Chapter 15 — The Laborer

CHAPTER XV The Laborer

The universal law of inertia, which makes every man a potential parasite, has generally led naïve thought to infer that labor must be the penalty of sin imposed at the exit gate of paradise. Ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Zeno, though hardly satisfied with so simple an explanation, arrived at an equally low estimate of a life spent in manual labor by dwelling upon the moral and intellectual futility to which years of constant drudgery led. And yet the ancient workman seldom committed suicide in despair. He possessed, of course, other saving instincts that provided him with unanalyzed compensations; and doubtless many a carpenter’s son consoled himself with vaguely sensed beatitudes that seemed to pronounce a blessing upon the poor in spirit, the meek, and the nonresisting, even though few such meditations have survived for us. Cicero, the Academic, and Posidonius,¹ the Stoic, merely repeated the aristocratic scorn for labor that their instinctive aversions and their experience in a society permeated with slavery seemed to justify.

Vergil here, as so often, questions the wisdom of his age. He proves that he knows a gospel of work in a picture, not without humor, of Jove bringing to an end the era of blissful indolence:²

Shook from the leaves their honey, put fire away, And curbed the random rivers running wine, That need, by gradual dint of thought on thought, Might forge the various arts.

It was not without a conscious smile that he chose, as his illustration of a happy existence, the ex-pirate peasant who “in pride of spirit matched the wealth of kings.” Vergil never forgot the simple people of his native Mantua, where a sturdy race still tilled the soil. He wrote most of his poems near Naples, where, to judge from his favorite illustrations, he must frequently have stopped before the benches of the smiths and shipbuilders, enjoying the contemplation of the industries so active there. And he had drunk deep in the philosophy of Lucretius, which, permeated with the idea of evolution, refused to see in the history of the arts and crafts merely an expression of degrading vanity and greed, rather than a proof of progressive development. We may, if we will, repeat the timeworn judgment that Rome scorned labor, but we must, of course, remember that Cicero’s circle was not all there was of Rome.

¹ Cic. Pro Flacco, 18, Opifices et tabernarios atque illam omnem faecem; cf. Cat. IV, 17; Acad. prior, II, 144. Posidonius, quoted by Seneca, Ep. 88, 21, volgares et sordidae... opificum.

² Vergil, Georgics, I, 121–146. The Corycian gardener, ibid. IV, 125; cf. ibid. II, 458. Horace also plies the hoe on the farm, Epist. I, 14, 39.

In Cicero’s time,³ most of the work in the household, in the shops and factories, and on the farm—at least in and near Rome—was performed by slaves and ex-slaves. All of Cicero’s household servants belonged to this class, as did his secretaries, business managers and stewards, readers, librarians, couriers, the tutors of his children, and even the men who helped him delve out historical and philosophical details for his essays. Atticus, his publisher, had a host of trained slaves who not only copied the manuscripts neatly but also read the proofs with a view to correcting the substance. When Cicero needed repairs made or new buildings erected on his estates, he was apt to let the contract to his slave farm manager;⁴ and slaves and freedmen are frequently mentioned as renters of estates and gardens.⁵

³ Park, The Plebs Urbana in Cicero’s Day; Kuehn, De Opificum Romanorum condicione; Blümner, Privat-Altertümer, p. 589; Brewster, Roman Craftsmen and Tradesmen of the Early Empire; Leffingwell, Social and Private Life at Rome in the Time of Plautus and Terence.

⁴ Cic. Quint. Fr. III, 1, 2; 1, 5 and 33; 9, 7.

⁵ Cic. Ad Fam. XVI, 18, 2; Labeo, in Digest, 14, 3, 5, 2.

The city house of the rich man swarmed with slaves assigned to petty jobs: caring for the jewel box, keeping the shoes, dancing at supper, guarding the linen chest, and whatnot. These were evidences of wealth, and a household might run to hundreds or thousands of souls for the purpose of demonstrating a thing so all-important. The larger farms were generally under the supervision of a slave manager (vilicus), who had a swarm of slaves working for him. Varro and Columella both assume that this troupe was adequate for all general work and, on a large farm, even for such specialized work as carpentry, masonry, and smithing. The earlier jurists also, like Alfenus and Trebatius, mention weavers, smiths,⁶ barbers, bakers, and other skilled artisans as being found on individual farms.

⁶ Digest, 33, 7, 12, 5, and 16, 2.

It is true, however, that the independent small farm never quite disappeared from Italy. It persisted especially in the inexhaustible districts of the Po Valley, in the mountain valleys,⁷ where at times only small plots were available, and on the southern coast, where Greek tenacity still clung to old methods. A tendency was also noticeable—which increased rapidly under the Empire—to rent lands to freedmen and slaves⁸ on shares, the slaves presumably gaining their freedom in most cases when they had proved themselves trustworthy enough for such contracts.

⁷ On his Sabine farm Horace cultivated one part under the charge of a vilicus, but also had five renters upon parts of it, Epist. I, 14, 1–3.

⁸ Digest, 14, 3 and 4.

In factories, slaves were generally employed in Cicero’s day. In the Arretine potteries and in the brickyards, we note that freedmen were managers, which implies slave labor for the heavy work. In the factories of Campania, the evidence does not suffice for a decision, since Greek cognomina in that region are not significant. The situation at Pompeii implies a very large number of free citizen laborers, something we may assume probable wherever Greeks worked.

Some instructive membership rolls of a laborers’ guild at Ostia reveal a remarkable scarcity of free native labor there in the second century of the Empire. A list⁹ of ship carpenters contains 320 names of skilled workmen. Slaves, to be sure, do not figure in the list; probably they were not eligible for membership in the guild. But we cannot conclude that they were not at work in the yards. Only four men were free immigrants; such men, in fact, are rarely found at Rome. Moreover, few names on the list bear the good old stamp of the true Latins. Greek cognomina are very numerous. Perhaps some who bore these names were Neapolitan and South Italian shipyard men, but other indications favor the view that the Greek cognomina here also indicate servile parentage. The most striking fact is the great abundance of imperial family names, borne, of course, by freedmen of the imperial household and their descendants. When we add to these the other names that belong to the servile class—names like Verna, Restitutus, Mansuetus, Successus, Hilarius, Fortunatus, Vitalio, and Publicius—we discover that at least three-fourths of these shipwrights were freedmen or, at most, only a generation or two removed from that stage. The same conclusion is reached by examining the membership lists¹⁰ of the transport-helpers’ guild, containing nearly four hundred names. Among these are found a large number of Ostia’s former public slaves, designated by the name Publicius or Ostiensis.

⁹ C. I. L. XIV, 256.

¹⁰ C. I. L. XIV, 250 and 251. This guild consisted of men who owned and ran the barges and lighters that helped load and unload large ships outside the harbor and transport the produce from the harbor to Rome. It is worthy of note that former slaves of Ostia and their sons had gained the means to engage in this business.

In the great number of small shops where production and retailing were not yet divorced,¹¹ we have already had occasion to notice the following several types of shopkeepers:

(1) The handicraftsman was often a free citizen who rented the shop and conducted the business with his own capital, himself working at the bench with perhaps one or more slaves. The plumbers of Rome often illustrate this type, and the Pompeian ex-soldier shoemaker who conducted his shop in the porter’s lodge of his former captain is a very humble example of this class.

(2) A second type is found in shops where a freedman or slave, by way of reward for faithful service, was lent some capital at interest or on shares, which, together with his own peculium, sufficed for the conduct of such a business. Many cases discussed by the jurists under De Tributoria actione fall into this class (Digest 14, 4). This system was very extensive, and doubtless many of the Pompeian shops directly connected with dwelling houses were conducted in this way.

(3) Again, men of some means also owned shops of various kinds that they supervised but conducted through slaves or freedmen acting as their agents, such agents generally receiving a percentage of the profits as an incentive to industry. Cases of this kind, which also seem to have been very numerous, are discussed under the title De Institoria Actione (Digest 14, 3), where phrases frequently occur such as: “If your slave acts as institor in a taberna or at a money-changer’s table.”

¹¹ It is evident that in a few peculiar trades, “custom work” continued alongside ordinary handicraft shops. Gaius, for instance, cites a case in which a man brings his own gold to the jeweler to have it made into specified articles (III, 147). Of course, work in jewelry has always lent itself to this system, since, when broken or out of fashion, the material will usually be worth reworking. There is no reason to suppose, however, that there was much custom work in other lines during the Republic, though Diocletian’s edict proves that in the third century, when capital was disappearing, the custom system reasserted itself everywhere.

A study¹² of all the inscriptions in which the subject is explicitly designated as a workman shows clearly that slaves and freedmen dominated the industries of the Empire. Of 1,854 occurrences of the names of workmen, 67 are slaves; 344 are designated outright as ex-slaves; 459, though free, have Greek cognomina and therefore are largely ex-slaves; and 919 give an indefinite form of name from which no conclusion can be drawn. Only 65 are demonstrably freeborn citizens. From this list, it would seem a fair inference that about 15–20 percent were freeborn and 80–85 percent were slaves and ex-slaves. Of course, this does not give a wholly accurate picture of the situation in the industrial world, for slaves naturally are less fully represented in such records than citizens. Furthermore, a large part of the liberti did not acquire their freedom until quite old, many receiving it on the deathbed as an act of kindness from their masters. If our records gave a census of the men while at work, instead of inscriptions upon their tombs, the list of slaves might well exceed that of the freedmen.

¹² Kuehn’s careful and very useful dissertation, De Opificum Romanorum Condicione, Halle, 1910.

These conditions are so surprising that one is almost at a loss to explain what became of Rome’s poor free stock, and attempts at a solution must be offered with some diffidence. Caesar and the triumvirs, who had drawn much of the proletarian group into the armies of the civil wars, scattered them over the world in colonies. Those who were settled on farms in Italy, in places like Cremona, Luceria, and Beneventum, were doubtless saved for Italian society, though not for urban industry. Those sent westward to Cordova, Hispalis, Tarraco, Arles, Orange, Lyons, and other colonies of Spain and Gaul created centers of Roman civilization from which the Empire long drew heavily for sturdy citizens. But the large numbers colonized in Greece and the East—in Philippi, Corinth, Dyrrachium, Buthrotum, Beirut in Syria, Sinope and Heraclea on the Black Sea, and elsewhere—seem to have been quickly Hellenized. At any rate, they were all drawn from the channels of commerce and industry into agriculture, and a large part of them was lost to Roman culture.

It must also be pointed out that the inscriptional evidence may in part misrepresent the facts. For instance, it is possible that Easterners at Rome regarded industry more highly than the native Italians and were therefore more apt to record a lowly métier on their tombstones. Perhaps the native often preferred an honorable life of ease on the corn doles to mingling with slaves at the workbench. Such considerations would explain a part of the striking percentages furnished by the inscriptions. And yet the freedmen, too, were very quick to catch the spirit prevalent at Rome. Trimalchio, after making a fortune in trade, says: “Manum de tabula, I retired from active business and began to lend my money through freedmen; then I bought estates and built this palace.” We may also assume that many of the Roman proletariat disappeared into the silent wilderness and rough mountain regions, as did so many of the “poor white trash” of our South when driven out of the race for a decent livelihood by slavery. In our Civil War, it was this class that terrorized several states with brigandage and petty pilfering. The inquiry still leaves many questions unanswered, but on one point it seems to lead back to a definite conclusion: most of Rome’s industry was in servile hands.

The conditions of the slave laborer varied widely. On large farms, where a fellow slave was manager, much depended upon his temper; but since the landlord seldom met his slaves, all the harshness of unsympathetic profit-seeking might find expression in such managers. The same was, of course, true in mines, to which the lowest class generally drifted; and in factories we may presume that a harsh regime of driving found entrance through managers bent on gaining their owner’s gratitude by means of large profits. In such places there were no minimum hours of work, and the lash and chain were frequently used. Yet we must beware of filling in the picture from modern conditions of slavery, where differences of race and state of culture have aggravated the evils inherent in the system. Apart from a national pride in his race, which the Roman possessed like any modern, there is no evidence at Rome that any slave was not considered a potential citizen and thought gifted with as good blood and as keen an intellect as his master. The Romans had too many business managers of superior wit, literary men, artists, doctors, architects, teachers, and secretaries in their households to draw any false conclusions on that score. Indeed, the Plautine intrigue is generally based on the assumption that, when a young man is at his wit’s end through a reckless faux pas, he can rely upon his slave to find a way out. Cicero’s solicitous and generous letters to Tiro, which, if unaddressed, might be mistaken for missives to some highly favored young relative, show how unrestrained the friendship between master and man might grow in daily intercourse over books and business. The trust men showed in their procurators, who traveled at leisure over the provinces conducting the large and confidential affairs of their masters, could not but preclude the emergence of any general scorn for the subject class. And the custom of placing and equipping slaves and freedmen in mercantile shops on a partnership basis, which was so general under the ancient system of small-shop production, gave unlimited opportunities for free development to slaves and freedmen. Indeed, modern slavery has nowhere offered such opportunities; they were not even found in societies under the rigid class systems of modern European states, where slavery was unknown.

Measured merely in economic terms, the position of the freeborn laborer was more precarious than that of slaves and freedmen. He had less opportunity to reach the sympathy and support of a rich patron. He had no access to positions of trust, since these fell to trusted slaves, well trained and long known. The sinecures of well-mannered attendance fell to those who knew the routine. The free laborer had no master from whom to get funds for shopkeeping; he did not fit in well with a troop of slaves, either on the farm or in the household, where discipline had to be uniform. In factories, in mines, or at the docks, he might find work if he asked no more than the daily cost of a slave, which seldom exceeded fifteen cents a day. A slave drudge could usually be bought for two hundred dollars,¹³ that is, about twenty dollars per year, capitalized and insured. His annual keep would come to twenty or thirty dollars more, including the price of two tunics, a pair of shoes, some twelve or fifteen bushels of wheat—that is, a soldier’s ration—some table remnants in the form of oil, wine, and vegetables, and a straw cot in the slave barracks. On the assumption that his job was temporary, and therefore did not incur any waste in idle seasons, the free man might ask for a trifle more than this, but only a trifle.

¹³ On prices of slaves, see Wallon, Histoire de l’esclavage, II, 159. See Cato’s list of allowances, R. R. 56–59; Cato, however, was considered a hard master. In Cato’s day the ration of oil was very small. As oil was much cheaper later, the ration increased.

Unfortunately, we do not have many notes on actual wages. In Delos,¹⁴ during the third century B.C., the temple records indicate that unskilled workmen generally received from twenty to thirty cents per day, whether they were free or slaves hired out by their owners. Strangely enough, the best artistic work—that of architects, for example—was not much better paid. Municipal clerks in Caesar’s colony at Urso in Spain received twenty cents per day; probably Horace received little more than that as a scriba in the quaestor’s office at Rome. For Egypt during the Augustan age we have considerable information, but unfortunately it is not quite applicable to the rest of the Empire, since the whole province was practically a vast governmental institution where free competition was never permitted. Under the circumstances, of course, wages were abnormally low, ranging generally from about five to twelve cents per day.¹⁵ Cicero¹⁶ once speaks of a somewhat puny slave as not worth twelve cents a day, presumably a sum quite below the normal wage of an average laborer. The soldier’s pay was 225 denarii—about fifteen cents per day, without food—under Caesar, but soldiers at that time expected a part of the booty or a share in some colony after the war. Diocletian’s edict,¹⁷ issued when the Empire was a wreck, tried to force down the price of labor as well as of all other commodities. Such was the Emperor’s idea of controlling the high cost of living. The wages given there are in addition to “keep,” such as it was. The more important items are the following:

Unskilled workman — 12.8 cents Bricklayer — 21.6 cents Carpenter — 21.6 cents Stone mason — 21.6 cents Blacksmith — 21.6 cents Shipbuilder — 21–26 cents Painter — 32.4 cents

¹⁴ Glotz, Les Salaires à Délos, Jour. des Savants, 1913, 206; cf. Guiraud, La Main d’œuvre industrielle dans l’ancienne Grèce; Francotte, L’industrie, I, 327.

¹⁵ Dessau, I. L. S. 6087, LXII. The lictors received only half that amount, viatores a third, and heralds a fourth, but these were likely to be shopkeepers who were only occasionally called upon for service.

¹⁶ West, The Cost of Living in Roman Egypt, Class. Phil. 1916, 304; Westermann, An Egyptian Farmer, Univ. Wisc. Studies, 1919, 178.

¹⁷ Cic. Pro Roscio Com. 28. It is impossible to take this as the normal wage in Cicero’s day, though handbooks generally do. Cicero, in fact, is emphatically insisting on this slave’s low value as a workman. In the parable of Our Lord, Matt. 20, 2, workers in the vineyard are assumed to earn one denarius per day.

Diocletian’s edict, C. I. L. III, p. 801. An interesting discussion of its bearing upon the question of the cost of living may be found in Abbott, The Common People of Ancient Rome, p. 145. See Pauly-Wissowa, art. “Diocl. Edict,” for bibliography. An item on the wages of a jeweler is found in the Dacian wax tablets of the second century A.D. The workman contracts to work for half a year for $6.30. This salary was doubtless in addition to board and lodging, C. I. L. III, 948.

These wages are in addition to “food and lodging” for the workman; and although, in modern estimates of a “living wage” in America, these two items make up only about 35 percent of the “budget,” in Cicero’s day the bare necessities constituted at least 80 percent of the daily expense if the laborer was married. Diocletian’s list of wages, therefore, is very generous in comparison with Republican prices, a fact doubtless attributable in large part to the great decrease in the number of slaves by his time. For the end of the Republic, I think we may safely conclude that the wages found at Delos probably still held, and that ordinary unskilled labor might expect about one denarius per day, or about 17–20 cents measured simply in gold. This was approximately the wage generally paid to Italian farm labor at the harvest season in 1870, before the entry of Victor Emmanuel.¹⁸

¹⁸ Monographia della città di Roma, III, p. ccxii. If a man hired out for a full year to ensure himself board and lodging through the winter, he received only half a lira per day.

Obviously, the ancient free laborer did not rear a large family and send his children to college. Could he live at all? Certainly not as well as the urban slave, for the slave was not only kept fed and clothed up to the point of efficiency and put in a position to acquire a peculium, but so, too, were his wife and children. Furthermore, the children born in the household were apt to be trained in some skilled occupation, if only with a view to more profitable service—an advantage that frequently placed them in a position in which they could profit from contact with the master. The freeborn laborer had to find his own lodging, and if he had a family, he had to feed his children; his wife, of course, generally earned her own living. But is it likely that laboring men reared families on such wages? If we compare the wages with the laboring man’s budget of necessities, forget present-day conditions, and think instead of the conditions of the English laboring man before the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Italian workman before 1870, or the Japanese poor before the Great War, we shall find that somehow it could be done.

In reckoning the cost of living, we soon realize that “living” is a term of innumerable meanings, especially in a society dominated by slavery. Cicero felt that his son, while a student at Athens, could not live on less than four thousand dollars a year, since, as the son of an ex-consul, he had to keep up appearances and associate with young aristocrats like Messala and Bibulus. Cicero himself felt that the dignity of his position demanded a town house in the most aristocratic quarters—it cost about $200,000—a suburban villa, and at least one seaside retreat for vacations; sometimes he had three. Cicero, of course, was far from wealthy; he merely tried to live as he thought an ex-consul should. But the workingman was not expected to include the cost of appearance and respectability in his budget. He was expected only to keep body and soul together, and the state even aided him in this. As for the rest, the sun kept him warm and reduced his bill for clothing to the items demanded by a scant sense of modesty; government officials and charitable citizens gave him free baths and amused him without charge on all the holidays.

His menu called for no meat.¹⁹ The invincible legionaries of Rome had conquered the world on a fare of wheat porridge, and the state in Cicero’s day gave every citizen applicant at Rome a soldier’s ration of a bushel of wheat per month at about one-third the market price; under the Empire, this ration became a free gift. In cities that had no corn doles, this staple cost about seventy-five cents per bushel, or two and a half cents per day per person.²⁰ To this he generally added a bit of cheese and some vegetables, olive oil, and wine. In Diocletian’s list, which is higher than Republican prices, cheese costs seven cents per pound; three heads of cabbage²¹ or six turnips could be had for a cent—vegetables that can be raised almost every month of the year on sunny slopes near Rome. A pint of ordinaire²² cost about one cent, and that, generously mixed with water, might suffice for a day. The oil, of which a small quantity was used, sold at a trifle more. That is practically the entire bill for food. It would, in fact, be wholly misleading to draw up a complex schedule of prices to compare with the many items that go into making the monthly index of prices now issued by the Department of Labor. Eight cents per day—or six cents with a ticket of admission to the corn doles—paid the grocer’s bill.

¹⁹ The Sicilians drafted for the army in 1915 were so unaccustomed to eating the meat of the army rations that compulsion had in many cases to be applied. In 1906, I found that the regular noonday meal at an osteria for workmen near a Roman factory cost five cents. It consisted of half a pound of bread, a slice of cheese, and a glass of wine. The daily wage was then two lire. In 1916 the wage had risen threefold, and the price of the meal also. Since then wages and prices have again doubled. With a wage of twelve lire instead of two, the laborer still eats the same fare, lives in the same basement, wears the same shoddy, and votes the Socialist ticket as before.

²⁰ For prices of wheat, see Rostowzew, Pauly-Wissowa, art. “Frumentum.” The prices varied normally from 40 cents to about $1.50 per bushel, fluctuating considerably because poor farmers generally had to market their grain as soon as it was ripe. The lack of transportation in winter tended to make prices high in February and March. Polybius, II, 15, and XXXIV, 8, cites some very low prices from Spain and the Po Valley before these regions had been opened to regular commerce. Such prices should not be reckoned in making a normal average.

²¹ See Diocletian’s Edict, V and VI.

²² Columella, III, 3, 10, gives 300 sesterces per culleus (120 gallons) as a fair price. Martial, XII, 76, implies that an amphora (6 gallons) costs about 20 asses.

As for clothing, one pair of shoes,²³ frequently dispensed with, cost at most half a dollar. Five pounds of wool at ten cents a pound, or less, sufficed for two tunics, which his wife wove by lamplight. To naked limbs, Italy tempered the winds.

²³ See Diocletian’s Edict, IX, 5a.

Rents at Rome during the Republic were what we should consider low. Caelius²⁴ was considered very extravagant when he was thought to have paid $1,500 per year for a house in the fashionable quarters. Cicero insisted that the rent was only $500, and that a false rumor had been spread by the owner for advertising purposes. If a man like Caelius paid $500 on the Palatine, what did a basement or an attic room in the Subura bring? We have no prices for Rome, but in the heyday of prosperity at Delos,²⁵ many shops and houses—presumably of a fair type intended for occupancy by the shopkeeping class—rented for one or two dollars a month. With labor and building materials as cheap as they were at Rome, we have no reason to think rentals there were much higher than at Delos. Until recently, farm laborers of the Campagna reckoned house rent as practically nothing. They raised cabins with their own hands, making them out of a few poles and some waste straw; and these suffice in that climate. Ancient workmen could do as much, or they rented a room or two in the cheaply built tenement houses, or slept in their shops or in the narrow rooms behind the shops. House rent was a small item to men who did not need to consider questions of station.

²⁴ Cic. Pro Caelio, 17; Plutarch, Sulla, 1, implies that 2,000–3,000 sesterces was the price of cheap apartments barely available for respectable Romans in Sulla’s day.

²⁵ See Roussel, Délos, p. 149. At Pompeii, a residence of fair size that had been converted into a fullery rented for seven dollars per month, C. I. L. IV, 1, p. 392. Later, Martial and Juvenal frequently complain of the high rental of their attic apartments.

The Roman workingman also had to have his bath and a post-balneal chat with his friends. For this, the cities or public-spirited citizens usually provided numerous public houses where admission was free, more commonly one-fourth of a cent, or at most a cent. This was the workingman’s clubhouse.

It appears, then, that the laborer, thanks to state charity and the genial climate of Italy, need not starve or freeze to death. If he kept in good health and could find work, his wage would permit marriage, for his wife could perhaps support herself by spinning, weaving, or shopkeeping; and if there were children, they too were put to work at a very early age. Nothing was left over for pleasure, to be sure, but the Roman government knew the dangers of an unamused rabble and, on all the numerous holidays, supplied games and amusements without charge: chariot races, theatrical performances, wild-beast hunts, gladiatorial shows, processions, and naval battles. The emperors had discovered a very simple narcotic with which to soothe the crowd infected with the diseases induced by slavery and a nonproductive economic system, and they administered it with constant and certain success: panem et circenses.

There was only one deep concern for which no provision had been made. Where were the surviving relatives to find as much as ten dollars with which to pay for the cremation of the body at death, the niche for the burial crock, and the jug of wine for a respectable wake? To allay this terror, the workmen formed burial societies that collected small monthly dues with which to meet the necessary expenses. The society also provided a respectable funeral procession from among its members.

During the Empire there were neither slave uprisings nor labor revolutions in Italy. Apparently, the laboring man was fairly happy; whether he could, under such conditions, also be a good citizen is quite another question.

The laborers of every craft had their collegia,²⁶ or labor guilds, but in the face of slave competition these could in no sense be unions organized for the purpose of improving wages and conditions through collective bargaining. We never hear of labor strikes in Italy.²⁷ Obviously, if a laborer refused to work on the terms offered him, a slave would be put in his place. It may be that the early guilds, assigned by tradition to the regal period, had grown out of direct economic needs. Industry probably had a healthier life at that time, when commerce was more active and slavery had not yet permeated the city. The political strikes of the early Republic, the secessions to the Sacred Mount, may then have copied labor methods or may have found their strength in such labor guilds. But tradition tells us nothing of such matters.

²⁶ Waltzing, Les Corporations; Ruggiero, Diz. Epig., art. “Collegium,” by Waltzing; Kornemann, art. “Collegium” in Pauly-Wissowa; Abbott, The Common People of Ancient Rome, p. 209.

²⁷ Strikes sometimes occurred in Eastern cities where free labor was not entirely at the mercy of slave economy; see Ruggiero, loc. cit., p. 358.

In the late Empire, again, when the state was organizing the guilds for public purposes, granting certain immunities in return for services in grain transportation, fire protection, and other quasi-public duties, the guilds often exerted pressure upon the state through their patrons in order to obtain further privileges and exemptions. Thus, for instance, the bargemen²⁸ of the Tiber secured some kind of monopoly with the help of a powerful friend, and the fullers of Rome brought suit to have their former water rights restored. But such instances are proofs of new tendencies and do not indicate the purposes of the earlier guilds. During the Republic, the chief object of these many organizations seems to have been social, to use a very broad term.

²⁸ Ruggiero, loc. cit.

As is usual where shops are small and carry a very limited stock, shoppers go from one to another to bargain. Consequently, makers of the same article congregate in the same section of the city.²⁹ The result is that the community of interest naturally arising from the practice of the same métier is strengthened by personal acquaintance and an interest in the same locality. Thus, a natural social group already exists for the formation of a burial-aid society, for some community of worship, and for social gatherings over wine and “shop talk.” By inscribing on stone their membership list, together with all the dignified titles of petty offices, they created a world of seeming importance where, for a while, they could forget the low esteem in which the outside world seemed to hold them.³⁰

²⁹ Besides the many special fora, we know numerous streets at Rome named for some special craft, e.g., vicus frumentarius, v. lorarius, v. materiarius, v. pulverarius, v. sandaliarius, v. unguentarius, porticus margaritaria. Jewelers usually gathered on the Via Sacra, potters on the Esquiline, tanners in the Trastevere, etc.

³⁰ Some of the guilds seem, like the medieval guilds, to have made a permanent place for themselves in annual religious festivals. The shipwrights at York gave “Building of the Ark,” the goldsmiths gave the “Magi,” and the fishers and mariners produced “Noah and the Flood.” So the Roman carpenters were apparently called upon to furnish the pine used in the celebration of Magna Mater and to carry it in the procession. They accordingly assumed from that time on the name of dendrophori. Shipwrights and sailors had regular parts to perform in the festival of Isis. In Cicero’s day, the officers of the guilds displaced the local officers in the direction of the street celebrations of the Compitalia. Indeed, evidence may someday come to light proving a direct connection between the medieval “mystery plays” performed by guilds and the ancient “mysteries” in which labor guilds also had a share.

The real binding cord that held them together was, of course, the very practical service of the society in collecting the petty dues and procuring the columbarium for the burial urns. The division of costs thus reduced the dreaded expense of dying and the fear of roaming as unburied ghosts, and the poor man could then contemplate the inevitable with some complacency. Nor were the social gatherings wholly for purposes of pleasure: the libations provided for the cult of the spirits of departed members and patrons, for which reason the members often called one another comestores and convictores. The following lines, taken from the “regulations and bylaws” of such an organization, will afford some insight into their little world:³¹

“It is unanimously voted that whoever wishes to enter this society shall pay an initiation fee of one hundred sesterces—about three dollars at this time—and an amphora of wine, and shall pay monthly dues of five asses—three cents.”

“If a member in full standing dies, there shall be drawn for his account three hundred sesterces, one-sixth of which shall be divided among the attendants of the funeral. The funeral procession shall go on foot.”

“Any member who commits suicide shall not be buried by the society.”

“If any member who is a slave shall become free, he shall provide the society with an amphora of good wine.”

“If an officer elected in due order does not give a dinner to the members, he shall be fined one dollar.”

“The officers are each to furnish an amphora of good wine, two cents’ worth of bread for each member, four sardines, and provide for the service.”

“If any member causes a disturbance by changing his seat, he shall be fined twelve cents; if anyone insults another member, the fine shall be 36 cents; if he abuses the presiding officer, the fine shall be 60 cents.”

³¹ The Leges of the Collegium Dianae et Antinoi, C. I. L. XIV, 2112; Dessau, I. L. S. 7212.

CHAPTER XV The Laborer

The universal law of inertia, which makes every person a potential parasite, has generally led naive thinkers to conclude that labor must be the punishment for sin imposed at the exit from paradise. Ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Zeno were hardly satisfied with so simple an explanation, yet they reached an equally low opinion of a life spent in manual labor by emphasizing the moral and intellectual futility produced by years of constant drudgery. Even so, the ancient workman seldom committed suicide in despair. He possessed other saving instincts, of course, which gave him compensations he did not analyze; and doubtless many a carpenter’s son consoled himself with vaguely understood beatitudes that seemed to bless the poor in spirit, the meek, and those who did not resist, although few such reflections have survived for us. Cicero, the Academic, and Posidonius,¹ the Stoic, merely repeated the aristocratic contempt for labor that their instinctive aversions and their experience of a society permeated by slavery seemed to justify.

¹ Cic. Pro Flacco, 18, “Opifices et tabernarios atque illam omnem faecem”; cf. Cat. IV, 17; Acad. prior, II, 144. Posidonius, quoted by Seneca, Ep. 88, 21, “vulgares et sordidae... opificum.”

Here, as so often, Vergil questions the wisdom of his age. He shows that he knows a gospel of work in his picture—not without humor—of Jove bringing the era of blissful idleness to an end:²

“Shook from the leaves their honey, put fire away,And curbed the random rivers running wine,That use, by gradual dint of thought on thought,Might forge the various arts.”

It was not without a conscious smile that he chose, as his example of a happy existence, the former pirate turned peasant who “in pride of spirit matched the wealth of kings.” Vergil never forgot the simple people of his native Mantua, where a sturdy race still tilled the soil. He wrote most of his poems near Naples, where, judging from his favorite illustrations, he must often have stopped before the benches of smiths and shipbuilders and enjoyed watching the industries that were so active there. He had also drunk deeply from the philosophy of Lucretius, which was permeated by the idea of evolution and refused to see the history of the arts and crafts merely as an expression of degrading vanity and greed rather than as evidence of progressive development. We may, if we wish, repeat the timeworn judgment that Rome despised labor, but we must remember that Cicero’s circle was not the whole of Rome.

² Vergil, Georgics, I, 121–146. The Corycian gardener, ibid. IV, 125; cf. ibid. II, 458. Horace also works with a hoe on his farm, Epist. I, 14, 39.

In Cicero’s time,³ most work in the household, in shops and factories, and on farms—at least in and near Rome—was performed by slaves and former slaves. All Cicero’s household servants belonged to this class, as did his secretaries, business managers and stewards, readers, librarians, couriers, his children’s tutors, and even the men who helped him uncover historical and philosophical details for his essays. Atticus, his publisher, had a host of trained slaves who not only copied manuscripts neatly but also read the proofs with the aim of correcting their substance. When Cicero needed repairs or new buildings on his estates, he was likely to give the contract to his slave farm manager;⁴ and slaves and freedmen are often mentioned as tenants of estates and gardens.⁵

³ Park, The Plebs Urbana in Cicero’s Day; Kuehn, De Opificum Romanorum Condicione; Blümner, Privat-Altertümer, p. 589; Brewster, Roman Craftsmen and Tradesmen of the Early Empire; Leffingwell, Social and Private Life at Rome in the Time of Plautus and Terence.

⁴ Cic. Quint. Fr. III, 1, 2; 1, 5 and 33; 9, 7.

⁵ Cic. Ad Fam. XVI, 18, 2; Labeo, in Digest, 14, 3, 5, 2.

A rich man’s city house swarmed with slaves assigned to minor duties such as caring for the jewel box, keeping the shoes, dancing at supper, guarding the linen chest, and countless other tasks. These slaves were evidence of wealth, and a household might contain hundreds or thousands of people simply to demonstrate something considered so important. Larger farms were generally supervised by a slave manager, or vilicus, who had a swarm of slaves working under him. Both Varro and Columella assume that this workforce was sufficient for all ordinary work and, on a large farm, even for specialized tasks such as carpentry, masonry, and smithing. Earlier jurists, including Alfenus and Trebatius, also mention weavers, smiths,⁶ barbers, bakers, and other skilled artisans as being found on individual farms.

⁶ Digest, 33, 7, 12, 5, and 16, 2.

It is true, however, that the independent small farm never entirely disappeared from Italy. It survived especially in the inexhaustible districts of the Po Valley, in mountain valleys where at times only small plots were available, and along the southern coast, where Greek tenacity still held to old methods. There was also a noticeable tendency—which rapidly increased under the Empire—to rent land on shares to freedmen and slaves.⁷ Presumably, in most cases, slaves who had proved trustworthy enough for such contracts eventually gained their freedom.

⁷ On his Sabine farm, Horace cultivated one part under the charge of a vilicus, but he also had five tenants on portions of it, Epist. I, 14, 1–3.

In Cicero’s day, factories generally employed slaves. In the potteries of Arretium and in the brickyards, we find freedmen serving as managers, which implies the use of slave labor for the heavy work. In the factories of Campania, the evidence is not sufficient for a conclusion because Greek surnames in that region are not significant. Conditions at Pompeii suggest a very large number of free citizen laborers, something we may assume was probable wherever Greeks worked.

Some instructive membership lists from laborers’ guilds at Ostia reveal a remarkable scarcity of free native labor there during the second century of the Empire. A list⁸ of ship carpenters contains 320 names of skilled workmen. Slaves do not appear on the list, to be sure; they were probably ineligible for guild membership. But we cannot conclude that slaves were not working in the shipyards. Only four men are free immigrants, who are in fact seldom found at Rome. At the same time, few names on the list have the good old stamp of true Latins. Greek surnames are very numerous. Perhaps some who bore these names were shipyard workers from Naples and southern Italy, but other evidence tends to support the view that Greek surnames here also indicate servile ancestry. The most striking fact is the abundance of imperial family names, borne, of course, by freedmen of the imperial household and their descendants. When we add to these the other names associated with the servile class—names such as Verna, Restitutus, Mansuetus, Successus, Hilarius, Fortunatus, Vitalio, and Publicius—we discover that at least three-fourths of these shipwrights were freedmen or, at most, only one or two generations removed from that status. The same conclusion follows from examining the membership lists⁹ of the transport workers’ guild, which contain nearly four hundred names. Among them are many of Ostia’s former public slaves, identified by the name Publicius or Ostiensis.

⁸ C. I. L. XIV, 256.

⁹ C. I. L. XIV, 250 and 251. This guild consisted of men who owned and operated the barges and lighters that helped load and unload large ships outside the harbor and transported goods from the harbor to Rome. It is worth noting that former slaves of Ostia and their sons had acquired the means to enter this business.

In the great number of small shops where production and retailing had not yet been separated,¹⁰ we have already had occasion to note several kinds of shopkeepers:

(1) The craftsman was often a free citizen who rented the shop and conducted the business with his own capital, working at the bench himself, perhaps with one or more slaves. Rome’s plumbers often illustrate this type. The former soldier at Pompeii who made shoes and conducted his shop in the porter’s lodge of his former captain is a very humble example of this class.

(2) A second type appeared in shops where a freedman or slave, as a reward for faithful service, was lent some capital at interest or in return for a share of the profits. Together with his own peculium, this was enough to operate such a business. Many cases discussed by the jurists under De Tributoria Actione belong to this class (Digest 14, 4). This system was very widespread, and many of the Pompeian shops directly connected to private houses were doubtless operated in this way.

(3) Men of some means also owned various kinds of shops that they supervised but operated through slaves or freedmen acting as their agents. Such agents generally received a percentage of the profits as an incentive to work hard. Cases of this kind, which also seem to have been very numerous, are discussed under the title De Institoria Actione (Digest 14, 3), where phrases frequently occur such as: “If your slave acts as institor in a taberna or at a money-changer’s table.”

¹⁰ It is evident that, in a few unusual trades, “custom work” continued alongside ordinary handicraft shops. Gaius, for example, cites a case in which a man brings his own gold to a jeweler to have it made into specified articles (III, 147). Jewelry has, of course, always suited this system because, when it is broken or out of fashion, the material is usually worth reworking. There is no reason to suppose, however, that much custom work was done in other trades during the Republic, although Diocletian’s edict proves that in the third century, when capital was disappearing, the custom system reasserted itself everywhere.

A study¹¹ of all inscriptions in which the subject is explicitly identified as a workman clearly shows that slaves and freedmen dominated industry under the Empire. Among 1,854 occurrences of workmen’s names, 67 are slaves, 344 are explicitly identified as former slaves, and 459 are free but have Greek surnames and are therefore largely former slaves. Another 919 have names in an indefinite form from which no conclusion can be drawn. Only 65 are demonstrably freeborn citizens. From this list, it seems fair to infer that about 15–20 percent were freeborn and 80–85 percent were slaves or former slaves.

Of course, this does not provide a completely accurate picture of conditions in industry, because slaves are naturally less fully represented in such records than citizens. Furthermore, many of the liberti did not receive their freedom until they were quite old, and many received it on their master’s deathbed as an act of kindness. If our records provided a census of these men while they were at work, rather than inscriptions on their tombs, the list of slaves might well be larger than the list of freedmen.

¹¹ Kuehn’s careful and very useful dissertation, De Opificum Romanorum Condicione, Halle, 1910.

These conditions are so surprising that one is almost unable to explain what became of Rome’s poor freeborn population, and any proposed solution must be offered with some hesitation. Caesar and the triumvirs, who had attracted much of the proletarian population into the armies of the civil wars with large rewards, scattered these people across the world in colonies. Those settled on farms in Italy, in places such as Cremona, Luceria, and Beneventum, were doubtless preserved for Italian society, although not for urban industry. Those sent westward to Cordova, Hispalis, Tarraco, Arles, Orange, Lyons, and other colonies in Spain and Gaul created centers of Roman civilization from which the Empire long drew heavily for strong citizens. But the large numbers colonized in Greece and the East—in Philippi, Corinth, Dyrrachium, Buthrotum, Beirut in Syria, Sinope and Heraclea on the Black Sea, and elsewhere—seem to have been rapidly Hellenized. In any case, all of them were diverted from commerce and industry into agriculture, and a large proportion were lost to Roman culture.

It must also be noted that the evidence from inscriptions may partly misrepresent the facts. For example, it is possible that easterners at Rome respected industry more than native Italians did and were therefore more likely to record a humble trade on their tombstones. Perhaps natives often preferred a supposedly honorable life of idleness on the grain dole to working beside slaves at the bench. Such considerations would explain part of the striking percentages supplied by the inscriptions.

Yet freedmen, too, were very quick to absorb the spirit prevalent at Rome. After making his fortune in trade, Trimalchio says: “Manum de tabula; I retired from active business and began to lend my money through freedmen. Then I bought estates and built this palace.”

We may also assume that many members of the Roman proletariat disappeared into the silent wilderness and remote mountain regions, as did many of the “poor white trash” of the American South when slavery drove them out of the competition for a decent livelihood. During our Civil War, it was this class that terrorized several states through brigandage and petty theft. The inquiry still leaves many questions unanswered, but on one point it seems to lead to a definite conclusion: most of Rome’s industry was in servile hands.

The conditions of slave laborers varied widely. On large farms where another slave served as manager, much depended on his temperament. But because the landlord seldom met his slaves, all the harshness of unsympathetic profit-seeking might find expression through such managers. The same was naturally true in the mines, where the lowest class generally ended up; and in factories we may assume that a harsh system of driving workers was introduced by managers determined to earn their owner’s gratitude through large profits. In such places, there was no maximum number of working hours, and the whip and chain were frequently used.

Yet we must avoid filling out this picture from modern forms of slavery, in which differences of race and cultural development have aggravated the evils inherent in the system. Apart from national pride in his race, which Romans possessed like modern peoples, there is no evidence at Rome that any slave was not regarded as a potential citizen and as someone with blood as good and an intellect as sharp as his master’s. Romans had too many household business managers of superior intelligence, as well as literary men, artists, doctors, architects, teachers, and secretaries, to draw any false conclusions on that point. Indeed, the typical Plautine intrigue is generally based on the assumption that, when a young man reaches the end of his own resources because of some reckless faux pas, he can rely on his slave to find a way out.

Cicero’s solicitous and generous letters to Tiro—which, if the recipient were not named, might be mistaken for messages to a highly favored young relative—show how freely friendship could develop between master and servant through daily work together on books and business. The trust that men placed in their procurators, who traveled at leisure through the provinces while managing their masters’ large and confidential affairs, could not help preventing the rise of any general contempt for the subject class. The widespread practice of placing slaves and freedmen in mercantile shops and equipping them to work on a partnership basis, common under the ancient system of production in small shops, also gave slaves and freedmen unlimited opportunities for independent development. Indeed, modern slavery has nowhere offered such opportunities. They were not even available in modern European societies with rigid class systems, although those societies did not practice slavery.

Measured only in economic terms, the position of the freeborn laborer was more precarious than that of slaves and freedmen. He had fewer opportunities to gain the sympathy and support of a wealthy patron. He had no access to positions of trust, because these went to trusted slaves who were well trained and had long been known. The easy posts involving polite attendance went to those who knew the routine. The free laborer had no master from whom he could obtain funds to open a shop. Nor did he fit well into a workforce of slaves, whether on a farm or in a household, where discipline had to be uniform.

In factories, mines, or at the docks, he might find work if he asked no more than the daily cost of a slave, which seldom exceeded fifteen cents a day. An ordinary slave laborer could usually be bought for two hundred dollars,¹² or about twenty dollars a year when the cost was capitalized and insured. His annual maintenance would cost another twenty or thirty dollars, including two tunics, a pair of shoes, twelve or fifteen bushels of wheat—equivalent to a soldier’s ration—some table scraps in the form of oil, wine, and vegetables, and a straw bed in the slave barracks. If a free man’s job was temporary and therefore caused no waste during idle seasons, he might ask for a little more than this—but only a little.

¹² On slave prices, see Wallon, Histoire de l’esclavage, II, 159. See Cato’s list of allowances, R. R. 56–59; Cato, however, was considered a harsh master. In Cato’s day, the ration of oil was very small. Because oil later became much cheaper, the ration increased.

Unfortunately, we have few records of actual wages. At Delos¹³ during the third century B.C., temple records indicate that unskilled workmen generally received from twenty to thirty cents a day, whether they were free laborers or slaves hired out by their owners. Strangely enough, the best artistic work—such as the work of architects—was not paid much better.

¹³ Glotz, Les Salaires à Délos, Journal des Savants, 1913, 206; cf. Guiraud, La Main-d’œuvre industrielle dans l’ancienne Grèce; Francotte, L’industrie, I, 327.

Municipal clerks in Caesar’s colony at Urso in Spain received twenty cents a day.¹⁴ Horace probably received little more than that as a scriba in the quaestor’s office at Rome. For Egypt during the Augustan age, we have considerable information, but unfortunately it does not apply fully to the rest of the Empire. The entire province was practically a vast government institution in which free competition was never permitted. Under those conditions, wages were naturally abnormally low, generally ranging from about five to twelve cents a day.¹⁵

¹⁴ Dessau, I. L. S. 6087, LXII. The lictors received only half that amount, viatores one-third, and heralds one-fourth, but these were likely to be shopkeepers who were called upon for service only occasionally.

¹⁵ West, The Cost of Living in Roman Egypt, Classical Philology, 1916, 304; Westermann, An Egyptian Farmer, University of Wisconsin Studies, 1919, 178.

Cicero¹⁶ once describes a rather weak slave as not worth twelve cents a day, presumably a sum considerably below the normal wage of an average laborer. A soldier’s pay under Caesar was 225 denarii—about fifteen cents a day, without food—but soldiers at that time expected to receive a share of the booty or a grant in some colony after the war.

¹⁶ Pro Roscio Comoedo, 28. It is impossible to regard this as the normal wage in Cicero’s day, although handbooks generally do so. Cicero is, in fact, emphatically insisting on this slave’s low value as a worker. In the parable of Our Lord, Matthew 20, 2, workers in the vineyard are assumed to earn one denarius a day.

Diocletian’s edict,¹⁷ issued when the Empire was a wreck, attempted to force down the price of labor as well as the prices of all other commodities. This was the Emperor’s idea of controlling the high cost of living. The wages listed there were in addition to “keep,” such as it was. The more important items are:

Unskilled workman: 12.8 cents Bricklayer: 21.6 cents Carpenter: 21.6 cents Stone mason: 21.6 cents Blacksmith: 21.6 cents Shipbuilder: 21–26 cents Painter: 32.4 cents

¹⁷ Diocletian’s Edict, C. I. L. III, 19, 6 ff. An interesting discussion of its bearing on the cost of living may be found in Abbott, The Common People of Ancient Rome, p. 145. See Pauly-Wissowa, article “Diocletian’s Edict,” for the bibliography. An item concerning a jeweler’s wages appears in the Dacian wax tablets of the second century A.D. The workman contracts to work for half a year for $6.30. This salary was doubtless in addition to board and lodging, C. I. L. III, 948.

These wages were in addition to “food and lodging” for the workman. In modern American estimates of a “living wage,” those two items make up only about 35 percent of the budget; but in Cicero’s day, if the laborer was married, the bare necessities constituted at least 80 percent of the daily expense. Diocletian’s list of wages is therefore very generous in comparison with Republican prices, a fact doubtless due in large part to the great decrease in the number of slaves by his time. For the end of the Republic, I think we may safely conclude that the wages found at Delos probably still applied, and that ordinary unskilled labor could expect about one denarius a day, or roughly seventeen to twenty cents when measured simply in gold. This was approximately the wage generally paid to Italian farm laborers during the harvest season in 1870, before the arrival of Victor Emmanuel.¹⁸

¹⁸ Monografia della città di Roma, III, p. ccxii. If a man hired himself out for a full year to ensure board and lodging through the winter, he received only half a lira a day.

Obviously, the ancient free laborer did not raise a large family and send his children to college. Could he live at all? Certainly he could not live as well as an urban slave. The slave was not only fed and clothed well enough to remain efficient and placed in a position to acquire a peculium; his wife and children were supported too. Furthermore, children born in the household were likely to be trained in a skilled occupation, if only to make their service more profitable. This advantage frequently put them in a position to benefit from contact with the master.

The freeborn laborer had to find his own lodging, and if he had a family, he had to feed his children. His wife, of course, generally earned her own living. But is it likely that laborers raised families on such wages? If we compare their wages with the laborer’s budget of necessities, set aside present-day conditions, and think instead of the conditions of English laborers before the repeal of the Corn Laws, Italian laborers before 1870, or the Japanese poor before the Great War, we shall find that somehow it could be done.

When calculating the cost of living, we quickly realize that “living” is a term with countless meanings, especially in a society dominated by slavery. Cicero believed that his son, while studying at Athens, could not live on less than four thousand dollars a year because, as the son of a former consul, he had to maintain appearances and associate with young aristocrats such as Messala and Bibulus. Cicero himself believed that the dignity of his position required a town house in the most aristocratic quarter—it cost about $200,000—a suburban villa, and at least one seaside retreat for vacations; at times he had three. Cicero, of course, was far from wealthy. He merely tried to live as he thought a former consul should.

The workingman, however, was not expected to include the cost of appearances and respectability in his budget. He was expected only to keep body and soul together, and the state even helped him do that. As for everything else, the sun kept him warm and reduced his clothing expenses to the items demanded by a minimal sense of modesty. Government officials and charitable citizens gave him free baths and entertained him without charge on every holiday.

His menu included no meat.¹⁹ Rome’s invincible legionaries had conquered the world on a diet of wheat porridge, and in Cicero’s day the state gave every citizen at Rome who applied a soldier’s ration of one bushel of wheat a month at about one-third of the market price. Under the Empire, this ration became a free gift. In cities without grain distributions, this staple cost about seventy-five cents a bushel, or two and a half cents a day for each person.²⁰

¹⁹ Sicilians drafted into the army in 1915 were so unaccustomed to eating the meat included in army rations that, in many cases, they had to be compelled to eat it. In 1906, I found that the regular midday meal at an osteria for workmen near a Roman factory cost five cents. It consisted of half a pound of bread, a slice of cheese, and a glass of wine. The daily wage was then two lire. In 1916, the wage had tripled, and so had the price of the meal. Since then, wages and prices have again doubled. With a wage of twelve lire instead of two, the laborer still eats the same food, lives in the same basement, wears the same shoddy clothing, and votes the Socialist ticket as before.

²⁰ For wheat prices, see Rostowzew, Pauly-Wissowa, article “Frumentum.” Prices normally varied from forty cents to about $1.50 a bushel, fluctuating considerably because poor farmers generally had to market their grain as soon as it ripened. The lack of transportation in winter tended to make prices high in February and March. Polybius, II, 15, and XXXIV, 8, cites some very low prices from Spain and the Po Valley before those regions had been opened to regular commerce. Such prices should not be included when calculating a normal average.

To this wheat, the laborer generally added a little cheese and some vegetables, olive oil, and wine. In Diocletian’s list, whose prices are higher than those of the Republic, cheese costs seven cents a pound. Three heads of cabbage²¹ or six turnips could be bought for one cent, and these vegetables could be grown during almost every month of the year on the sunny slopes near Rome. A pint of ordinary wine²² cost about one cent and, generously mixed with water, might last for a day. Oil, of which only a small amount was used, sold for a little more. That was practically the entire food bill. It would, in fact, be entirely misleading to draw up a complex schedule of prices to compare with the many items included in the monthly price index now issued by the Department of Labor. Eight cents a day—or six cents with a ticket admitting the holder to the grain distributions—paid the grocer’s bill.

²¹ See Diocletian’s Edict, V and VI.

²² Columella, III, 3, 10, gives 300 sesterces per culleus, or 120 gallons, as a fair price. Martial, XII, 76, implies that an amphora, or six gallons, cost about twenty asses.

As for clothing, one pair of shoes,²³ which was often dispensed with, cost at most half a dollar. Five pounds of wool, at ten cents a pound or less, was enough for two tunics, which the laborer’s wife wove by lamplight. Italy’s climate softened the winds for uncovered legs.

²³ See Diocletian’s Edict, IX, 5a.

Rents in Republican Rome would seem low to us. Caelius²⁴ was considered very extravagant when people believed that he paid $1,500 a year for a house in the fashionable quarter. Cicero insisted that the rent was only $500 and that the owner had spread the false rumor for advertising purposes. If a man such as Caelius paid $500 on the Palatine, what did a basement or attic room in the Subura cost?

²⁴ Cic. Pro Caelio, 17; Plutarch, Sulla, 1, implies that 2,000–3,000 sesterces was the price of cheap apartments barely suitable for respectable Romans in Sulla’s day.

We have no prices for Rome, but during the height of prosperity at Delos,²⁵ many shops and houses—presumably of a reasonably good type intended for the shopkeeping class—rented for one or two dollars a month. Since labor and building materials were as cheap as they were at Rome, we have no reason to believe rents there were much higher than at Delos. Until recently, farm laborers of the Campagna regarded house rent as practically nothing. They built huts with their own hands from a few poles and some waste straw, and these were adequate in that climate. Ancient workmen could do as much. Alternatively, they rented one or two rooms in cheaply constructed tenement buildings, or slept in their shops or in the narrow rooms behind them. Rent was a minor expense for men who did not have to consider questions of social standing.

²⁵ See Roussel, Délos, p. 149. At Pompeii, a fairly large residence that had been converted into a fullery rented for seven dollars a month, C. I. L. IV, 1, p. 392. Later, Martial and Juvenal frequently complained about the high rents of their attic apartments.

The Roman workingman also needed his bath and a conversation with friends afterward. For this purpose, cities or public-spirited citizens usually provided numerous public bathhouses where admission was free, or more commonly cost one-fourth of a cent, and at most one cent. This was the workingman’s clubhouse.

It therefore appears that, thanks to state charity and Italy’s mild climate, the laborer did not have to starve or freeze to death. If he remained healthy and could find work, his wage allowed him to marry, because his wife could perhaps support herself by spinning, weaving, or keeping a shop. If there were children, they too were put to work at a very early age. Nothing was left for pleasure, to be sure, but the Roman government understood the dangers of an unentertained crowd and provided free games and amusements on all the numerous holidays: chariot races, theatrical performances, wild-beast hunts, gladiatorial shows, processions, and naval battles. The emperors had discovered a very simple narcotic with which to soothe the crowd afflicted by the diseases caused by slavery and an unproductive economic system, and they administered it with constant and certain success: panem et circenses.

Only one serious concern remained unprovided for. Where could surviving relatives find as much as ten dollars to pay for cremating the body after death, securing a niche for the burial urn, and providing the jug of wine needed for a respectable wake? To relieve this fear, workmen formed burial societies that collected small monthly dues to meet the necessary expenses. The society also supplied a respectable funeral procession drawn from its members.

During the Empire, Italy experienced neither slave uprisings nor labor revolutions. Apparently, the laborer was reasonably happy. Whether he could also be a good citizen under such conditions is an entirely different question.

Workers in every craft had their collegia,²⁶ or labor guilds, but in the face of competition from slaves, these could not in any sense be unions organized to improve wages and conditions through collective bargaining. We never hear of labor strikes in Italy.²⁷ Obviously, if a laborer refused to work on the terms offered, a slave would be put in his place.

²⁶ Waltzing, Les Corporations; Ruggiero, Dizionario Epigrafico, article “Collegium,” by Waltzing; Kornemann, article “Collegium” in Pauly-Wissowa; Abbott, The Common People of Ancient Rome, p. 209.

²⁷ Strikes sometimes occurred in eastern cities where free labor was not entirely at the mercy of a slave economy; see Ruggiero, loc. cit., p. 358.

It is possible that the early guilds, which tradition assigns to the regal period, developed from direct economic needs. Industry probably had a healthier existence then, when commerce was more active and slavery had not yet permeated the city. The political strikes of the early Republic—the secessions to the Sacred Mount—may have copied labor methods or may have drawn their strength from such labor guilds. But tradition says nothing about this.

In the later Empire, when the state organized guilds for public purposes and granted certain immunities in return for services in grain transportation, firefighting, and other quasi-public duties, the guilds often applied pressure to the state through their patrons in order to gain further privileges and exemptions. For example, the bargemen²⁸ of the Tiber secured some kind of monopoly with the help of a powerful friend, and the fullers of Rome brought a lawsuit to have their former water rights restored. But such cases are evidence of new tendencies and do not reveal the purposes of the earlier guilds.

²⁸ Ruggiero, loc. cit.

During the Republic, the chief purpose of these many organizations seems to have been social, using that term in a very broad sense. As usually happens when shops are small and carry very limited stocks, shoppers went from one shop to another to bargain. Consequently, makers of the same article gathered in the same district of the city.²⁹ The shared interest that naturally arose from practicing the same trade was therefore strengthened by personal acquaintance and a common interest in the same neighborhood. A natural social group already existed from which to form a burial-aid society, establish a shared form of worship, and hold social gatherings over wine and “shop talk.”

²⁹ Besides the many specialized forums, we know of numerous Roman streets named for particular crafts—for example, vicus frumentarius, vicus lorarius, vicus materiarius, vicus pulverarius, vicus sandalarius, vicus unguentarius, and porticus margaritana. Jewelers generally gathered on the Via Sacra, potters on the Esquiline, tanners in the Trastevere, and so forth.

By inscribing their membership lists on stone, together with all the dignified titles of minor offices, the members created a world of apparent importance in which they could briefly forget the low esteem in which the outside world seemed to hold them.³⁰ The real bond that held them together was, of course, the society’s very practical service in collecting small dues and securing a columbarium for their burial urns. Dividing the costs in this way reduced both the dreaded expense of dying and the fear of wandering as unburied ghosts, allowing the poor man to contemplate the inevitable with some peace of mind.

³⁰ Some guilds, like the medieval guilds, seem to have established permanent roles for themselves in annual religious festivals. The shipwrights at York presented “The Building of the Ark,” the goldsmiths presented “The Magi,” and the fishers and mariners produced “Noah and the Flood.” Similarly, the Roman carpenters were apparently called on to provide the pine used in the celebration of Magna Mater and to carry it in the procession. From that time onward, they accordingly adopted the name dendrophori. Shipwrights and sailors had regular parts to perform in the festival of Isis. In Cicero’s day, guild officers displaced local officers in directing the street celebrations of the Compitalia. Indeed, evidence may someday come to light proving a direct connection between the medieval “mystery plays” performed by guilds and the ancient “mysteries” in which labor guilds also participated.

Nor were the social gatherings held entirely for pleasure. Their libations supported the worship of the spirits of departed members and patrons, for which reason the members often called one another comestores and convictores. The following passages, taken from the “regulations and bylaws” of such an organization, provide some insight into their small world:³¹

“It is unanimously voted that whoever wishes to enter this society shall pay an initiation fee of one hundred sesterces—about three dollars at this time—and an amphora of wine, and shall pay monthly dues of five asses, or three cents.”

“If a member in good standing dies, three hundred sesterces shall be drawn for his account, one-sixth of which shall be divided among those attending the funeral. The funeral procession shall go on foot.”

“Any member who commits suicide shall not be buried by the society.”

“If any member who is a slave becomes free, he shall provide the society with an amphora of good wine.”

“If an officer duly elected does not give a dinner to the members, he shall be fined one dollar.”

“The officers are each to provide an amphora of good wine, two cents’ worth of bread for each member, four sardines, and the necessary service.”

“If any member causes a disturbance by changing his seat, he shall be fined twelve cents; if anyone insults another member, the fine shall be thirty-six cents; if he abuses the presiding officer, the fine shall be sixty cents.”

³¹ The Leges of the Collegium Dianae et Antinoi, C. I. L. XIV, 2112; Dessau, I. L. S. 7212.