Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent

**Tyler Cowen** (0:04)
Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.
Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am here chatting with Kim Bowes. She is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and she has a new book out called Surviving Rome, The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent. It has perhaps been my favorite economics book of the last year, though I think to the rest of the world it is more of a history book and an archaeology book. Kim is also extremely well published in the history of Christianity, religious spaces, Christian spaces, what homes were like, what rooms were like in the Roman Empire, and much more. Kim, welcome.

**Kim Bowes** (1:05)
Thanks, Tyler. It's great to be here.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:07)
I have many, many questions. Let's start with houses. If I were back in time and I visited a Roman elite house, what is it you think I or say you would find most surprising?

**Kim Bowes** (1:18)
I think you would find surprising the extraordinary amount of color and decoration that surrounds you. I mean, every single surface of that house would have been covered in some sort of decoration in ways I think we would have found garish. We would be astounded by how kitschy those houses were to our modern eye.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:38)
The kitschy spaces, how were they treated? So say there were mosaic floors. Is it like, oh no, you can't walk on this, it's beautiful? Or people, the dogs would just trample on it? How was it?

**Kim Bowes** (1:50)
Yeah, I think that's another thing that might surprise us, right? We would see that decoration as somehow being special and fenced off because that's the way we manage decoration in our own spaces, but not in that world. Because everything is sort of encrusted with some sort of decoration, everything is used in ways that I think would really surprise us too.

**Tyler Cowen** (2:09)
Reminds me of my house, in fact. Now, could you do business in these homes? You'd have a few people come by, there'd be a room.

**Kim Bowes** (2:15)
That's what they're built for. They're built for business. I think that's another thing that would surprise us most about this world is the idea of going off to work is entirely a, you know, probably a 19th century idea. And prior to that, for all of human history, work was in the space of the home. And the Roman house, particularly the Roman elite house, is a machine for the production of social status. And that status meant a space to do deals, to meet your clients, to show off things that we would never dream of showing off, right?
Members of our family, the most intimate aspects of our daily lives, all of that is literally built into the fabric of a Roman house.

**Tyler Cowen** (2:58)
And you just walk to your boss's house. There's no GPS. Are there even addresses?

**Kim Bowes** (3:03)
Are there even addresses? Now, that's a great question.

**Tyler Cowen** (3:06)
Because how do people find...

**Kim Bowes** (3:06)
Not in the way that we seem to use them, no.

**Tyler Cowen** (3:09)
So it's like latter 20th century Tokyo. You just have to get there somehow.

**Kim Bowes** (3:14)
You just have to get there somehow. And you know what people use? They use other humans, right? That's how you navigate your way around an ancient city is you ask people. And of course, ancient cities are a lot smaller than our own cities. So the chances are moving around in a city, you know people. Rome is the largest city potentially on the planet at the time, at a million people. And most Roman cities, right, are probably two, three thousand people.
Nothing for us more than a large village. So you find your way around by by using other humans.

**Tyler Cowen** (3:44)
So here's a very crude, you know, real estate influenced question. There's a home for five people. How many bathrooms does it have?

**Kim Bowes** (3:51)
Haha, probably none.

**Tyler Cowen** (3:53)
None. So what do you do for, you know?

**Kim Bowes** (3:56)
So pots. Romans are great users of of pots for that sort of activity. Of course, there are public latrines that you could go out and use. But even those are not present in an awful lot of cities as far as we can tell.
And, you know, of course, they called these public latrines after the Roman emperor who started to charge for using them. If you can imagine naming public latrines after any of our American presidents.