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Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent
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.
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.
504 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 4, 2025
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January 4, 20267.5 out of 10.
Surviving Rome is an excellent reassessment of our assumptions about how the working poor and middling classes got by in the Roman world based on new information along with a closer reading of older sources.
What most struck me about Bowes' recreation of daily life 2,000 years ago is how similar were the strategies used by the poor and middling classes to get by then as those used today by people in similar economic and social positions.
Strongly recommended.
Surviving Rome is an excellent reassessment of our assumptions about how the working poor and middling classes got by in the Roman world based on new information along with a closer reading of older sources.
What most struck me about Bowes' recreation of daily life 2,000 years ago is how similar were the strategies used by the poor and middling classes to get by then as those used today by people in similar economic and social positions.
Strongly recommended.
April 1, 2026
A very good book that surveys some of the most recent archeology to paint a picture of what life was like for your average commoner in the Roman Empire.
Most commoners in the pre-modern era were farmers, and a takeaway that struck me was that the largest category of farms was mid-sized, not small. This is counterintuitive because land in the empire was increasingly concentrated among a select group of large, wealthy landowners belonging to the elite classes (see the data in Scheidel, The Great Leveller). In fact, as Bowes writes, land during the Roman Empire was in very short supply. Nevertheless, if you stumbled across a random Roman farm from the imperial period, the likeliest type you'd run across is mid-sized, practicing crop rotation, and employing tactics to maximize yields.
If you're guessing that these peasant farmers must have leased their land and worked as tenants, you are correct. But, the evidence suggests that peasant farmers often rented and owned land, and often leased the land they owned. They also sold much or most of what they produced as surplus to urban, but also local, markets. In other words, most Romans — most Roman farmers — were not subsistence farmers. They didn't produce just to consume.
Even more fascinating is that most Romans juggled various income sources. Romans could farm and produce intermediate and/or final goods for income, and they could also earn some of their income from wages. However, unless they were on the upper end of the income distribution, whether as a top-earning artisan or a highly skilled wage earner, none of these income sources on their own would have provided enough resources to live on. Low wage rates, high rents, and extractive taxes all played their role, as did the seasonality and temporary nature of each income stream. No one had a cushy 9-to-5 job, and wives did not necessarily stay at home to raise the kids. Women and children worked too, often hard work that left its mark in the skeletons of the dead.
Though the Romans did not have banks in any sense in which we'd recognize them, lending and debt were a vital component of the Roman peasants' and commoners' financial portfolio. Romans borrowed money to cover gaps between their expenditures and their earnings, perhaps helping them when out of work or as a result of a bad harvest. In the context of farming, borrowing took on a familiar nature. Farmers would borrow to pay for seed and to purchase goods, using future profits to pay the debt. Sometimes, when borrowers could not repay what they owed, they sold their children into slavery or sent them to unpaid apprenticeships. Sometimes, the debtor would die before repayment, and it was the living relatives who took on the burden.
The Roman 90 percenters, whether as an individual or family unit, likely did not have a nest egg. Saving was extremely difficult. The mixed-income strategies reflect a world where people had to stretch their denarii. Money was borrowed, lent, and invested to maximize its utility, so that the tap would not run dry. Nevertheless, people in the Roman world enjoyed a wider variety of foods and goods, especially but not exclusively in the cities. The Roman consumer revolution reached the countryside, as well.
An angle that the book doesn't explore is crime and corruption. Was petty property theft common? Where would it have fit as an income strategy? Crime has throughout history been a popular recourse for the impoverished, accepting high risks for high rewards. In a similar vein, was prostitution a common recourse? And from the perspective of the soldiery, which Bowes does discuss from the perspective of a soldier's wages, there is no discussion of corruption. This is particularly disappointing because she cites some Judaic evidence in other contexts, but not Judaic evidence with respect to petty corruption schemes run by Roman officers and recruits, especially when put in charge of tax collection. All of these schemes were part of the Roman "90 percent" income-earning strategies.
One thing that Bowes makes clear is that the imperial Roman economy was monetized. Goods were understood in terms of money prices, the quintessential mark of a market economy. What I would dispute is that this implies that the Roman economy was primarily driven by monetary exchange. Bowes points to coin hoards as evidence that small change (bronze coins) — the money of everyday commerce — were in abundant supply. Broader monetary economics would suggest the opposite: that coin hoardes, particularly large ones, were evidence that small change was not in circulation. For example, those large coin hoards in taverns suggest that the taverns had a hard time getting rid of it, implying a low velocity of circulation (i.e. low demand; see Sargent and Velde, The Big Problem of Small Coinage, and Selgin, Good Money). A scarcity of small coinage was common and endemic in the pre-modern era, and I think without more evidence it would be more natural to assume that there wasn't enough small coins to go around in most years. Bowes inadvertently provides evidence of this in that Roman wages were often paid in terms of credit, much like wages throughout other periods of the pre-industrial era. Workers tend to prefer coins because they have a wider range of choice when spending them, versus credit that has to be spent in locations that trust the creditor — there are gains from trade when using money. If workers were getting paid in credit, it was likely because their employer didn't have small coinage to pay them with instead. As such, these gains from monetary trade were likely unavailable to most Roman 90 percenters.
An interesting point made in the book is that though Roman commoners and peasants consumed more than they ever had before, this does not necessarily imply that they were better off. Higher levels of consumption were often driven by a perceived need to keep up in terms of status. As consumer goods became more prolific, maintaining status became more expensive. And to consume more, you had to work more. So, maybe it was all a wash. But this last insight is not novel; it's the core lesson of Say's Law (supply creates demand). And the logic behind the overall concept is specious, as presumably one would be spending income on goods because the perceived benefit of the goods was greater than the income, and the perceived benefits of the goods outweigh the disutility of labor. In other words, that status was more expensive implies that said status provided greater benefits. Likewise, today, it is more expensive to live a middle-class lifestyle than a poor person's, but I don't think any poor person would agree that their standard of living is equivalent in real terms with respect to that of the middle-class. (The discussion reminds me of a common quip I always hear: "Every year I make more money, but I also have more expenses." So why are we always striving to make more money? It's not about status. It's because those greater expenses are a means of enjoying a more comfortable lifestyle.)
Something to consider is that despite an evolution in the profession's understanding of economics and the Roman economy, there is a disproportionate Marxist influence in the early literature. This is not controversial. Finley, in The Ancient Economy, excoriates the application of standard economic assumptions, arguing that any understanding must begin at the level of the social class. Though initially I disagreed with Finley, I thought his perspective interesting, different, and perhaps containing some degree of truth. Bowes book drives another nail in the coffin of that initial interpretation, and reaffirms my more recent position that Finley's book is very bad (see my review). Anyway, more importantly, Bowes knows the literature very well and oftentimes speaks to this group of scholars, and so references to Marxist influence in the research are common and reflect the academic landscape. I recommend you skip Finley and read Bowes' Surviving Rome instead.
Most commoners in the pre-modern era were farmers, and a takeaway that struck me was that the largest category of farms was mid-sized, not small. This is counterintuitive because land in the empire was increasingly concentrated among a select group of large, wealthy landowners belonging to the elite classes (see the data in Scheidel, The Great Leveller). In fact, as Bowes writes, land during the Roman Empire was in very short supply. Nevertheless, if you stumbled across a random Roman farm from the imperial period, the likeliest type you'd run across is mid-sized, practicing crop rotation, and employing tactics to maximize yields.
If you're guessing that these peasant farmers must have leased their land and worked as tenants, you are correct. But, the evidence suggests that peasant farmers often rented and owned land, and often leased the land they owned. They also sold much or most of what they produced as surplus to urban, but also local, markets. In other words, most Romans — most Roman farmers — were not subsistence farmers. They didn't produce just to consume.
Even more fascinating is that most Romans juggled various income sources. Romans could farm and produce intermediate and/or final goods for income, and they could also earn some of their income from wages. However, unless they were on the upper end of the income distribution, whether as a top-earning artisan or a highly skilled wage earner, none of these income sources on their own would have provided enough resources to live on. Low wage rates, high rents, and extractive taxes all played their role, as did the seasonality and temporary nature of each income stream. No one had a cushy 9-to-5 job, and wives did not necessarily stay at home to raise the kids. Women and children worked too, often hard work that left its mark in the skeletons of the dead.
Though the Romans did not have banks in any sense in which we'd recognize them, lending and debt were a vital component of the Roman peasants' and commoners' financial portfolio. Romans borrowed money to cover gaps between their expenditures and their earnings, perhaps helping them when out of work or as a result of a bad harvest. In the context of farming, borrowing took on a familiar nature. Farmers would borrow to pay for seed and to purchase goods, using future profits to pay the debt. Sometimes, when borrowers could not repay what they owed, they sold their children into slavery or sent them to unpaid apprenticeships. Sometimes, the debtor would die before repayment, and it was the living relatives who took on the burden.
The Roman 90 percenters, whether as an individual or family unit, likely did not have a nest egg. Saving was extremely difficult. The mixed-income strategies reflect a world where people had to stretch their denarii. Money was borrowed, lent, and invested to maximize its utility, so that the tap would not run dry. Nevertheless, people in the Roman world enjoyed a wider variety of foods and goods, especially but not exclusively in the cities. The Roman consumer revolution reached the countryside, as well.
An angle that the book doesn't explore is crime and corruption. Was petty property theft common? Where would it have fit as an income strategy? Crime has throughout history been a popular recourse for the impoverished, accepting high risks for high rewards. In a similar vein, was prostitution a common recourse? And from the perspective of the soldiery, which Bowes does discuss from the perspective of a soldier's wages, there is no discussion of corruption. This is particularly disappointing because she cites some Judaic evidence in other contexts, but not Judaic evidence with respect to petty corruption schemes run by Roman officers and recruits, especially when put in charge of tax collection. All of these schemes were part of the Roman "90 percent" income-earning strategies.
One thing that Bowes makes clear is that the imperial Roman economy was monetized. Goods were understood in terms of money prices, the quintessential mark of a market economy. What I would dispute is that this implies that the Roman economy was primarily driven by monetary exchange. Bowes points to coin hoards as evidence that small change (bronze coins) — the money of everyday commerce — were in abundant supply. Broader monetary economics would suggest the opposite: that coin hoardes, particularly large ones, were evidence that small change was not in circulation. For example, those large coin hoards in taverns suggest that the taverns had a hard time getting rid of it, implying a low velocity of circulation (i.e. low demand; see Sargent and Velde, The Big Problem of Small Coinage, and Selgin, Good Money). A scarcity of small coinage was common and endemic in the pre-modern era, and I think without more evidence it would be more natural to assume that there wasn't enough small coins to go around in most years. Bowes inadvertently provides evidence of this in that Roman wages were often paid in terms of credit, much like wages throughout other periods of the pre-industrial era. Workers tend to prefer coins because they have a wider range of choice when spending them, versus credit that has to be spent in locations that trust the creditor — there are gains from trade when using money. If workers were getting paid in credit, it was likely because their employer didn't have small coinage to pay them with instead. As such, these gains from monetary trade were likely unavailable to most Roman 90 percenters.
An interesting point made in the book is that though Roman commoners and peasants consumed more than they ever had before, this does not necessarily imply that they were better off. Higher levels of consumption were often driven by a perceived need to keep up in terms of status. As consumer goods became more prolific, maintaining status became more expensive. And to consume more, you had to work more. So, maybe it was all a wash. But this last insight is not novel; it's the core lesson of Say's Law (supply creates demand). And the logic behind the overall concept is specious, as presumably one would be spending income on goods because the perceived benefit of the goods was greater than the income, and the perceived benefits of the goods outweigh the disutility of labor. In other words, that status was more expensive implies that said status provided greater benefits. Likewise, today, it is more expensive to live a middle-class lifestyle than a poor person's, but I don't think any poor person would agree that their standard of living is equivalent in real terms with respect to that of the middle-class. (The discussion reminds me of a common quip I always hear: "Every year I make more money, but I also have more expenses." So why are we always striving to make more money? It's not about status. It's because those greater expenses are a means of enjoying a more comfortable lifestyle.)
Something to consider is that despite an evolution in the profession's understanding of economics and the Roman economy, there is a disproportionate Marxist influence in the early literature. This is not controversial. Finley, in The Ancient Economy, excoriates the application of standard economic assumptions, arguing that any understanding must begin at the level of the social class. Though initially I disagreed with Finley, I thought his perspective interesting, different, and perhaps containing some degree of truth. Bowes book drives another nail in the coffin of that initial interpretation, and reaffirms my more recent position that Finley's book is very bad (see my review). Anyway, more importantly, Bowes knows the literature very well and oftentimes speaks to this group of scholars, and so references to Marxist influence in the research are common and reflect the academic landscape. I recommend you skip Finley and read Bowes' Surviving Rome instead.
March 23, 2026
This is a well-written and informative book, but the subject was too dry for me; I wound up returning it to the library when I was about 75% through it. A few years ago I would have pushed on to the end for the sake of trying to learn. Now, in old age, I don't want to spend the time on something I'm not enjoying. Reading quickly was never a strong point and it's not getting any better. I have to take more time now to ensure that information/plot/nuances/etc. are sinking in. The old adage "too many books, too little time" takes on more meaning when you finally realize that you actually are ancient. So, the condensed version of this ramble is good book, just not my cup of tea.
January 31, 2026
My favourite archaeological book ever? For a field where much of traditional education tells you most of the significant work was done in 1970 and before - it is great to be reminded that there is still so much we are yet to fully understand.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews