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The callous reality of life for Ancient Roman plebs _ The Story of Money · Economy & Finance

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Speaker 1: These are people who would force their mother to lend
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Speaker 1: them money at interest. These are people who would sell
0:06
Speaker 1: their children to live another day. These are people who
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Speaker 1: are not going to go quietly. And I think all
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Speaker 1: of these things defy the kind of categories that we
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Speaker 1: put on people in the past. When we really dig
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Speaker 1: into the complexity, I think we find a world that
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Speaker 1: really astounds us for the amount of grit and determination
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Speaker 1: that people had.
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Speaker 2: Today on the story of money. Ancient Rome's brutal economy
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Speaker 2: and how ordinary people survived it. And yes, sure, it
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Speaker 2: was a time of bustling cities, expanding empires, new trade routes,
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Speaker 2: a sophisticated civilization with a thriving economy. But for most
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Speaker 2: ordinary Romans, day laborers, tenant farmers and the like, everyday
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Speaker 2: existence wasn't quite as prosperous or even that stable. And
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Speaker 2: here to tell us how they survived is Kim Bowes,
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Speaker 2: professor of ancient history and archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. Hi, Kim.
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Speaker 1: Hey, Robin.
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Speaker 2: It's great to have you here because we've wanted to
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Speaker 2: do a Roman episode for a long time. It feels
1:17
Speaker 2: we can't really do a history podcast, even if it's
1:20
Speaker 2: money focused, without doing the Romans at some point. And
1:23
Speaker 2: you're going to tell us the story of just how
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Speaker 2: creative the average Roman had to be just to, well, frankly,
1:28
Speaker 2: stay financially afloat, right?
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Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely. And you say you couldn't do a podcast
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Speaker 1: about money without including the Romans. I hope to convince
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Speaker 1: you and all your listeners that ordinary people got by
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Speaker 1: in ways which were far different than maybe we've supposed
1:45
Speaker 1: they'd gotten by.
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Speaker 2: They were.
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Speaker 1: immensely complex in their financial lives. They used a whole
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Speaker 1: range of financial instruments. And money played an enormous role
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Speaker 1: in their lives.
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Speaker 2: To paraphrase the Wu-Tang Clan, money rules everything around me. Well,
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Speaker 2: we're going to go into Roman hustle culture, debt, credit, money,
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Speaker 2: subsistence in ancient Rome. And that's coming up here on
2:08
Speaker 2: The Story of Money. Gillian is away this week. I'm
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Speaker 2: Robin Wigglesworth.
2:19
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2:55
Speaker 2: So as i mentioned we're not going to be focusing
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Speaker 2: on the ancient roman elites the senators the emperors all
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Speaker 2: that jazz we're going to be focusing on the 90
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Speaker 2: roughly speaking at least specifically how the 90 lived in
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Speaker 2: ancient roman egypt Kim, why are we focusing on Rome
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Speaker 2: and Egypt today?
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Speaker 1: Well, as I talk about in my book, Surviving Rome,
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Speaker 1: the most solid evidence that we have for how the
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Speaker 1: 90% survived actually comes from Rome and Egypt. The papyri
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Speaker 1: particularly are preserved in the very dry climate of Egypt.
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Speaker 1: And those papyri preserve an extraordinary range of financial data,
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Speaker 1: which we just don't have from other places. Now, we
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Speaker 1: will talk about other places. We'll talk about places like Pompeii.
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Speaker 1: We'll talk a lot about Roman Britain, for which we
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Speaker 1: actually have pretty good evidence. And we'll talk, of course,
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Speaker 1: about the city of Rome. But interestingly, if we're interested
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Speaker 1: in ordinary people's economics... Egypt is really the place to start.
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Speaker 4: Okay.
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Speaker 2: I mean, I know that Pompeii, a lot of the
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Speaker 2: things were preserved by the famous eruption of the volcano,
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Speaker 2: but why do we know so much about Roman Britain specifically?
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Speaker 1: Well, the Brits are extraordinary archaeologists, and they've actually managed
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Speaker 1: to leverage archaeology and all of the kind of stuff
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Speaker 1: that you don't necessarily think of as being financial data,
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Speaker 1: like pollen and animal bones and things like this, to
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Speaker 1: create a really sophisticated picture of that particular province.
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Speaker 2: Okay, well, we're going to start in Roman Egypt. So
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Speaker 2: let's imagine a fictional family living at this time. It's
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Speaker 2: 100 AD. There's a father, let's call him Satyricus. He's
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Speaker 2: an entrepreneurial tenant farmer who did, in fact, actually exist
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Speaker 2: in Roman Egypt, right, according to historical records. And let's
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Speaker 2: say he's married to a Thasus, and together they have
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Speaker 2: the son Horus and the daughter Attia. So, Kim, can
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Speaker 2: you tell us a little bit about what his daily
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Speaker 2: routine would have been like around that time?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I think his daily routine is maybe not too
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Speaker 1: different from our own in the sense that someone like
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Speaker 1: Satyricus and Thasus would wake up and immediately start thinking
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Speaker 1: about money. They're a tenant farmer. They're thinking about the
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Speaker 1: price of wheat at that moment. They're thinking about how
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Speaker 1: are they going to get labor to work their small plots?
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Speaker 1: What kinds of things are they growing? Again, not too unfamiliar.
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Speaker 1: They certainly would have had a plot of wheat. They
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Speaker 1: certainly would have been growing some hay for their animals.
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Speaker 1: But maybe surprisingly for us, they also would have had
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Speaker 1: some small plot of pretty specialized stuff like dates and
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Speaker 1: And in fact, our historical satiricus actually went all in
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Speaker 1: on a field of time at one point. So pretty specialized,
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Speaker 1: what we would call maybe cash crops.
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Speaker 2: Was that the point of the time that you can
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Speaker 2: make a bit of cash money from time?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, presumably. I mean, he's not eating it, one wouldn't think.
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Speaker 2: No, that's a weird thing, this munching. I don't know.
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Speaker 2: Maybe it's like crisp back then.
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Speaker 1: I don't know. No, I think even then it would
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Speaker 1: have been a strange thing to be eating. So he's
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Speaker 1: almost certainly selling it. He's also got a little plot
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Speaker 1: probably of some grapes to make some wine out of.
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Speaker 1: He's also not drinking that. He's selling it. So you
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Speaker 1: have to imagine someone who thinks a lot about money
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Speaker 1: and is juggling a whole bunch of different kinds of crops,
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Speaker 1: some of which he's eating, but an awful lot of
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Speaker 1: which he's going to sell.
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Speaker 2: Okay. So he's a pretty hardworking guy. He's trying different things.
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Speaker 2: I mean, how much money would he be making from
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Speaker 2: all this work of grain, wheat, barley, even thyme, I guess?
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Speaker 1: So I spent an awful lot of time trying to
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Speaker 1: figure this out. And we wish we had things like
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Speaker 1: crop reports for the Roman world, which, of course, we don't.
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Speaker 1: And so you have to use a little bit of archaeology,
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Speaker 1: some more evidence from these financial records. The short answer
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Speaker 1: to your question is he would have made more money
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Speaker 1: by selling what he grew than by eating it. if
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Speaker 1: you see what I mean. So he would have been
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Speaker 1: much better going for the market rather than simply being self-sufficient. Now,
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Speaker 1: of course, that depends on what the market looks like
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Speaker 1: in that particular year. And therein, right, as the bard says,
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Speaker 1: lay the rub for people like Satyricus. They lived in
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Speaker 1: markets and they died by markets. So he would have
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Speaker 1: woken up thinking about what the price of crops were
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Speaker 1: in that particular year.
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Speaker 2: You mentioned that Satyricus, and I love his name, you know,
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Speaker 2: most might have familiarity with the Roman Empire sadly comes
7:21
Speaker 2: from Asterix and Obelix. I'm mostly still of slightly newer centuries,
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Speaker 2: but this is delightful for me. You mentioned he's a
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Speaker 2: tenant farmer, right? So he didn't own his own land.
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Speaker 2: Is that the normal way of things back then for
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Speaker 2: the ordinary plebs?
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Speaker 1: I think it became more normal as time went on.
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Speaker 1: One of the things about the Roman world is it's
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Speaker 1: incredibly densely populated. There's less and less land. The price
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Speaker 1: of land goes up almost certainly, and it gets harder
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Speaker 1: to own And so renting land was an obvious alternative.
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Speaker 1: I do think sometimes we imagine a world in which
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Speaker 1: everyone was, you know, attendant for somebody else. And actually,
7:56
Speaker 1: Egypt is one of those places where we can see
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Speaker 1: people actually do own land. They own tiny plots of land.
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Speaker 1: They often own different plots of land and they're renting
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Speaker 1: plots of land. So they have very complicated, if you like,
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Speaker 1: land portfolios.
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Speaker 2: So what do these portfolios look like? Were they sort
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Speaker 2: of a tiny plot of land that they might own
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Speaker 2: themselves outside their own home and then they rent larger
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Speaker 2: tracts somewhere else, a mix of them? Do they have
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Speaker 2: to travel far to get to these things?
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Speaker 1: When we have something like a whole archive where we
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Speaker 1: can see all the different, if you like, land portfolio
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Speaker 1: of even a really small farmer like Satiricus, we can
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Speaker 1: see them constantly changing their portfolio. So the land that
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Speaker 1: they own, they own. That's great. Satiricus, the real Satiricus,
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Speaker 1: didn't actually own any land. He was renting all the time.
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Speaker 1: But the plots that they rented or owned are almost
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Speaker 1: never next to each other. So, you know, you say
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Speaker 1: you rent a land, it comes up on the market
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Speaker 1: as being up for lease. And you think, gosh, that's
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Speaker 1: really good land. It's really well irrigated. It's a bit
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Speaker 1: of a walk away. It's worth it to me. And
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Speaker 1: so I'm going to rent it. Then say your father
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Speaker 1: dies and leaves you a plot of land, which is
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Speaker 1: nowhere near where you're actually living. Obviously, you're not going
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Speaker 1: to turn that down. So this portfolio actually imagines a
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Speaker 1: lot of hustling moving around from plot to plot.
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Speaker 4: Okay.
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Speaker 2: Well, that sounds suboptimal, but probably unavoidable. Yeah. So Satiricus
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Speaker 2: doesn't own his own land in the real Satiricus. He's
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Speaker 2: poor and he has to rent it on a fairly
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Speaker 2: short-term basis. I'm curious, what did that cost? What were
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Speaker 2: the land rent rates at the time?
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Speaker 1: The real satiricus and any imaginary person in Egypt has
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Speaker 1: got it particularly bad in that regard. Land rents in
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Speaker 1: Egypt are really high. In most instances, they're taking half
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Speaker 1: your crop. And in many Egyptian farmers... Like satyricus, they're
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Speaker 1: taking two thirds of their crop. And then once you
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Speaker 1: add in all kinds of other things, you're looking at,
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Speaker 1: you know, an awful lot of whatever it is that
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Speaker 1: you're growing disappearing. So obviously, if you can own your
9:59
Speaker 1: own land, that's fine. better, but then you got to
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Speaker 1: pay taxes. All of this stuff is eroding what you're
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Speaker 1: actually able to take home and either eat or sell.
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Speaker 1: I think land rental rates are probably also going up
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Speaker 1: as land becomes rarer and more expensive. So Soterikis is
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Speaker 1: living at a particularly rough time during the Roman Empire
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Speaker 1: when rates are pretty high.
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Speaker 2: If life was that tough and the money he ended
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Speaker 2: up with was so low after having worked all year
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Speaker 2: around on all these different plots of land– How did
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Speaker 2: his family survive? Did they have enough?
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Speaker 1: So the word you just used there is key. His
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Speaker 1: family survived. I think, you know, too often economic historians
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Speaker 1: of any period just tend to imagine people like Satiricus,
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Speaker 1: the male wage earner, the male laborer. And of course,
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Speaker 1: there's an entire rest of the family. We've got Thesis
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Speaker 1: and Horace and Attia. All of them are working. All
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Speaker 1: of them are bringing in different kinds of income. that's
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Speaker 1: absolutely necessary for them to survive. Because the margins are
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Speaker 1: so narrow with the high rents, this is the only
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Speaker 1: way that you can actually pull this sort of thing off.
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Speaker 2: Because, I mean, we tend to think of, in the
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Speaker 2: popular imagination, ancient Rome, even sort of non-Roman parts, direct
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Speaker 2: Roman parts like Egypt, as being fantastically wealthy. But life
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Speaker 2: sounds quite tough for not just, you know, our little
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Speaker 2: hero satiricus, but also little Atia, little Horus as well, right?
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Speaker 1: This is a world which is really pronounced by instability
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Speaker 1: and precarity. So there may be a lot of wealth
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Speaker 1: in the system, but it's always coming and going. And
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Speaker 1: the only way to sort of manage that and to
11:46
Speaker 1: sort of steer it to your advantage is actually to
11:50
Speaker 1: use money in really complicated and sophisticated ways. And that's
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Speaker 1: also true for ordinary people like satiricus. So it's not
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Speaker 1: like they're just sitting around on their farm while the
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Speaker 1: rest of the world or the wealthy world, as it were,
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Speaker 1: the Ciceros of this world, are using money and banking
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Speaker 1: and all this stuff. They're all actually using all of
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Speaker 1: those same kind of complicated instruments. So it's not just
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Speaker 1: a rich-poor binary. And I think this is one of
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Speaker 1: the hardest things that we have to get rid of
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Speaker 1: is the way in which ordinary people are actually doing
12:20
Speaker 1: incredibly complex things in their economic lives.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we're definitely going to be talking more about
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Speaker 2: those sort of complex products sometimes that they use. But
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Speaker 2: on your book, Surviving Rome, you also talk about the 90%.
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Speaker 2: Do we know roughly what sort of, was there a 90%?
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Speaker 2: Was it an 80% that people were sort of poor?
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Speaker 2: Was it 99% under David Graeber's famous sort of framing
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Speaker 2: of it? The anthropologist, he talked about how really 1%
12:45
Speaker 2: really kind of owned everything. Do we have any sort
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Speaker 2: of even rough sense of what inequality was in ancient Rome?
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Speaker 1: So I'm a real pessimist on these numbers. I think
12:56
Speaker 1: it's impossible to figure them out. People have done a
12:59
Speaker 1: really valiant effort to try to do it. And so
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Speaker 1: I use the term 90% as a bit of a
13:03
Speaker 1: throwaway because you're right, could be 80%, could be 99%
13:07
Speaker 1: of people who are, in my definition, working with their hands,
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Speaker 1: having to negotiate this precarious and risk-filled world. But as
13:17
Speaker 1: far as the actual number is concerned, I really wish
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Speaker 1: we knew. But for all the data that we do have,
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Speaker 1: it's extremely difficult to actually come up with not only
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Speaker 1: an average income, but then figure out how that worked
13:31
Speaker 1: across the Roman population. So with all due respect to
13:35
Speaker 1: David Graeber, I wish we could talk about the 99%
13:37
Speaker 1: and the 1%, but alas, I think it's pretty difficult.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's annoying how reality is sometimes complex and difficult
13:44
Speaker 2: and hard to figure out.
13:45
Speaker 1: It really is annoying, isn't it?
13:47
Speaker 2: It drives me crazy on a daily basis. But I'm curious,
13:51
Speaker 2: why is this perception of Rome as a wealthy economy
13:56
Speaker 2: so prevalent? This just seems to be the common view
13:59
Speaker 2: everywhere that Rome was super rich. Why is that?
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Speaker 1: Well, you know, we have a lot of pop culture
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Speaker 1: that's really emphasized this in our minds. One of my
14:08
Speaker 1: personal favorites is Gladiator, which, of course, imagines this enormously
14:12
Speaker 1: opulent world, at least at the upper ends of things. And,
14:17
Speaker 1: of course, you know, the writings that come down to
14:20
Speaker 1: us from this world are written by the people who
14:22
Speaker 1: have money. You know, imagine a history of the United
14:25
Speaker 1: States written by Elon Musk is not going to feature
14:27
Speaker 1: McDonald workers or people working on a chicken factory line.
14:32
Speaker 1: people write from their own perspective. And so Cicero and Co.,
14:36
Speaker 1: as I call them in my book, really dominate our
14:39
Speaker 1: view of this world, and they tend to represent and
14:41
Speaker 1: reproduce their own perspective.
14:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess also historians sometimes are tempted as well, right,
14:49
Speaker 2: to focus on the deeds and the activities of the
14:52
Speaker 2: great and mighty and wealthy. Even David Graeber did that, right? That,
14:56
Speaker 2: you know, you tend to think of the rich and
14:58
Speaker 2: the poor, and even if you care about the poor,
15:00
Speaker 2: you still focus on the actions of the rich more
15:02
Speaker 2: than anything else.
15:03
Speaker 1: I would also throw in there another extraordinary book of
15:06
Speaker 1: which I'm a great admirer, Thomas Piketty's Capital. Insofar as
15:10
Speaker 1: this is a book which is interested in the origins
15:13
Speaker 1: of wealth inequality, it's really focused on rich people and
15:16
Speaker 1: how rich people get richer, which has really dominated our
15:20
Speaker 1: conversation about inequality. And in the process, we've sort of
15:23
Speaker 1: forgotten about ordinary people because their wealth is so statistically insignificant.
15:29
Speaker 1: So there's lots of ways in which we've sort of
15:30
Speaker 1: left ordinary people behind and both because the evidence for
15:34
Speaker 1: them is a lot harder to come by, and because
15:38
Speaker 1: sometimes when we think we're talking about the non-rich or
15:41
Speaker 1: the 99%, we're actually really focused, even if we're really angry,
15:45
Speaker 1: we're really focused on the 10% or the 1%. So
15:49
Speaker 1: this is a challenge that historians have in every period.
15:51
Speaker 1: We have it even in the present. And so we're
15:54
Speaker 1: constantly having to think about whose history are we really
15:58
Speaker 1: telling here? Yeah.
15:59
Speaker 2: Well, today, Kim, we are going to start redressing the balance. Hooray.
16:04
Speaker 2: Let's dig into a bit more of that of the
16:06
Speaker 2: satiricus and his family. Life sounds pretty hard, but there
16:10
Speaker 2: must have been some good life. I mean, what did
16:12
Speaker 2: they do for fun, for an enjoyment? What did they
16:15
Speaker 2: spend their tiny little bit of extra money on?
16:18
Speaker 1: This is one of the things that most surprised me
16:20
Speaker 1: when I was writing this book. You know, we tend,
16:22
Speaker 1: when we think of rich and poor, we sort of
16:24
Speaker 1: sap the poor of everything. We imagine they had literally nothing.
16:27
Speaker 1: That defines poverty. When in fact, once you dig into
16:30
Speaker 1: all the new archaeology, you start looking at the financial
16:33
Speaker 1: records that we have, these are people who actually have
16:37
Speaker 1: quite nice clothing. They have quite a lot of clothing.
16:41
Speaker 1: They wear jewelry. They have perfume. I excavated myself in Italy,
16:46
Speaker 1: you know, poor farmers who are wearing perfume. Just because
16:50
Speaker 1: people are poor doesn't mean that they're not spending their
16:52
Speaker 1: money on little luxuries. Rome is a world full of
16:57
Speaker 1: these kinds of consumer goods, and ordinary people and even very,
17:01
Speaker 1: very poor people also consume those goods, not just the super,
17:04
Speaker 1: super rich people. I think we also have to imagine
17:09
Speaker 1: people eating a whole range of foods that we imagine
17:13
Speaker 1: only rich people ate. We eat might conjure to mind
17:18
Speaker 1: rich people eating things like dormice and thrushes and all
17:21
Speaker 1: this stuff that appears in Roman literature. But we now know,
17:25
Speaker 1: thanks to some great archaeology, the extraordinary range of things
17:29
Speaker 1: that ordinary people ate. So the new excavations in Pompeii
17:32
Speaker 1: have found ordinary people eating snails and citrus and 10
17:38
Speaker 1: different kinds of cheeses and a whole range of goods
17:41
Speaker 1: rather than just a very narrow, you know, sort of
17:43
Speaker 1: bread and water type diet. So life was difficult, precarious,
17:49
Speaker 1: but also, if you like, diverse and complex.
17:54
Speaker 2: How well fed were some ordinary Romans then compared to
17:58
Speaker 2: Somebody in the Victorian era or even today, I guess,
18:01
Speaker 2: in some of the poorer countries. I mean, how do
18:04
Speaker 2: we compare this?
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Speaker 1: So we've always assumed that poor Romans are basically eating
18:09
Speaker 1: at the caloric minimum. And we somehow imagine that amounts
18:13
Speaker 1: to what the United Nations today constitutes caloric. A caloric minimum.
18:18
Speaker 1: In my view, Romans are eating a lot more than this.
18:21
Speaker 1: Even the very poorest Romans, even enslaved people working on
18:25
Speaker 1: a farm are eating a lot more in calories, not
18:28
Speaker 1: least because they're doing an awful lot of work. So
18:31
Speaker 1: on the one hand, I would argue that they're much
18:33
Speaker 1: better nourished than we imagined. It's hard to compare them
18:36
Speaker 1: to your Victorian children, but I suspect in many instances
18:39
Speaker 1: they are better nourished, not least because they're partaking of
18:43
Speaker 1: the foodstuffs from what we might call a global empire. Now,
18:48
Speaker 1: if you live in the countryside, right, then just like today,
18:52
Speaker 1: there's far less different kinds of food available in the
18:56
Speaker 1: countryside than there are in a place like Pompeii or Rome.
18:59
Speaker 1: So the countryside, you're not going to get that citrus
19:02
Speaker 1: and peppercorns and all this imported stuff.
19:05
Speaker 2: You said in Roman Britain, ordinary people drank wine, right?
19:09
Speaker 1: French wines.
19:11
Speaker 2: They had a decent life.
19:13
Speaker 1: About half of Roman farmers, from what we can tell,
19:16
Speaker 1: show signs of having drunk at least a little bit
19:18
Speaker 1: of wine. They're not mostly growing it themselves, and they're
19:22
Speaker 1: mostly importing it, which is kind of amazing. The farmers
19:26
Speaker 1: that I excavated in Italy, they're clearly making their own wine. Obviously,
19:30
Speaker 1: they're Italian farmers. But they're also drinking wine from what's
19:33
Speaker 1: today Gaza. So they're importing wine because clearly they think
19:37
Speaker 1: it's better, it's better tasting, whatever, even as they're growing
19:41
Speaker 1: things themselves. And this is the thing that was most
19:43
Speaker 1: surprising to me. You always imagine, well, if I grow it,
19:45
Speaker 1: I don't need to buy it. Well, if you have
19:47
Speaker 1: a sophisticated palette and you prefer X over Y, then
19:50
Speaker 1: you're going to go buy X. And they certainly did that.
19:54
Speaker 2: Okay. So they are able to piece together a little
19:58
Speaker 2: bit of extra money or resources. It's not affluence, but
20:01
Speaker 2: at least it is a little bit of non-essential consumption,
20:06
Speaker 2: which is nice. But what kind of money were they
20:09
Speaker 2: using for these things? Because money and credit was fairly
20:13
Speaker 2: developed in the Roman Empire, right?
20:15
Speaker 1: So the money system has to be explained a little
20:17
Speaker 1: bit because it's very different from our own monetary system.
20:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do the basics here, right? Because there's a
20:23
Speaker 2: coinage system and that's what people maybe see. You can
20:26
Speaker 2: go to a museum and see the coins, but then
20:29
Speaker 2: there's the whole broader ecosystem of money and credit around it, right? Right.
20:33
Speaker 1: That's exactly right. And this is a show about money.
20:36
Speaker 1: So maybe we should dig into for a second about
20:39
Speaker 1: actual money. So it's a tri-metallic system. So it's pretty
20:43
Speaker 1: complicated already. It runs on gold, silver, and bronze. The
20:48
Speaker 1: gold coin of the realm is the aureus. The silver
20:51
Speaker 1: coin is the denarius. And then because so many ordinary
20:54
Speaker 1: people need so much small change for their ordinary lives,
20:59
Speaker 1: there's a whole range of different bronze coinages. The Cistercius
21:03
Speaker 1: is the largest of those. The Ass, yes, I know,
21:07
Speaker 1: the Ass is among the smallest, but then they even
21:10
Speaker 1: developed sort of fractions of the Ass. In different parts
21:14
Speaker 1: of the empire, they use a slightly different system because
21:17
Speaker 1: the Romans, for all that they are brutal in lots
21:21
Speaker 1: of ways, they also allowed economic systems that had existed
21:25
Speaker 1: for a long time, say in the Greek East or
21:28
Speaker 1: in Egypt, to simply carry on. So our man Satyricus
21:31
Speaker 1: in Egypt is using, in his ordinary life, the drachma,
21:35
Speaker 1: which is the basic coin.
21:37
Speaker 2: It's a bronze coin. It's a bronze Greek coin, essentially.
21:42
Speaker 2: It's the Greek equivalent of the sesterce.
21:44
Speaker 1: That's correct. And then he uses the obol, which is
21:47
Speaker 1: smaller than the ass, as a coin of sort of
21:51
Speaker 1: daily use. So if our man Satyricus worked for wages,
21:55
Speaker 1: he would almost certainly be paid in obols.
21:58
Speaker 2: Okay.
21:58
Speaker 4: Yeah.
21:58
Speaker 2: Well, I only know the sister say from, again, asterisks
22:01
Speaker 2: and obelisks. Sorry about that. That's right. How do they
22:05
Speaker 2: account for these things? Were there some ledgers? Were there
22:08
Speaker 2: the records of money going in and out?
22:10
Speaker 4: Yes.
22:11
Speaker 1: So in many cases, just like today, right, it's way
22:14
Speaker 1: easier to keep track of your expenditures on a ledger
22:18
Speaker 1: rather than having to carry coins around with you. And
22:21
Speaker 1: in many cases we can see in Roman Egypt, that's
22:22
Speaker 1: exactly what they did. So we have these long accounts
22:26
Speaker 1: from farms mostly, but also from small businesses in which
22:30
Speaker 1: people are basically paying for things by putting them on account.
22:33
Speaker 1: When I was growing up, this was a normal thing
22:35
Speaker 1: that we used to do when we would go to
22:36
Speaker 1: the grocery store. So we wouldn't carry all the money
22:38
Speaker 1: around with us. We would just say, put it on
22:39
Speaker 1: my account. And because people are highly numerate, even people
22:44
Speaker 1: who couldn't read were numerate, they could negotiate these kinds
22:47
Speaker 1: of systems. And you have a whole population of shopkeepers
22:52
Speaker 1: and managers who some of whom are enslaved people, some
22:55
Speaker 1: of whom aren't, who are basically in the business of
22:57
Speaker 1: keeping all these accounts.
22:59
Speaker 2: So barter, what often people think of as poorer people
23:03
Speaker 2: having to do, especially in a place in a time
23:05
Speaker 2: like ancient Rome, that wasn't as prevalent as people might think.
23:09
Speaker 1: No, this is a world where everyone really thinks in money.
23:12
Speaker 1: And so even if you're not paying in actual coins,
23:15
Speaker 1: everything has a price that you are actually negotiating and
23:18
Speaker 1: imagining in denarii, sisters, whatever. So even though there are
23:23
Speaker 1: parts of the Roman Empire where people don't have coins
23:26
Speaker 1: ready to hand, that doesn't mean that they're using barter.
23:29
Speaker 1: Everything has a price in money.
23:31
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, let's return to our sort of heroic family,
23:35
Speaker 2: the Satyricuses, I guess. I mean, what's a typical last name?
23:39
Speaker 2: Do they have last names?
23:42
Speaker 1: Not always. Let's go with the Satyricuses. Sounds good.
23:45
Speaker 2: Okay, the Satyricus. Satyricus and his kids and his family.
23:49
Speaker 2: his children, his wife, Thesis. Does he control the finances
23:54
Speaker 2: of the family? What does the family look like as
23:57
Speaker 2: a sort of economic unit, but in total, as it were?
24:00
Speaker 2: Because I assume it wasn't just him controlling everything.
24:04
Speaker 1: No, this is, in fact, another many of the things
24:08
Speaker 1: that surprised me and that I argue in my book is, A,
24:12
Speaker 1: that the entire family is contributing income in order to
24:15
Speaker 1: get by. And B, the people who really run the
24:18
Speaker 1: family finances are very often women. So Satyricus' wife Thasys,
24:24
Speaker 1: if we're imagining this hypothetical family, it's far more likely
24:28
Speaker 1: that she's the one who's actually keeping the books. managing
24:32
Speaker 1: how much money is coming in and out, and juggling
24:36
Speaker 1: all of these different complicated ways that these folks have
24:40
Speaker 1: to get by.
24:40
Speaker 2: What about the kids? Will they be working? When can
24:43
Speaker 2: Horace the son go out and help his dad in
24:45
Speaker 2: the fields?
24:45
Speaker 1: So we have a lot of what we would call
24:48
Speaker 1: child labor in the Roman world. Romans probably wouldn't think
24:53
Speaker 1: about it that way. They don't have a separate concept
24:57
Speaker 1: of childhood as a time when you go to school
24:59
Speaker 1: and you're free from work and you're somehow in a
25:02
Speaker 1: different life phase. Instead, children worked as soon as they
25:05
Speaker 1: were able at doing any age-appropriate tasks. So our kid
25:10
Speaker 1: Horace is going to start by doing things like picking
25:13
Speaker 1: up leaves. He'll graduate to controlling some donkeys. His sister, Itiab,
25:21
Speaker 1: might work at herding geese or working with other kinds
25:24
Speaker 1: of small animals. And then they work their way up
25:26
Speaker 1: as soon as they're strong enough and old enough.
25:29
Speaker 2: Well, I have to say, I quite like the sound
25:31
Speaker 2: of that. My children scream child labour as soon as
25:33
Speaker 2: I ask them to tidy up their rooms.
25:35
Speaker 1: Well, you can just threaten them with donkey driving if
25:40
Speaker 1: they give you too much grief.
25:42
Speaker 2: I'm going to try that, Kim. I'm definitely going to
25:43
Speaker 2: try that. To be fair, they'd be thrilled if they
25:46
Speaker 2: heard that we were getting a donkey there.
25:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, actually, I could come up with... Oh, manure spreading.
25:51
Speaker 2: How about that? That sounds far more like a proper punishment.
25:58
Speaker 2: But did Horace, would he have gone to school at all?
26:01
Speaker 2: How much would he earn out in the fields at all,
26:05
Speaker 2: if anything, really?
26:06
Speaker 1: So there's no public education. If Satyricus and Thysus want
26:10
Speaker 1: to send Horace to school, they're going to have to pay.
26:12
Speaker 1: And given that we're talking about the countryside, although there
26:16
Speaker 1: are very large villages, it's probably unlikely that he went
26:19
Speaker 1: to any kind of school. School would have been life,
26:22
Speaker 1: as it were, the school of life. But he would
26:25
Speaker 1: have learned quite a lot, actually, by doing things. Imagine
26:28
Speaker 1: a world in which everyone's thinking in money. Learning basic
26:31
Speaker 1: maths would have been one of the things that he
26:34
Speaker 1: would have grown up with. He also, though, might have
26:37
Speaker 1: been educated by being put out as an apprentice. His
26:40
Speaker 1: parents would have sent him off to work for, say,
26:42
Speaker 1: a weaver or someone working in an olive press, and
26:48
Speaker 1: he would have learned whatever that particular trade was. If
26:52
Speaker 1: he was an apprentice, he probably would have been paid
26:54
Speaker 1: almost nothing and his wages would have been given to
26:57
Speaker 1: his family, but he would have received his food and
27:00
Speaker 1: his clothing. If he's going off in the fields and
27:03
Speaker 1: spreading manure, for instance, he's making about what half his
27:09
Speaker 1: father would have made. So boy wages are a little
27:13
Speaker 1: bit more than half of what male unskilled wages are.
27:17
Speaker 1: So they're not nothing, right? And they really matter for
27:20
Speaker 1: a family that's really on the edge, particularly if you
27:24
Speaker 1: have a couple of children, right? Those two children can
27:27
Speaker 1: earn almost as much as an adult if you can
27:30
Speaker 1: get them work all day long.
27:32
Speaker 2: How much would, you know, Horace and his father be making?
27:35
Speaker 2: Do we have even a rough idea of how many
27:37
Speaker 2: sisters a day or the equivalent in grains?
27:40
Speaker 1: Yes, we have good records for what wages would have
27:43
Speaker 1: been in the time of Satyricus. They would have earned,
27:47
Speaker 1: a male wage laborer would have earned just shy of
27:51
Speaker 1: the equivalent of a drachma or a cistercius a day.
27:54
Speaker 1: And Horace, as I said, a little bit about maybe
27:57
Speaker 1: half of that. And that's not enough to live on.
28:01
Speaker 1: You'd have to get work every single day. And that's
28:03
Speaker 1: incredibly unlikely.
28:06
Speaker 2: How many sesterce in denarius and how many denarius in tenorius?
28:10
Speaker 2: Because they probably would have changed depending on how much
28:13
Speaker 2: silver and gold was in circulation, I guess. But do
28:15
Speaker 2: we have a rough idea?
28:17
Speaker 1: Yes. No, we know pretty well the equivalencies or the,
28:21
Speaker 1: if you like, the relationships between the different metals. So
28:24
Speaker 1: there's four asses to the sesterceus and lots of payment, remember,
28:29
Speaker 1: is happening in these fractions. There's four sister seat per denarius.
28:34
Speaker 1: And then there's 25 denarii in an arias. So the
28:36
Speaker 1: arias is a really high value coin. It's worth a
28:39
Speaker 1: lot more money. You know, we used to think that
28:42
Speaker 1: the arias was a kind of savings coin or a
28:45
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, one of these coins that you
28:47
Speaker 1: would use, you know, is, I don't know, some sort
28:50
Speaker 1: of prestige item and you wouldn't actually use it in
28:52
Speaker 1: day-to-day exchange. This turns out actually to be wrong. We
28:55
Speaker 1: know this from Pompeii. We have the cash boxes of businesses,
28:59
Speaker 1: and they've got RE in them. So if someone's rolling
29:01
Speaker 1: up and is going to buy some really high-value item,
29:04
Speaker 1: they're going to use the coin that's best served to
29:07
Speaker 1: do that. They're going to use the REs. And we
29:09
Speaker 1: know that even though these silver coins have a higher
29:13
Speaker 1: value than the bronze ones and the gold are really valuable,
29:16
Speaker 1: even ordinary people, if they have to do high-value transactions–
29:20
Speaker 1: and remember, farmers– At harvest time, right, they've got a
29:24
Speaker 1: lot of stuff moving through their hands. They're going to
29:28
Speaker 1: use these same coins. They may not get to hold
29:30
Speaker 1: on to them because they have to pay a lot
29:33
Speaker 1: out in expenses as they're bringing in an income. But
29:36
Speaker 1: they're using the full range of coinage available.
29:39
Speaker 2: If I rocked up at some merchant in Pompeii, for example,
29:43
Speaker 2: and had an Aureus, what could I get for that?
29:45
Speaker 1: Well, you could get many, many, many days of food, obviously,
29:49
Speaker 1: probably many months of food if you're eating pretty frugally
29:52
Speaker 1: with your aureus. You could also buy, I would say,
29:57
Speaker 1: many lengths of cloth. Cloth is very expensive. And clothing
30:02
Speaker 1: is very expensive.
30:03
Speaker 2: What about Thysis? Would she be working? What would she
30:06
Speaker 2: be doing? Apart from controlling the purse strings, I guess.
30:10
Speaker 1: Thysis is working a little bit beneath our radar. Because
30:15
Speaker 1: we have lots of wage records, most of those wage
30:18
Speaker 1: records involve men and boys. And every once in a while,
30:22
Speaker 1: we see women appearing in our wage records, and they're
30:25
Speaker 1: not necessarily working for wages per se. They're doing things
30:28
Speaker 1: like selling small amounts of pretty highly specialized agricultural products
30:34
Speaker 1: like carob seeds. They seem to be doing a lot
30:37
Speaker 1: of selling of feed for animals, particularly birds and things.
30:42
Speaker 1: But the other thing that women are doing to make money,
30:46
Speaker 1: they're almost certainly working in the fields alongside their husbands.
30:49
Speaker 1: But we have a lot of evidence for women really
30:52
Speaker 1: working in the sort of more complicated areas of finance.
30:55
Speaker 1: They're big money lenders. Lots of the evidence that we
30:58
Speaker 1: have for the lending of money comes from women. We
31:01
Speaker 1: have some women in Pompeii who appear to be working
31:04
Speaker 1: out of perhaps their family's workshop. And presumably they're helping
31:10
Speaker 1: run the books for that workshop, but they also appear
31:12
Speaker 1: to be lending money. And this makes sense, right? If
31:14
Speaker 1: the women are the ones who are the managers and
31:16
Speaker 1: the bookkeepers of the family, it makes sense that if
31:20
Speaker 1: anyone's going to get involved in money lending, it's going
31:22
Speaker 1: to be them, right? Because they know how much money
31:24
Speaker 1: is coming in and coming out. The other thing that
31:26
Speaker 1: women do And this also applies to girls. So Atia,
31:30
Speaker 1: Thysa's daughter, would have certainly been doing this. All women
31:33
Speaker 1: are spinning. Cloth is very difficult to make. You have
31:37
Speaker 1: to spin the wool or linen, and then you have
31:39
Speaker 1: to weave it. And everybody can spin. In the Roman world,
31:43
Speaker 1: it seems only women spun, women and girls. And we
31:47
Speaker 1: don't have a ton of evidence for how much they
31:49
Speaker 1: could make doing that. But the evidence that we have
31:51
Speaker 1: suggests that they might actually make almost as much as
31:56
Speaker 1: an unskilled male laborer doing spinning if they were quick.
32:00
Speaker 1: So I think spinning and the textile industry generally is
32:03
Speaker 1: a big part of women's contribution to overall family income.
32:08
Speaker 2: So that would have been both the wife thesis and
32:10
Speaker 2: Atiyah would presumably be helping out as sort of a
32:13
Speaker 2: spinning cloth at home because they could sell it for
32:17
Speaker 2: lots of sesterce and denarius, I guess.
32:20
Speaker 1: That's right. Or in Egypt for obols and drachma.
32:23
Speaker 2: Yes. Yes, exactly. Can we return to how they control
32:26
Speaker 2: the finances? Because I guess even if some of them
32:28
Speaker 2: didn't work or didn't do that much work or we
32:31
Speaker 2: don't know exactly what they did, how did them being
32:35
Speaker 2: in control of the finances work in practice?
32:38
Speaker 1: Women's sort of place in the Roman economic world is
32:43
Speaker 1: sort of contradictory, right? On the one hand, it's a
32:46
Speaker 1: patriarchal society and women in theory are not allowed to
32:50
Speaker 1: participate in politics. They're not allowed to achieve the highest
32:54
Speaker 1: ranks in Roman society. But in practice, they actually had
32:58
Speaker 1: a huge amount of economic power for one reason in particular,
33:02
Speaker 1: which is in the Roman world, very unusually historically, women
33:06
Speaker 1: are allowed almost total control of their dowries, which meant
33:10
Speaker 1: that if a Roman couple divorced, the woman gets to
33:15
Speaker 1: keep her dowry. The man usually gets to use a
33:19
Speaker 1: portion of it during their marriage, but he has to
33:21
Speaker 1: return it, its value, right, if they separate. And this
33:26
Speaker 1: meant that whatever women took into their marriage, which in
33:29
Speaker 1: some cases was even for poor families, a not insignificant
33:33
Speaker 1: amount of money, several months worth of income at the
33:36
Speaker 1: bottom end, not to mention some plots of land, et cetera,
33:40
Speaker 1: they got to use that. And they got to use
33:42
Speaker 1: that as collateral for loans. They got to use that
33:46
Speaker 1: in the event of some sort of economic hardship. So
33:50
Speaker 1: in that respect, women's sort of de facto very low
33:55
Speaker 1: position actually becomes a position of a certain amount of
34:00
Speaker 1: power and influence.
34:01
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, this is fascinating. We are going to
34:03
Speaker 2: be taking a quick break here, though, Kim, because I mean,
34:06
Speaker 2: we have so many things i still want to ask
34:08
Speaker 2: about when we come back we're going to be talking
34:10
Speaker 2: about something we've been talking a little bit around the
34:13
Speaker 2: edges but how ordinary people manage their debts in the
34:17
Speaker 2: ancient roman empire because uh there would have been of
34:20
Speaker 2: course plenty of years where droughts ruined harvests interest payments
34:24
Speaker 2: start mounting up what was a family to do well
34:28
Speaker 2: the answer lies in ancient rome's hidden credit system and
34:32
Speaker 2: we're going to get to that right after the.
34:34
Speaker 4: Break Investors today are most worried about three key factors,
34:46
Speaker 4: interest rates, the corporate credit cycle and the impact of
34:48
Speaker 4: artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is impacting.
34:52
Speaker 1: The jobs market and corporate margins.
34:54
Speaker 4: Interest rates are of concern because people are wondering when
34:57
Speaker 4: will the Fed start to raise or lower interest rates again.
35:00
Speaker 4: And finally, the corporate credit cycle. If the economy is
35:03
Speaker 4: to weaken, what does that mean for the ability of
35:06
Speaker 4: corporate credit to hold up? We are thinking about the
35:08
Speaker 4: next generation and constantly adapting our portfolios to meet their needs.
35:19
Speaker 2: And we are back. So we're in the second century
35:23
Speaker 2: Roman Egypt. We're discussing how the economy at the time
35:26
Speaker 2: operated for the 90%. Not the elites, not the senators,
35:30
Speaker 2: not the emperors, just ordinary people, the plebs. And to
35:34
Speaker 2: do this, we're looking at a semi-fictional ancient Roman farming family.
35:39
Speaker 2: There's Satyricus, our tenant farmer, his wife Thasys, and his
35:43
Speaker 2: lovely children, son Horus and daughter Athia. And we're about
35:47
Speaker 2: to throw them, well, sorry, some terrible, horrible, no good
35:52
Speaker 2: economic problems that were typical of the time. Let's say
35:55
Speaker 2: there was a drought and the satiricuses find themselves deep
36:00
Speaker 2: in debt because of it. So Kim, what would happen
36:02
Speaker 2: in that kind of scenario?
36:04
Speaker 1: So drought is a big one. And in Egypt, right,
36:07
Speaker 1: even having too much water, say the Nile flood is
36:10
Speaker 1: too high. This also throws our family into jeopardy. All
36:14
Speaker 1: of these things, particularly for a family that's really living
36:17
Speaker 1: with really small margins of survival, this creates enormous problems
36:22
Speaker 1: for them. So we have families who we see confronting this,
36:27
Speaker 1: and they would take their children, like Horace and Atia,
36:29
Speaker 1: and they would basically put them into a form of
36:31
Speaker 1: kind of debt bondage. This also means that you might
36:36
Speaker 1: look for other ways to get members of your family
36:38
Speaker 1: off your books, as it were. You might try to
36:40
Speaker 1: put them into an apprentice arrangement. But the most likely
36:44
Speaker 1: scenario is these Romans are not just going to lie
36:47
Speaker 1: down and die when something like this happens. These folks
36:51
Speaker 1: are real hustlers. They're going to try to find a
36:53
Speaker 1: way out of this problem. And in a world in
36:56
Speaker 1: which everything revolves around money, they're going to try to
36:59
Speaker 1: get a loan.
37:00
Speaker 2: Just quick on debt bondage. Was it that they were
37:02
Speaker 2: collateral for a loan or they were kind of sold
37:04
Speaker 2: into debt, kind of indentured servitude? What would it look like?
37:08
Speaker 1: We have some really incredibly sad archives of a family
37:12
Speaker 1: who actually, they're not even that poor, really. The guy
37:15
Speaker 1: is a priest in a local village. He has a
37:16
Speaker 1: certain amount of status, but he's constantly running out of cash.
37:20
Speaker 1: He has a big family and he.
37:23
Speaker 1: He basically exchanges what is his very younger sister and
37:27
Speaker 1: in earlier cases, his brother and his daughter, a whole
37:31
Speaker 1: range of his family members in which their labor serves
37:36
Speaker 1: as the interest on a loan. So he still has
37:39
Speaker 1: to pay back the principal and their labor serves as
37:42
Speaker 1: the interest. And they do this arrangement for years, years
37:45
Speaker 1: and years and years. And then they come back and
37:47
Speaker 1: do the same thing with their children. They basically let
37:50
Speaker 1: their children out in term for either the loan itself
37:55
Speaker 1: or for the interest on the loan. So these arrangements,
37:59
Speaker 1: they look horrific to us, right? We can't imagine children
38:03
Speaker 1: being used as the collateral on a loan. This seems
38:05
Speaker 1: to be pretty common practice, particularly in these moments where
38:08
Speaker 1: families get into financial difficulty.
38:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I guess they have value, obvious value for
38:14
Speaker 2: the families. I guess it makes sense.
38:15
Speaker 1: They have labor value.
38:16
Speaker 2: In a terrible way.
38:17
Speaker 4: Yeah.
38:17
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
38:18
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, just to return to the loan system,
38:21
Speaker 2: the credit system, obviously one of my favorite issues of
38:24
Speaker 2: all time. There's this tremendous line in your book from
38:27
Speaker 2: a Roman dream interpreter. What's it called? Artemidorus. And I
38:32
Speaker 2: just want to read it out because I think it
38:34
Speaker 2: will resonate with people even today, right? According to Artemidorus,
38:39
Speaker 2: to dream of borrowing money portends death. To dream of
38:42
Speaker 2: the death of a moneylender portends life. And that, I think,
38:46
Speaker 2: for anybody who's owed a hell of a lot of
38:49
Speaker 2: money to somebody like a bank, that's going to ring true,
38:53
Speaker 2: I think, unfortunately. Can you tell us a little bit
38:56
Speaker 2: about what kind of financial instruments or credit system there
38:59
Speaker 2: was for So a family like the satiricuses?
39:03
Speaker 1: They're very complicated and they range from, you know, satiricus
39:08
Speaker 1: goes and finds a friend and he gets him to
39:09
Speaker 1: lend him some money and there's, you know, that's the
39:13
Speaker 1: end of it. We used to think that this was
39:16
Speaker 1: how Roman credit worked, just between friends, right? No interest,
39:19
Speaker 1: you know, this is just one of the glues that
39:22
Speaker 1: knit society together. Increasingly, we're convinced, alas, that this was
39:26
Speaker 1: not true. And most credit loaner were for money, for interest.
39:33
Speaker 1: So that might take the form of simply borrowing money
39:36
Speaker 1: with interest, and we write all this down. It might
39:38
Speaker 1: take the form of using something as collateral. We just
39:42
Speaker 1: talked about using children as collateral. It might mean using
39:46
Speaker 1: your wife's dowry as collateral. It might mean using the
39:50
Speaker 1: house that you're living in as collateral and use these
39:54
Speaker 1: to basically cement the loan, as it were. If you're
39:58
Speaker 1: a farmer, like satiricus, here's an extraordinary thing that you
40:00
Speaker 1: might do. Satiricus, as we talked about, might have a
40:04
Speaker 1: tiny plot of, say, vines for making wines. They could
40:09
Speaker 1: try to sell their grapes before they're ready in advance,
40:15
Speaker 1: as it were, as a kind of futures. This would
40:18
Speaker 1: guarantee them a certain kind of return. And then the
40:21
Speaker 1: person who bought them, if they could then turn around
40:23
Speaker 1: and sell that wine for more, would actually make some money.
40:26
Speaker 1: So it's a kind of form of futures trading. And
40:28
Speaker 1: it's a means of offloading risk onto somebody else, but
40:33
Speaker 1: also offloading potentially a little bit of profit that you
40:36
Speaker 1: might make. So there's a whole range of ways in
40:41
Speaker 1: which Romans might actually get a loan. We have a
40:44
Speaker 1: really interesting case of a shepherd who, not unlike the satiricus,
40:48
Speaker 1: actually doesn't seem to own any of his sheep. He's
40:50
Speaker 1: leasing them from someone else. He sells their future wool,
40:55
Speaker 1: which is really interesting, before it's being sheared. Okay.
40:59
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, the financial nerd in me is positively
41:01
Speaker 2: thrilled at the idea of a shepherd selling wool futures
41:04
Speaker 2: on rented sheep yeah on rented sheep as well that's
41:07
Speaker 2: amazing exactly but so obviously women played a huge role
41:12
Speaker 2: in the financial management of a family what role did
41:16
Speaker 2: they play when you know they hit financial difficulty.
41:20
Speaker 1: We have quite a lot of evidence of women actually
41:23
Speaker 1: lending money, so acting as moneylenders, and they are the
41:25
Speaker 1: ones conducting those arrangements. They're figuring out what interest rates
41:29
Speaker 1: they're going to charge. They're above all figuring out what
41:31
Speaker 1: collateral they're going to ask in exchange for these loans.
41:34
Speaker 1: We have some graffiti, actually, which serve as the actual
41:39
Speaker 1: textual contractual contract between some female moneylenders in Pompeii and
41:47
Speaker 1: the people they're lending their money to. It's kind of amazing, right?
41:49
Speaker 1: Like you scratch it on the wall as the record
41:53
Speaker 1: of our credit debt relationship. The other thing that women do,
41:57
Speaker 1: because they're in charge of the household, they're also in
41:59
Speaker 1: charge of the household's things. And as I said before,
42:03
Speaker 1: despite this economic precarity, Romans have a lot of things.
42:07
Speaker 1: They take their little bit of money and they invest
42:10
Speaker 1: it in consumer goods. Those consumer goods, of course, have
42:13
Speaker 1: a resale value. Pawn shops. And the records that we
42:17
Speaker 1: have from pawn shops are overwhelmingly dominated by women. Women
42:21
Speaker 1: going and pawning everything from clothes to any metal objects.
42:27
Speaker 1: Metal objects have certain value and they retain that value.
42:29
Speaker 1: We have a woman pawning her bathtub, which seems to
42:33
Speaker 1: be made of metal. And because women control those objects,
42:37
Speaker 1: they're the ones who are going to go to the
42:39
Speaker 1: pawn shop. pawn them for some kind of cash when
42:41
Speaker 1: the family needs cash, and then hopefully go and redeem
42:44
Speaker 1: those pawns when the family's a little bit more flush.
42:46
Speaker 2: Were Romans in general everywhere always in debt? Or was
42:50
Speaker 2: it something that would wax and wane a little bit,
42:52
Speaker 2: depending on, I guess, the droughts or the flooding of
42:55
Speaker 2: the Nile or volcano eruptions?
42:59
Speaker 1: The evidence that I've found doesn't describe, as maybe David
43:02
Speaker 1: Graeber would have it, a world of people who are
43:04
Speaker 1: in debt and that sort of class of debtors. Instead,
43:07
Speaker 1: what people are using, they're using credit as another monetary instrument.
43:13
Speaker 1: So let's imagine that I have– I'm a farmer again.
43:16
Speaker 1: Let's go back to our guy, Satiricus. And the harvest
43:18
Speaker 1: has just come in and I got a ton of grain.
43:21
Speaker 1: But I have actually no cash. I don't really want
43:25
Speaker 1: to sell my grain right now because the price is
43:27
Speaker 1: really low because it's the harvest. So I'm going to
43:29
Speaker 1: take out a loan because I need cash.
43:32
Speaker 4: Right.
43:32
Speaker 1: But I'm actually not poor right now. I've got lots
43:35
Speaker 1: of one kind of thing, but I need another kind
43:37
Speaker 1: of thing. This we see all the time so that
43:40
Speaker 1: people are using debt and credit relationships, not necessarily because
43:45
Speaker 1: they're desperately poor, because they need a certain kind of money.
43:51
Speaker 2: Right.
43:51
Speaker 1: And money can be cash money. It can be credit money.
43:53
Speaker 1: It can be a commodity. And they need to move
43:56
Speaker 1: between those, if you like, modes of money. And in
44:00
Speaker 1: this complicated money world, this is what people are using
44:04
Speaker 1: money to do. So just like today, right, just because
44:07
Speaker 1: I have a mortgage on my house doesn't necessarily mean
44:10
Speaker 1: I'm poor. I don't know why we assume this of
44:13
Speaker 1: ancient people, right? Because they have to take out money,
44:15
Speaker 1: they're necessarily poor, or that only poor people take out debt, right?
44:19
Speaker 1: And rich people are all creditors. Lots of the 90%
44:24
Speaker 1: are lending money to their neighbors, so they're the creditors.
44:27
Speaker 1: They're just doing it at a tiny scale. And I
44:30
Speaker 1: think one of the most interesting examples of this, where
44:32
Speaker 1: you really see how complicated these relationships are, is some
44:36
Speaker 1: of the poorest people that we know about from the
44:38
Speaker 1: Roman world, and that's miners. These are people working the
44:42
Speaker 1: most miserable job, right? They're mining granite in the middle
44:46
Speaker 1: of Egypt. It's hot. It's horrible. And we have all
44:49
Speaker 1: of these records of them basically using their rations and
44:54
Speaker 1: their tiny amounts of pay in these complicated credit relationships.
44:59
Speaker 2: But is it the problem that almost like we talked
45:01
Speaker 2: about the heuristic of us thinking the Roman Empire was wealthy,
45:05
Speaker 2: ergo Romans were wealthy, but in the same way we
45:07
Speaker 2: think of money physical gold or silver coins as money
45:11
Speaker 2: and debt is inherently bad and you're poor but in
45:14
Speaker 2: reality credit is a system that you know the difference
45:18
Speaker 2: between credit and money sometimes gets very wishy-washy in practice
45:22
Speaker 2: and certainly even in everyday roman economics that is the
45:25
Speaker 2: case with like shop ledgers for example where you you
45:28
Speaker 2: buy stuff a lot of it on credit essentially it
45:30
Speaker 2: doesn't mean anything other than that it's a simple way
45:33
Speaker 2: rather than lugging coins around all.
45:35
Speaker 1: The time That's right. And in a world in which, okay,
45:38
Speaker 1: we would say in money parlance, it's highly monetized. That
45:42
Speaker 1: is to say there's a lot of cash money around.
45:45
Speaker 1: There's still times and places where there aren't. And so
45:48
Speaker 1: you have to come up with some system in which
45:51
Speaker 1: you're going to get around that problem. And so using
45:54
Speaker 1: the ledger, right, ledger accounting is one way of getting
45:57
Speaker 1: around that. but also using credit and debt as a
46:01
Speaker 1: means of moving money around or compensating for one kind
46:05
Speaker 1: of money with another, that's another way of dealing with that.
46:08
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's return to our imaginary, semi-imaginary family, the
46:13
Speaker 2: Satyricuses in 2nd century AD in Roman Egypt. And let's
46:20
Speaker 2: imagine two scenarios. Let's say the family does manage to
46:24
Speaker 2: get out of debt. They manage to stay afloat. It's
46:26
Speaker 2: all great. saw gravy until tragedy strike. Satyricus, our doughty
46:32
Speaker 2: fictional farmer, he sadly passes away. How did poor people
46:36
Speaker 2: manage funerals, especially specifically, I guess, in ancient Roman Egypt?
46:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, in Egypt, it's fascinating.
46:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, they care about death and everything that happens afterwards.
46:46
Speaker 1: They really do. And that doesn't end in the Roman period.
46:48
Speaker 1: So they continue to practice mummification right the way through
46:52
Speaker 1: the Roman period. And so the Satyricus family, if they
46:56
Speaker 1: could have, would have set some money aside in order
46:59
Speaker 1: to pay for Satyricus' burial and ideally his mummification. And
47:03
Speaker 1: we have mummies of ordinary working people from Roman Egypt.
47:07
Speaker 1: So we know that this wasn't impossible. It was costly.
47:10
Speaker 1: You definitely had to plan ahead. So you had to save.
47:13
Speaker 1: We kept talking about debt and credit a minute ago.
47:15
Speaker 1: We didn't talk about savings. Savings is hard, but one
47:19
Speaker 1: of the things that you would have saved for in
47:21
Speaker 1: addition to your daughter's dowries was your funeral expenses. In
47:25
Speaker 1: parts of the Roman world, we also know of clubs.
47:28
Speaker 1: These are almost like savings clubs, but particularly to save
47:31
Speaker 1: for funerals. So you join one of these clubs, you'd
47:34
Speaker 1: make a small contribution on a yearly basis, and then
47:37
Speaker 1: the club would see to your burial. Particularly, for instance,
47:39
Speaker 1: if you didn't have a family that might look after
47:41
Speaker 1: your burial. So, yep, someone like Satiricus is not going
47:47
Speaker 1: to take that problem lightly.
47:49
Speaker 2: Okay, well, let's turn to a slightly more depressing scenario
47:53
Speaker 2: where The satiricuses didn't get out of debt. They are
47:57
Speaker 2: financially stricken. And then our farmer hero passes away anyway.
48:02
Speaker 2: What happens to the satiricuses after a satiricus himself passes away?
48:06
Speaker 1: There's the positive potential outcomes and the negative ones, right?
48:09
Speaker 1: Let's look at the negative ones first.
48:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do the negative. I want to end on
48:13
Speaker 2: a happy note for.
48:14
Speaker 4: Our hero family.
48:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to end on a happy note. Don't worry.
48:17
Speaker 2: Exactly. This is a happy podcast.
48:19
Speaker 1: And it's actually true to boot. So the negative scenario, right,
48:24
Speaker 1: is that those kids get sold off into that form
48:27
Speaker 1: of debt bondage so that their mother might get a
48:31
Speaker 1: loan in order to pay back some of these other
48:34
Speaker 1: expenses that they may have. This potentially is both gets
48:39
Speaker 1: her kids off her books, as it were. She doesn't
48:41
Speaker 1: have to pay for their upkeep while she may then
48:44
Speaker 1: incur debts, which are potentially maybe easier to pay off.
48:49
Speaker 1: So they might've had to sell their children off. They might've,
48:52
Speaker 1: if they could put them in apprenticeship, I mean, worst
48:54
Speaker 1: case scenario, right? They starve. We certainly have human skeletal
48:59
Speaker 1: evidence that people suffered from malnutrition. So that's the negative
49:04
Speaker 1: scenario for a family like satiricus, who's the second year
49:07
Speaker 1: of his family. If the weight main wage earner dies,
49:11
Speaker 1: remember though, right? It actually could be his wife that
49:13
Speaker 1: dies because she may make as much money spinning as
49:16
Speaker 1: he does, as he does. Um, Possibly. scenario. And this
49:21
Speaker 1: actually happened in the case of the real satiricuses. He
49:24
Speaker 1: did die and they have a mountain of debt. And
49:27
Speaker 1: then the records break off. We find them about 10
49:29
Speaker 1: years later and suddenly Thyssis has managed to clear all
49:33
Speaker 1: of his debts. Hundreds of drachmas in debt that somehow
49:37
Speaker 1: she manages to clear. We don't know how she did this,
49:40
Speaker 1: so we can only speculate. How in the world might
49:43
Speaker 1: you do this? The first is that you really double
49:46
Speaker 1: down on some of those cash crops and you get lucky, right?
49:49
Speaker 1: You do your field of time or your grapes and
49:52
Speaker 1: it's a year where everybody's crops fails and yours don't.
49:55
Speaker 1: The prices are really high and boom, right? In one season,
49:59
Speaker 1: you've actually managed to wipe out those debts. There's lots
50:03
Speaker 1: of other ways that potentially we can imagine the hustling
50:09
Speaker 1: that we see these people doing, selling other kinds of things,
50:13
Speaker 1: selling commodities, selling their own labor, making a killing on
50:19
Speaker 1: money lending. These are the kinds of things that allow
50:22
Speaker 1: you to put away small amounts of money. That, I think,
50:25
Speaker 1: is one of the ways in which a family that
50:27
Speaker 1: loses everything a wage earner, maybe not the male one,
50:30
Speaker 1: maybe losing the woman is almost as bad, how they
50:34
Speaker 1: might have actually managed to clear some of those debts.
50:37
Speaker 2: Well, I'm glad that Thasys proved to be such an
50:41
Speaker 2: incredible finance aide that she managed to get her family
50:43
Speaker 2: out from under this.
50:45
Speaker 1: She did.
50:45
Speaker 2: Maybe Satyricus, maybe he was the useless guy, really. Maybe
50:48
Speaker 2: she's the real hero of our story. I take it
50:50
Speaker 2: all back. Yeah. So she's our hero.
50:52
Speaker 1: She is in the end, actually.
50:54
Speaker 2: She is. I mean, turning a little bit to modern parallel,
50:58
Speaker 2: I mean, the whole hustle culture thing, that sounds quite similar, right?
51:03
Speaker 2: I mean, what I guess rich people call a portfolio
51:05
Speaker 2: career or, you know, other people call a gig economy today.
51:09
Speaker 2: But like, basically, you might not have enough money to
51:12
Speaker 2: survive from your main job. You cobble together all these
51:14
Speaker 2: different other income streams. You do whatever you can to
51:17
Speaker 2: stay afloat. That sounds quite similar, right? Yeah.
51:20
Speaker 1: It's becoming more and more similar. The United States' most
51:24
Speaker 1: recent census has shown that more and more poor families
51:27
Speaker 1: are having to get by with multiple income streams. We
51:30
Speaker 1: live in a wage-earning society, and in the United States,
51:33
Speaker 1: our minimum wage is extremely low. So it used to
51:37
Speaker 1: be that a minimum wage job could just barely provide
51:41
Speaker 1: the foundation for a family income. That's no longer true
51:44
Speaker 1: in the United States. And so this hustle economy, right,
51:47
Speaker 1: having you say you work a salary job, but then
51:50
Speaker 1: you drive for Uber or, you know, you do something online.
51:55
Speaker 1: These are becoming increasingly the way that modern American families
51:58
Speaker 1: get by. They would have found much to understand in
52:03
Speaker 1: ancient Rome. having all of these different income streams, watching
52:07
Speaker 1: some of them come and go, using the little bit
52:11
Speaker 1: of money that you have to actually give out in
52:14
Speaker 1: loans to other people so you might make a tiny
52:16
Speaker 1: bit of interest. All of this, what I'm calling hustle,
52:19
Speaker 1: I think is one of the surprising things about how
52:23
Speaker 1: Romans got by. It's super complicated.
52:25
Speaker 2: I don't think the founding fathers quite envisaged where they
52:28
Speaker 2: thought of America as a modern Rome, thought about that
52:31
Speaker 2: kind of basic, having to work constantly just to stay
52:35
Speaker 2: afloat was kind of what they aspired to.
52:37
Speaker 1: No, in fact, and you know, it's interesting. Americans' relationship
52:41
Speaker 1: with ancient Rome is a very particular one. And they,
52:44
Speaker 1: particularly now, we imagine very particular aspects of Rome. We
52:48
Speaker 1: certainly don't imagine how ordinary people survived as one of
52:52
Speaker 1: the things that we've borrowed in creating the American republic.
52:57
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, sadly, we are coming to the end
52:59
Speaker 2: of this week's episode. So Kim, thanks so much. This
53:02
Speaker 2: has been fascinating. I am curious, though, what is like
53:05
Speaker 2: one thing you'd want listeners and viewers as well to
53:09
Speaker 2: take away when it comes to the financial lives of
53:12
Speaker 2: ordinary Romans back then?
53:14
Speaker 1: I would love it if people imagined ordinary people and
53:18
Speaker 1: even poor people as not just passive people, you know,
53:22
Speaker 1: at the mercy of some sort of systems of power.
53:25
Speaker 1: These are people who would force their mother to lend
53:28
Speaker 1: them money at interest. These are people who, you know,
53:32
Speaker 1: would sell their children to live another day. They show
53:36
Speaker 1: an astonishing amount of grit, even doing things that we
53:38
Speaker 1: might regard as, you know, morally abhorrent. But they're not passive.
53:44
Speaker 1: And they live their economic lives through these immensely complex instruments.
53:51
Speaker 1: And I think all of these things defy the kind
53:53
Speaker 1: of categories that we put on people in the past,
53:56
Speaker 1: rich and poor, debtors and creditors. We like to divide
53:59
Speaker 1: the past into these categories because it seems so remote
54:03
Speaker 1: and we don't have a lot of information. And so
54:05
Speaker 1: It's easier to just simplify things. When we really dig
54:08
Speaker 1: into the complexity, I think we find a world that, A,
54:11
Speaker 1: we can relate to a lot more, and B, that
54:14
Speaker 1: really astounds us for the amount of grit and determination
54:20
Speaker 1: that people had in addition to their constant, complicated sophistication. Okay.
54:27
Speaker 2: Well, that is a tremendous note to end on. So
54:30
Speaker 2: thanks for being here today, Kim.
54:32
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Robyn.
54:34
Speaker 2: Well, that's sadly it for this episode of The Story
54:37
Speaker 2: of Money. If you liked this episode, then please do subscribe, comment,
54:40
Speaker 2: like the show, we read the comments. And if you
54:43
Speaker 2: really enjoyed it, well, then come and join us at
54:46
Speaker 2: the FT Weekend Festival this September at Kenwood House in London.
54:50
Speaker 2: Dylan and I are going to be talking to the
54:52
Speaker 2: author David McWilliams about what Dante thought about bankers. Shock, horror,
54:57
Speaker 2: it's not good. It's definitely one of the worst circles
55:01
Speaker 2: of hell. The details, including a special discount promo, are
55:06
Speaker 2: in the show notes. And until then, I'm Robin Wigglesworth,
55:10
Speaker 2: and we'll meet here again next week.