Invisible Romans (16 page)

3
SUBJECTION AND SURVIVAL: THE POOR

IT IS QUITE REASONABLE TO SUPPOSE
that the great mass of people in the Roman world were poor. The poor were free men and women who lived an essentially hand-to-mouth existence, i.e. those who were on the edge of having enough just to live on, who seldom had enough to save, invest, and use to change their situation. Their consuming economic and psychological orientation was just staying alive. Getting ahead remained a possibility, but not a probability and, as I will show, it was not an active concept in their mind world. From the Romano-Grecian world itself, the astrological work
Carmen Astrologicum
has much the same definition of poverty. There it is defined as not having ‘bread to fill his belly or clothes in which to clothe himself’ and ‘not finding his daily bread’ (1.22, 1.24). Artemidorus in his
Interpretation of Dreams
locates the poor at the very bottom of society: ‘The poor are like the paltry, obscure places into which shit and other refuse is thrown, or anything else of inconsequence’ (2.9).

A subsistence way of life is an easily understood measure that encompasses a wide range of situations, from the beggar on the street to the peasant, tenant farmer, and day-laborer. It stops short of what I call ordinary people, those who had some resource cushion, but were not wealthy enough to break into the sociopolitical-economic world of the elite. This upper level of ‘the poor’ is necessarily fuzzy, however. Although a slightly more successful artisan would be an ordinary
person, the poor artisan, barely making a living, would qualify as ‘poor,’ much like cobbler Micyllus in Lucian’s tale of Hades:

Well, I’ll lament, then, since you wish it, Hermes – Alas, my scraps of leather! Alas, my old shoes! Alackaday, my rotten sandals! Unlucky man that never again will I go hungry from morning to night or wander about in winter barefooted and half-naked, with my teeth chattering for cold! (
Downward Journey
20/Harmon)

To offer a rough quantification, it is likely that a cash income of around 300 denarii per year would keep a reasonably sized family above the subsistence level in all but the larger cities; this would be the equivalent of about a denarius a day throughout the year. Although this was probably about the best standard wage, the lower wage of half a denarius a day was common. In addition, the chronic underemployment and fluctuating demand for labor and products in both urban and rural worlds meant that most people were not regularly employed and not paid the best wages; they lived on the edge much if not all of the time. These are the poor.

It is reasonable to ask if it is justifiable to lump all those living a hand-to-mouth existence together when I examine a mind world. After all, it can well be argued that a poor family farming a meager plot, regularly on the edge of starvation but at least with some access to their own food supply, has a fundamentally different outlook from that of a beggar or day-laborer. However, what they share is the highly conditional state of their lives: they are the least able to control their lot and to deal with an always uncertain future. A similar state of powerlessness and always near, if not real, desperation unites them in their attitudes toward what is important, which strategies work best for survival, and how to view their place in the world. And so in this chapter I focus on all free folk in difficult if not desperate circumstances as a permanent condition.

It is not hard to imagine who these people might be. Peasants on the land are an obvious group. The standard definition of a peasant is someone who works his own land, and there were many such independent farmers during the empire. The
Moretum,
a literary composition in the style of Virgil, captures to a degree the reality of a farmer’s life lived in squalor, with very basic food to eat and an income supplemented by
meager sales of garden vegetables in the town market. Likewise tenant farmers were common men who, if they ever had owned the land they worked, had lost it through debt to a landlord who now allowed them to stay in return for a fee or percentage of the land’s produce each year. The parable of the tenants illustrates not only their situation, but the possibility they might cause trouble for the landlord:

There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey. When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said. But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. Jesus asked: Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? ‘He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,’ they replied, ‘and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.’ (Matthew 21:33–41

The good tenant, therefore, works the landowner’s land and pays what is owed on time. But he does not own the land, and the parable illustrates the tension that existed between the renter and the owner, including the possibility of eviction.

In rural areas, nonslave agricultural laborers also abounded, men without land but with muscle and skill to rent out as needed during the year. The New Testament parable of the workers in the vineyard captures the lot of these men:

For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’ ‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered. He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’ (Matthew 20:1–8)

And Timon in Lucian’s tale makes even less for his labors. Timon, a once-rich man, has lost everything and so his position in society. To avoid the loss of face this entails:

… therefore my wrongs have driven me to this outlying farm, where, dressed in skins, I till the soil as a hired laborer at four obols [that is, half a denarius] a day, philosophizing with the solitude and with my pick. (
The Misanthrope
6/Harmon)

Such men waited all day for work, sometimes in vain; certainly, those seeking work almost always outnumbered those hired, so on any given day a man could easily go home with no income to show for it.

As for the poor in towns, the elite poet Martial points his epigrams at a number of examples. Beggars, of course, abounded; they begged in hoarse voices for the bread that would be thrown to dogs (
Epigrams
10.5.5). He refers to ‘beggar’s bridge’, apparently a hangout, as were any covered spaces, such as beneath an aqueduct (
Epigrams
12.32.25). He describes the life of a homeless person: shut out of the archway where he holed up, the winter makes him miserable; the dogs set upon him; birds try to take what he has – the image is of one the dead and unburied (
Epigrams
12.32.25). The New Testament has a number of examples of beggars at town gates – apparently a favorite spot – and elsewhere. Others sought work as it might occasionally present itself – being a porter, messenger, day-laborer in construction, or whatever proved available. Lucian, for example, notes that typical jobs of the poor included selling salt fish, cobbling sandals, and begging at crossroads.
Although in some larger towns a public dole might to some extent alleviate the situation of the poor, such a dole would have reached only a small fraction of the poor population of the empire as a whole and can be ignored as a factor in the elaboration of the poor’s mind world. In fact it is important to ignore much of what has been written about the poor based upon our sources for the city of Rome. Rome and its population was an aberration in the empire both for its size and for its political importance as the immediate milieu of the governing class. As tempting as it is to equate the Roman plebs with the urban poor when writing about the poor of the empire, the temptation must be resisted and material from Rome used very judiciously to be sure that only elements representative of the wider empire’s poor are used as evidence.

While the general outline is clear enough, the state of the sources means that it is impossible to write a detailed account of how the poor lived and how they viewed their world in Roman times. Their treatment in death embodies their perceived worth in life: their remains were cremated and placed in unmarked urns, or their carcasses were thrown into mass graves; in Italy, on the Isola Sacra between Ostia and Rome, and in North Africa such interments have been discovered, while Horace speaks of an area of the Esquiline Hill as the place where ‘a fellow slave would arrange to have his companions’ dead bodies, heaved out of their miserable cells, carried to burial in cheap caskets’ (
Satires
1.8.8–13). In life as in death the poor are silent, or virtually so – as they mostly are even in modern times.

A scholar’s list of the few sources found to provide material on the poor’s own outlooks illustrates the difficulty: proverbs, fables, folksongs, oral history, legends, jokes, language, ritual, and religion. But of these, Roman social historians have only proverbs and fables, and bits and snippets of jokes and religion. Proverbs exist in many forms and contexts. Fables, an elaborated form of proverbs, exist in the collection of Aesop’s tales and others. Of course there were folksongs, as there are many passing references such as this one by the elite Dio Chrysostom:

My case is like that of men who in moving or shifting a heavy load beguile their labor by softly chanting or singing a tune – mere toilers that they are and not bards or poets of song.’ (
Discourses
1.9/Cohoon)

8. The dead poor. Paupers would be unceremoniously buried in potters’ fields on the outskirts of towns, but the poor might still be able to afford humble burials such as those found at Isola Sacra, near Ostia.

But none survives. Legends, language, and ritual exist only in minuscule snatches or in very elite-distorted contexts.

Scholarly work on proverbs and fables is extensive, but only very recently has there been an attempt to relate their content to the actual life of the poor. Ancients were clear that these genres were expressions of what is now called ‘popular morality.’ Comparative studies also emphasize the validity of using them to see into the mind world of nonelites and, especially, for the most subjected members of society, the poor and slaves. Of course individual examples can be contingent on the context of their application, and ordinary folk and elites, too, valued and used fables in their own lives. In addition, some proverbs and fables are quite opaque. But judiciousness can produce useful results. Grouped patterns of narrative illustrate core values. Teresa Morgan in her
Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire
shows the way; her careful and comprehensive work reaches similar conclusions to those I have drawn in my own
research. I use selected proverbs and fables here as an essential window onto a real mind world of the poor.

There is one joke book from the ancient world, although we know that many others existed; however, even more so than with proverbs and fables, it is hard to pin down referential material specifically applicable to the outlook of the poor. Notices involving religion and philosophical thinking are sprinkled throughout classical literature; these notices have first to be recognized as relating to the perspective of the poor and then applied appropriately in the course of formulating an overall picture. Finally New Testament material, especially the illustrative situations and parables of the Gospels, provides insight into the outlook of the poor. When the evidence from all these sources comes together, a perhaps surprisingly coherent picture of the mind world of the poor emerges which is valid through time and space across the empire.

Demography

There is no quantifiable data from the Romano-Grecian world – or the ancient world in general – that helps much in determining the relative size of the demographic groups in the empire; even the total population is something of a guess, perhaps 50–60 million. Besides, the relative numbers would vary somewhat from place to place and from time to time. Nevertheless, I suppose a certain similarity of basic pattern among preindustrial societies in Europe and the Mediterranean area, and from this I offer a very broad idea of how many poor there were. Based upon studies of early modern Europe, where documentation exists to allow intelligent estimates of the size of various economic groups in society, I propose that about 65 percent of the population, slave and free combined, lived ‘on the edge’ – i.e. was at risk of death from any disruption of their subsistence existence by natural catastrophe, plague, famine, or other disaster.