The hidden financial world of ancient Rome

**Kim Bowes** (0:00)
These are people who would force their mother to lend the money at interest. These are people who would sell their children to live another day. These are people who are not going to go quietly. And I think all of these things defy the kind of categories that we put on people in the past. When we really dig into the complexity, I think we find a world that really astounds us for the amount of grit and determination that people had.

**Robin Wigglesworth** (0:35)
Today, on The Story of Money. Ancient Rome's brutal economy, and how ordinary people survived it. And yes, sure, it was a time of bustling cities, expanding empires, new trade routes, a sophisticated civilization with a thriving economy.
But for most ordinary Romans, the laborers, tenant farmers and the like, everyday existence wasn't quite as prosperous or even that stable. And here to tell us how they survived is Kim Bowes, Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. Hi, Ken.

**Kim Bowes** (1:11)
Hey, Robin.

**Robin Wigglesworth** (1:12)
It's great to have you here because we wanted to do a Roman episode for a long time. It feels we can't really do a history podcast, even if it's money focused without doing the Romans at some point. And you're going to tell us the story of just how creative the average Roman will have to be just to, well, frankly, stay financially afloat, right?

**Kim Bowes** (1:31)
Yes, absolutely. And you say you couldn't do a podcast about money without including the Romans.
I hope to convince you and all your listeners that ordinary people got by in ways which were far different than maybe we've supposed they've gotten by. They were immensely complex in their financial lives. They used a whole range of financial instruments and money played an enormous role in their lives.

**Robin Wigglesworth** (1:56)
To paraphrase the Wu Tang Clan, money rules everything around me.
Well, we're going to go into Roman hustle culture, debt, credit, money, subsistence in ancient Rome. And that's coming up here on the story of money. Gillian is away this week. I'm Robin Wigglesworth.
So, as I mentioned, we're not going to be focusing on the ancient Roman elites, the senators, the emperors, all that jazz. We're going to be focusing on the 90%, roughly speaking, at least. Specifically, how the 90% lived in ancient Roman Egypt. Kim, why are we focusing on Roman Egypt today?

**Kim Bowes** (2:45)
Well, as I talk about in my book Surviving Rome, the most solid evidence that we have for how the 90% survived actually comes from Roman Egypt. The papyri, particularly, are preserved in the very dry climate of Egypt, and those papyri preserve an extraordinary range of financial data, which we just don't have from other places. Now, we will talk about other places. We'll talk about places like Pompeii. We'll talk a lot about Roman Britain, for which we actually have pretty good evidence.
And we'll talk, of course, about the city of Rome. But interestingly, if we're interested in ordinary people's economics, Egypt is really the place to start.

**Robin Wigglesworth** (3:25)
Okay. I mean, I know that Pompeii, a lot of things were preserved by the famous eruption of the volcano, but why do we know so much about Roman Britain specifically?

**Kim Bowes** (3:34)
Well, the Brits are extraordinary archaeologists and they've actually managed to leverage archaeology and all of the kind of stuff that you don't necessarily think of as being financial data, like pollen and animal bones and things like this, to create a really sophisticated picture of that particular province.

**Robin Wigglesworth** (3:53)
Okay. Well, we're going to start in Roman Egypt. So let's imagine a fictional family living at this time. 100 AD, there's a father, let's call him Satyricus.
He's an entrepreneurial tenant farmer who did in fact actually exist in Roman Egypt, right? According to historical records. And let's say he's married to a thesis and together they have the son Horus and the daughter Attia. So Kim, can you tell us a little bit what his daily routine would have been like around that time?

**Kim Bowes** (4:26)
Yeah, I think his daily routine is maybe not too different from his own in the sense that someone like Satyricus and Thaises would wake up and immediately start thinking about money. They're a tenant farmer. They're thinking about the price of wheat at that moment. They're thinking about how are they going to get labor to work their small plots? What kinds of things are they growing? Again, not too unfamiliar. They certainly would have had a plot of wheat. They certainly would have been growing some hay for their animals. But maybe surprisingly for us, they also would have had some small plot of pretty specialized stuff, like dates. And in fact, our historical satiricus actually went all in on a field of time at one point.