, you can go buy that, and you certainly can do that in Big Moose, New York. So the city country thing sort of makes sense to us. And I think what surprised me is that that city, country, dietary difference held true for both wealthy homes as well as, you know, more modest, more modest farms. I think, though, you know, as archaeologists, we find something like this, and we're like, hey, everybody was rich, right? Look at all the things they ate. Look at all the stuff they had. And again, I grew up in a very poor part of rural upstate New York where my neighbors who were very poor had tons of stuff, right? They had five satellite dishes and six cars and, you know, they had, they had tons and tons of consumer goods that didn't make them rich. And economists like Amartya Sen long time ago pointed out, you know, consumption, it's not just an easy marker of wealth. Just because you can consume things doesn't mean that you're wealthy, right? You're making choices about how you're allocating your resources. And in the Roman world, one of the things I argue in this book is that it is, you gotta consume, right? It's like our own world, actually. If you don't consume, you don't fit and therefore you find yourself outside society. It's not enough to have one shirt, you have to have at least two. You have to have a whole costume of clothes. You have to have. You have to consume a whole variety of food. You have to be willing to buy small gifts of food for your friends and neighbors. These were acts of consumption that were absolutely necessary for participating in society so that the high levels of consumption don't necessarily translate into affluence, they translate into a very high cost of living, which is something I think many of your listeners can relate to. We certainly in the United States live in a consuming society. We consume like crazy. We're being urged to ever consume more by advertising, and that just erodes our balance sheets. Right? The end of the month you're like, what happened? All my money, right? Oh, well, I bought this thing and that thing and all this stuff on Amazon and now like, I got no money. And that's something I think a Roman could absolutely relate to. Consumer goods were available. They were cheap and available and cheap in ways that were sort of historically unprecedented. And you had to consume to belong. And that is not necessarily a good thing for poorer people. And so it's a complicated world that they live in. And it's really complicated, but also, I think, kind of eerily familiar when it comes to consumption.
- [27:39]
Morteza Hajizadeh
It is, it's quite interesting. And you're absolutely right. We are kind of being urged or sometimes being forced to consume and doesn't necessarily translate to richness or affluence, which again, I guess is another important part of the book that you clarify. Anyhow, let us move to chapter four, where you talk about the role of roads and farms. And I guess that's where the real, let's say surplus producing aspect of economy comes into this picture. So you talk about farms and roadside villages which dominate the rural landscape there. And they are the real. It's a surplus engines of that society. And surplus means exchange. It means being close to roads, towns, large scale buyers, maybe. Can you talk about farms as surplus producing engines of that economy? And also what was the role of roads and military garrisons maybe, which shaped that aspect of the economy there? And again, it would be great if you could comment in terms of how similar or different it is from today's markets.
- [29:01]
Dr. Kim Bose
Yeah, well, this was another big surprise to me. And this again is thanks to some of this new archeology. I should say that some of the most exciting archaeology has been in advance of modern construction projects. So new airports, trains, shopping malls in places where the law requires archaeology to be done in advance of those projects and that the results be put somewhere where they're publicly accessible. And all of the finds, including the plants, the animal bones, have to be studied. We have this amazing data set for what was going on in the Roman countryside, because where there's Heathrow 5 now used to be the British Roman countryside. And thanks to all these huge excavations, we can see not just individual farms, but we can actually see, as you just said, how they were all connected. And I think if your listeners, you know, maybe think of a Roman road, they probably think of, you know, this, you know, completely straight line, paved, you know, the Via Appia that goes outside of Rome is a kind of, you know, canonical example. They're like superhighways, right? It's like imagining the A1 or something. But in fact, the majority of roads were tracks and they connected all these farms with the slightly larger roads, with the slightly larger roads that then connected up to those big major arteries. And thanks to all of this new archeology, we can actually see the track network. And the track network is unbelievable. Now these have to be roads that are built by and maintained by farmers themselves, right? There's no reason for the state to be involved in these things. So they're a product of people who need to get their stuff off their farm and sell it somewhere, right? The nearest village, the nearest roadside site, or maybe the nearest town or city. And the level of, if you like, connectivity of, you know, me who live on a tiny farm in the middle of nowhere with my nearest city is sort of historically unprecedented in the Roman world. And we can see this thanks to all of this amazing new archaeology. And what that all means is that a people had to build those roads. Those people were the people who were using them themselves, namely farmers. And it points, it's another, you know, piece of data that points towards a surplus producing kind of machine that was overwhelmingly these small farms, obviously big, if you like, agro business also existed in the Roman world. And those people are clearly moving, you know, large surpluses of grapes or grain or whatever off their big estates. But the same was true of small farmers as well. And that was, I think, a surprise to me and has been a surprise to lots of people. I think that is what's most surprising to our world is that of course, we live in a world in which people are increasingly not living in the countryside. Right. Our countrysides are emptying out and everybody is moving to cities. The Roman world, in many parts of it, we was as dense in, say, the 2nd century CE as it would be until the 19th century. And in some places it was as densely populated as it ever was. Which is kind of amazing to imagine, right, that there are so many people living, as one of my colleagues, Chris Evans calls it, who excavated all these farms, beautiful excavations outside of Cambridge, or waving distance of each other. Right. That's how close they live. So, you know, my nearest neighbor in Big Moose, New York is five miles away. This would be unthinkable to a Roman. Right. They could see their neighbors in many places that we used to think were pretty empty. They now turn out to be not empty at all. They're super dense and they're all connected through this, this extraordinary track, track network.
- [32:57]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And I was also really interested in your chapter four, which has a fascinating title, Eight Jobs. Would be great if you could also talk about the title, how he came up with the title. We briefly talked about the role of women in household. But what about children? Or if you care to, if you would want to expand on the role of women, would also be great how. What was the role of women and children's labor in kind of rebalancing the household economics and survival in that area? You mentioned that women were involved in textile work, but what was the. Maybe the proportion of the money they brought into the household and also children's earnings. Was apprenticeship common at that time for children or not? Would be great if we could talk about these parts of the book.
- [33:48]
Dr. Kim Bose
Sure. So the title 8 jobs actually comes from a graffiti, a graffito from Pompeii that is making fun of this guy because he's this kind of crazy multitasker. He's this kind of clown car of, you know, he's a jug dealer and a pickle maker and a Farmer and a baker. And he does, he does a million different jobs. And so I'm not going to read the punchline of the joke because it's quite naughty. Uh, but the, the many graffiti from Pompeii are insulting graffiti. They're designed to make fun of somebody. And this is making fun of someone because he has so many jobs. Um, one of the arguments I make in the book is that it's really normal to have two or three, uh, maybe not eight. Um, and that is to say that an individual might do two or three things in order to bring in multiple streams of income, like we were talking about before. But it's also the case that family members, right, are also contributing multiple things to the overall family income. And kids are super important in this regard. In a really dense and populous world, there are an awful lot of kids. And the Roman sort of demographic structure meant that there were lots of younger children if they managed to survive their infancy. Very hazardous infancy in the Roman world. Lots of disease, very high infant mortality. But if you manage to survive until past five or six, you would be immediately put to work doing a variety of things. If you lived in cities, those kids would have a lot of opportunities for making small amounts of wages, doing, you know, kind of minor tasks. The kinds of things that I actually did when I was growing up, you know, carrying things, sweeping leaves, you know, following someone around and carrying something for them, managing smaller animals which would have been kept in cities, things like geese and pigs and stuff like that. That's the kind of jobs that you give to kids. And if you're on a farm, obviously the kids are doing this for their family, but in a world that's super dense and your neighbor is right over there and you can wave for them, maybe your kids might also be sent off to go work for someone else. We have an extraordinary and very grim archive from Egypt that describes how one family managed their children's labor. This was a family that seemingly was in debt. And they took their daughter, who was 6, and signed a contract that in return for a loan, they sent their daughter off to work for a number of years in an olive press. And the conditions of that contract were essentially, she could never leave at any time to go and visit her family. And if she did, her family had to pay a fine. And this six year old had to sit and work in this olive press, carrying olives, dumping them into the press machinery, presumably helping with the animals, these kinds of sort of more minor tasks. And then the father actually renewed the contract. So she had to do it for another few years. For few years. It makes for really grim reading, right? To imagine that it's not an apprenticeship that you're sending your children off to, which did exist in the Roman world. And Romans did send their children off to be apprentices. This was an instance of almost what sounds like debt slavery, except that the person paying off the loan is the child. Right. And her labor. And we might think this is, you know, this is. This is a death sentence, right? This, this six year old is never going to survive this. But because we have this whole archive of his family over a couple generations, we can actually see that she's just survived. She comes back and she has children of her own. So Romans, use of their Roman family's use of their children as income earners is. Right. This is the place where this is a really grim and rough world. And, you know, trying to figure out ways in which you can get your children off your books so that you don't have to feed them. A constant problem even today for very, very poor families. The Romans solved this through the markets that they had, in this case, a credit market. Right. Getting a loan in exchange for a child's labor. It's, it's, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't make for pretty reading, Morteza. It really, you know, makes you appreciate the advances that we've made in terms of child's labor, you know, since the 19th century. This is your fix. I am your host, Stassi Schroeder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three? Steven.
- [38:28]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Because he's so evil, I do think he is misunderstood.
- [38:32]
Dr. Kim Bose
You see everyone face consequences. It's intoxicating. The writers just know how to trick. Yeah, there's always a twist in this show. Tell Me Lies, the. The official podcast, January 6th. And stream the new season of Tell Me Lies January 13th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus kind of makes it. It sounds everywhere, though.
- [38:49]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there's still a lot of, unfortunately, child labor exploitations in parts of Africa. It kind of makes it sound like because before the interview, I think I told you that I studied English literature, 18th and 19th century literature. Kind of makes it sound very much like, you know, kids in England in the. During industrial revolution that they had to work in mines and under very, very difficult circumstances.
- [39:15]
Dr. Kim Bose
Yeah, it's amazing. You know, when I talk about some of this, I actually begin by showing a clip from a novel. I'm sure, you know, north and south by Elizabeth Gaskell. Right. Which describes some of the children's work in factories in the north of England.
- [39:30]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Exactly this period, which is sad, but you're right, we made a lot of advances. Hopefully we can keep them. Let's talk about chapter five a little bit. 90% and their money, which is the title of the chapter. Can you tell us about the role? I mean, the small hordes or middling dowries, what do they reveal about non elite assets in that society?
- [40:02]
Dr. Kim Bose
So, great question. Anyone who's been to an archaeological museum has probably seen all these beautiful Roman coins. Many of these come out of hoards, that is to say, little collections of coins that someone set aside hoping they could come back and find them and then never did for whatever reason. And now, thanks to an amazing project at Oxford, we have enormous database of these coin hoards from throughout the Roman Empire. And so it's possible to actually start to. They're really problematic for a whole bunch of reasons that I won't get into. But you can start to ask questions like, okay, so what was the average savings account like in the Roman world? There's a lot of reasons that the answer to that is not obvious or easy to extract from coin hoards. But if you combine with that, some of those coin hoards with some, again, data from Egypt, where we actually have rural smallholder farmers, dowries. So this is money that, you know, small farmers have saved up for their, their, their female children, right, to give on the event of their marriage. So they give a sense of what a small family, you know, smallholder farmer family could scrape together and save over years. Right. In order to supply their daughters with a dowry. And the numbers are actually in the ballpark of each other. And they actually amount to not a lot. Right. Like, not something that you could live on for years and years. You could live on it for a few months. But actually, you know, we're starting to gather this data now, even for countries like the United States, you know, a huge percentage of Americans don't have enough savings to meet a medical emergency, which of course in the United States is very expensive. So relatively speaking, even though this was not enough money in savings, average savings, to buy land or to make the kind of big purchases that would really allow you to get ahead. Not that kind of money, at least in coins. It was a certain kind of a cushion that might get you through some very lean times. And I think, especially in the United States, where we've really started to think about how fragile and volatile the increasing numbers of our Population are with respect to, you know, no job protections, a very volatile labor market. I was surprised in comparison how well the Romans sort of measured up in terms of their savings. The real problem, of course, that they have is that they. It's really hard for them to get the money to, if you like, make a capital improvement that would allow them to really permanently better their circumstances. So the amount to buy land or to buy another human being, that is to say, to buy a slave who's going to do more work for you, do things that are going to really permanently increase your income. This was really, really hard in this world and I think probably harder, almost certainly harder than it is in our own. So it's another one of those kind of, you know, both and situations. It looks pretty familiar in some senses, but not in others. I will say this too, right. On the subject of progress, right. One of the great advances that we've made in our societies is that we have, you know, state protections. If you lose all of your savings, you're not necessarily going to starve to death. In the Roman world, if you lost all your singings, you're going to starve to death. Right. Unless you had a network of family and friends that are going to help you. There aren't the kind of social safety nets that we have in many countries today that buffer people's small savings. There were no social safety nets, so no savings, no living.
- [43:58]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And again, it sounds very much familiar to or in the people, you know, let's say the 90% these days as well, in terms of the investment they make for savings for rainy days, you know, and how they lose it. But you're right, there are some sorts of protection depends, of course, which you didn't have back then. Another question that I have is, is about bioarchaeology. I think we can have a guess what it means, but it would be good if you could also give us a bit of an explanation what you mean by bioarchaeology, what kind of research method it is? And this question pertains to chapter six, which is called the Load Carrying Mother. Can you tell us about the role of bioarchaeology? What is it? And then how does it sorts of blurs the line between the slave and the free divide, which is, I think, a common understanding about the Roman, about Rome when it comes to issues such as labor.
- [45:03]
Dr. Kim Bose
Right. So bioarchaeology is a newer term. We used to use words like paleopathology or physical anthropology. Bioarchaeology means the sort of more holistic and total study of human remains. And that not only looks at the markers of disease or trauma on the human skeleton, but also uses new technologies to look at things like diet and weaning patterns. And above all, examines the human skeleton over. It sees the deceased individual as the result of an entire life course, right? As a human that was born and then went through various physiological changes and challenges and a whole series of kind of life episodes until they died. And that's the skeleton that we have today. So it imagines the human skeletal. The human skeleton almost like an archeologist imagines the layers of a dig, right? What we call the palimpsest. All those different layers and what we can learn from bioarchaeology continually amazes me. And the technologies are changing all the time. I think some of the most interesting things we found, and this is why the chapter is called the Load Bearing Mother. A lot of work in bioarchaeology is focused on the remains of stress that's experienced in infancy and young adulthood. Stresses that register in your teeth or in the orbits of your. Of your skull. We can actually see these kinds of stresses. We don't 100% know what they mean. We just know that these are bodies under stress. And in the Roman world, we're back to kids again, right? In the Roman world, kids were pretty stressed. Now, these stress markers in the teeth and in the skull only form if you survive, right? So if you're looking at an adult that has these stress markers, that means that they were very stressed as a child, but that they made it right? And they survived. And therefore, these changes were sort of etched into their. Into their body, as it were. And so we see kids who live in cities are almost certainly subject to a really high physiological stress load. That's probably disease. It could also be malnutrition. But because of those rich sewers that we were talking about earlier, I'm more inclined to disease. Because, of course, the thing about disease is that it saps your overall nutrition. You can be eating pretty well, but if you have cholera, if you have dysentery, if you have malaria, it actually saps your overall nutrition so that you're left with a lot less. And that's what seems to be happening to a lot of Roman children, particularly children in cities. But then when these kids grow up and survive and manage to be adults, the thing that's most impressive, this is why the chapter's called the Load Bearing Mother, is the amount of work that these people are doing. And this we can see in markers in the spine, in the joints, for osteoarthritis, for inflammation around the tendons, and for actual breaks where people break their arm, their legs, whatever. Most breaks are caused by accidents, not people hitting each other. And most of those accidents are, I would say, probably related in some way to work. And we see people like farmers get different breaks than people who live in cities. Women have different trauma than men. And this is all related to the kinds of work they're doing and the stress that they're putting on the bodies and the kinds of accidents that they have while they're doing all of these different kinds of activities. Anyway, all of these numbers, whatever you measure, osteoarthritis or herniated discs in your back, all these numbers are off the charts for the Roman period. When we compare them to what happened before and what came after. And this is because all of this work that people are doing to do all this surplus production, to make all this stuff that they're all consuming, they're paying the price in their bodies. And the woman who gives her name to the title of the chapter is a young woman that was trapped by the explosion of Vesuvius and excavated in the town of Herculaneum, who, even though she was young, right, she was in her teens, she'd already had a child. This is back to our very dense, populous world. At least one child, maybe more. And her back already looked like the back of a 50 or 60 year old, right? Like she had herniated discs. She had all the straighter back from carrying seemingly lots of heavy loads.
- [49:55]
Morteza Hajizadeh
That's really sad then.
- [49:57]
Dr. Kim Bose
Yeah, it's an extraordinary thing to do, bioarchaeology, because you come really face to face with real humans and, you know, the pain and challenges that they suffered and very often survived. That's the other thing, right? Most of the people didn't die of these things, they lived with them.
- [50:18]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I think I told you before the interview that I'm really interested in myself, in history and critical theory. I'm particularly interested in history from below, and I could be wrong. You're a historian, I'll leave it to you to correct me if I'm wrong. But I guess in the type of research that you've done, or similar types of archeological research, where you don't really deal with those elite texts that are written by court historians, let's say it's pretty much history from below, the things that it shows you about the lives of ordinary people, how they made their money, how they survived. So I think it's Very similar to that new trend of history. Yeah, yeah.
- [50:58]
Dr. Kim Bose
No, this is absolutely. This is quintessentially history from below.
- [51:02]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah. I'd like to ask one final question. I'm guessing it's a. I always like to ask a question which relates everything to present time. I know that historians hate making predictions or, you know, but anyhow, I'll ask it. So. This was a fascinating book because I think by now the listeners have realized it completely changes your perspective about. About Rome. I know in your book also you have Peter Brown writing a clarion call to make an end. To make an entirely fresh look at the. Look at Roman society, which I must say has completely changed my understanding of Roman society pretty much. Now, looking at it from the perspective of history from below, you talk about a society where 90% of the people lived in precarity, but at the same time they had incomes and savings, although it was small and volatile, but again, the expenses were also high, but they took part in that social life and that world of consumption. I'm keen to know if you were advising today's policymakers or governments. Your book, in terms of your book looking at that bottom up portrait of Roman society, what would it change? How would it change our understanding of economic security and precarity, especially for ordinary workers? How could we measure or support, let's say, those people who are living in economic insecurity and precarity?
- [52:41]
Dr. Kim Bose
I thought a lot about this as the statistics for industrialized nations, in particular in the United States for working people, have become more and more grim over the recent years. And, you know, particularly in the United States, there's a real, real love for things Roman. Right. We tie our own republic back to the Roman republic and we see ourselves as following the footsteps of Cicero. And there's lots of good reasons to make those connections. It's obviously more complicated than that. I don't think that when people admire Rome as Americans, they necessarily think about the ordinary working person. And if they were to think about the ordinary working person and not Cicero, I think this is absolutely the last aspect of ancient Rome we want to emulate because the, the extraordinarily punishing world that these people lived in has been made better in our own world through things like we talked about social safety nets before, right? The. The ability to be more flexible in your work, to support a family through a rough period. All of these things were not possible in the Roman world, right? You died or, you know, part of your family members died. You know, terrible things happened to you. The life expectancy was Astonishingly low. I don't think these are any of these things that we want to emulate for our own world and the way in which we solve them in our world, right, is to create this kind of economic cushion for working people so that if you do lose your job, you're not going to starve to death. You got some time to go and find another job. You have a means of supporting your family through these periods. You have a means of making sure that they get healthcare so your bodies don't wind up looking like the 80 year old ones when they're 30 of the ones that I study. These are such elements of progress. In our world and certainly in my country there's been a long tradition of questioning whether people, this is a good thing, whether this amounts to freedom. Very often the Romans get dragged in because somehow the Romans are meant to stand for freedom, which I've never quite understood. Maybe the Republic. I suppose we don't necessarily think about our ideas about what I call Cicero and Co, together with the pre grim fate of working people. And I wish we would. I wish we would look at our own world and see the extraordinary progress that we've made for working people, at least in the United States, and understand that those that progress is actually by building in those kinds of cushions that allow people to survive, that kind of volatility that didn't exist in the world that I study. And I can tell you as someone who spent, you know, time rummaging through the pockets of people who died in Vesuvius and looking through the expense accounts of farmers in Egypt, I would never want to live in this world. Right. It is such a grim and difficult world and it makes me appreciate the advances that we have made ourselves. And those advances for me are about those kinds of gentle protections that we have that support working people in adversity.
- [56:03]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Before I come to the end of the interview, I know that you've recently written this book. And writing a book is not easy. It takes a long time and also to recover from writing it. But is there any other? Especially this one. I guess it's not only a history book, it's archaeology, it's math, it's history. But is there any other project you currently have in mind or underway?
- [56:27]
Dr. Kim Bose
Yes, I'm getting my energy back. I have two projects underway. The first is to write a sequel to this book which basically asks what happens to all these people when the Roman Empire goes away? How does the end of the Roman Empire impact ordinary people? I'm very interested in the work of the author you cited earlier, Chris Wickham, who wrote the donkey in the book, who also wrote a big economic history of this period. And I'm interested in unpacking an economic history of the 90% as they live through and beyond the end of the Roman Empire. So that's one project. And then I have another project which in my head is called Roman Capitalism and is interested in the way in which Roman big business sort of interacted and met Roman small business and the way in which Roman systems of labor exploitation and resource exploitation both produced an extraordinary economic moment and had a whole series of really complicated and far reaching and very often negative knock on effects. And I'm proposing to start thinking about that with a new archaeological project actually on one of the one of Roman's big businesses, which is the brick industry which built Rome. Right. The bricks that built Rome were built by and made by a big Roman entrepreneurs. And so I'm interested in understanding how that business worked.
- [58:10]
Morteza Hajizadeh
That's fascinating. I hope to be able to speak to you about that book as well on new books networks. I'm really, really looking forward to reading that. Professor Kim Bose, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. I think our listeners by now know that this is a must read if they're interested in the history of Rome. The book we just discussed was Surviving the Economic lives of the 90% published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Thank you so much for your time.
- [58:38]
Dr. Kim Bose
Thank you so much. Mortiza, it's been so great to talk to.
- [58:47]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Sam.