Surviving Rome - by Kim Bowes (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A radical new history of the Roman economy focused on the lives and labors of the working people and the poor who made up the 90% percent of the population"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A radical revision--and worker's-eye view--of everything we thought we knew about the ancient Roman economy

The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor.

Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children's toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans' most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status.

Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today's laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world.

Review Quotes

"A factual no-nonsense account that puts the Mayan people at the heart of their story - back in control of their time."---Anthony Webb, Popular History Books

"Surviving Rome is that rarest of birds, an innovative and (yes) utterly gripping piece of economic history that any non-specialist can read with pleasure and excitement. . . a book of luminous humanity. . . Bowes takes us into the most intimate details of the lives of the Roman working majority. . . [her] admiration for these people's stubbornness, resilience and grit is tangible. She has done them proud."---Peter Thonemann, Times Literary Supplement

"[A] magnificent account of how the 90 percent of the population of the Roman Empire . . . lived, worked, and died."---Paolo Tedesco, Jacobin

"Superb."---Peter Jones, The Spectator

"A revolution in our understanding of the economic lives of the ancient Romans that [Bowes] masterfully summarises...The result is thrilling, because it overturns so many earlier assumptions."---Felix Martin, Financial Times

"Dispensing with marble-clad elites and imperial triumphs, this eye-opening study brings ancient Rome down to street level--into the fields, workshops, and crowded tenements where real economic life unfolded. . . . [Bowes] challenges long-held myths about Roman prosperity and instead reveals a gritty, improvisational economy that resonates uncannily with our own."---Ghalib Dhalla, Indulge Magazine

About the Author

Kim Bowes is professor of archaeology and ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire and Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity.