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What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
- Eumenes 3y agoThe mines of Ancient Spain (modern Andalusia mostly) most definitely "employed" the sorriest souls
- bragr 3y agoMy understanding from historians answering similar questions about ancient Romans is that we really don't know much about the average Roman because almost nothing was written down about them and even less survives to this day.
- woodruffw 3y agoIt's a little nuanced. We know about some aspects of the average Roman citizen's life: the details of their class and labor statuses, their political enfranchisement, the effects of the Roman economy on their livelihood, urbanization trends through the Republic and Empire, etc. We also know a decent amount about what they ate, what they wore, etc. We know many of these things either because they're discussed in comparison to an actual subject, or via inference with described subjects (i.e. descriptions of the lives of political candidates, bureaucrats, soldiers, slaves, and lesser sides of noble families).
- nemo 3y agoWhile literary sources were always produced by aristocrats, they still give a window into their times even if it's biased, so we know some things about some jobs. But also since the mid 20th century there's been a movement in history to learn about the daily lives of everyday people of the past in every period including Rome. Combined with archaeology, we can learn some things, so while we don't have a perfect picture of life for the many free Roman citizens packed into their insulae doing their jobs, there's been work and progress on filling that in, esp. using archaeological sources like Pompeii.
- bmarquez 3y agoThe Ancient Romans used a sponge on a stick for washing themselves after defecating. I always wondered who was responsible for cleaning and replacing those sponges in public latrines.
- 082349872349872 3y agoamazingly there's a game (nearly) based on that value proposition: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20082/pecunia-non-olet-geld-stinkt-nicht https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20082/pecunia-non-olet-g...
- qingcharles 3y agoThey used the three shells to clean the sponges.
- cgio 3y agoIn Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) the name of the profession with the responsibility of applying the sponge was σφουγκοκωλάριος, sfougokolariis where sfougo is the sponge, kolos is what you imagine it to be in context. The term is still used metaphorically in modern Greek.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoPeople always act as if ancient people were somehow different. Obviously you'd have the cleaner who cleans the toilets and swaps the sponges. They'd get more from the storecupboard and someone would be in charge of ordering the sponges from the spongemaker. Just imagine life today but without the electronics
- zerr 3y agoHow did rich people keep their wealth? Interesting, they had banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_ancient_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_ancient_Rome
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoSometimes those bankers were disrupted by Judeans coming in an smashing up the nice open plan lending atriums. Really need the firm hand of government to prevent repeat offending
- sslayer 3y agoYou just know at least one person got nailed for it.
- candiddevmike 3y agoSupposedly
- bjourne 3y agoActually the vandalism was from the Galileans. The Judeans totally adored their market makers.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoOh I thought that Jesus was a galilean and also a Judean (that Galilea was a rural part of the larger Judea).
- bjourne 3y agoWell, there was Roman province called Provincia Iudaea. It was much larger than the Palestinian region Judea, but at no point (it's borders were adjusted multiple times) did it cover the Galilee.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
- htag 3y agoOne thing, it's ambiguous if they are speaking of only jobs inside the city, or any job in the republic/empire. It's also ambiguous if this is limited to jobs only performed by free individuals. Some things that didn't make the list. * Free individuals sometimes became Gladiators * While very clean for ancient standards, their sewage system required a lot of manual maintenance. * We know sailors we subject to scurvy, which suggests they spent most of their time on ship and had very poor diets. * Prostitution was legal. * Without an understanding of germ theory, anyone dealing with very sick or dead individuals could be subject to poor health outcomes. * Lots of work would have been extremely physically taxing by today's standards. Lifting heavy things. Farming with hand tools. Blacksmithing.
- christkv 3y agoLegionnaire :)
- User23 3y agoThe correct term for a member of a Roman legion is legionary. A "legionnaire" is a member of the French Foreign Legion.
- bombcar 3y agoFarming is the big one - if your job sucked too hard you’d just go back to being a subsistence farmer like most everyone else.
- explaininjs 3y agoWas arable land easy to come by for a poor Roman or would you be more likely to have a landlord requiring some cut?
- rurp 3y agoIn general no, it wasn't easy for poor folks to get their own farm land, and it became harder as time went on. A plot of land was a common millitary pension; soldiers would retire there and work the land after putting in enough service time. This worked well while there was plenty of decent land in Italy, but became a worse deal over time. Once the prime land was taken up soldiers had to settle for plots of varying quality far from their homeland, which was much less pleasant as you'd expect.
- idlewords 3y ago"Mining" is rarely the wrong answer for worst job in any premodern era. Incredibly taxing physically, dangerous, claustrophobic, and with the constant risk of fire and being buried alive. The only silver lining for ancient miners was that they had little chance of living long enough to experience the long-term toxic effects of their vocation.
- quickthrowman 3y agoIt’s definitely mining for Rome, mining was done more or less exclusively by slaves and life expectancy was short.
- tacker2000 3y agoPlease dont post quora links. Whilst the questions and answers might be interesting, the whole site its just a minefield of ads, SEO spam, forced logins, etc…
- Aperocky 3y agoThe complete downfall of quora is surprising tbh. Trying to cash out before they reached critical point? At one point about a decade ago through my spotty memory they are pretty on par with reddit in terms of adoption and reputation.
- _-____-_ 3y agoQuora has fulfilled its purpose of generating training data for large language models, by answering the majority of questions people have ever thought to search for on the premise of "I wonder if anyone's asked this question before." Now that ChatGPT has read all the answers, Quora can fade into the sunset while ChatGPT regurgitates its answers with precision as part of an ad-free conversation.
- EMCymatics 3y agoAre you sure Quora's purpose is to create large language models?
- _-____-_ 3y agoYes
- ztrww 3y agowhich is a bit sad since the majority of answers on Quora are worse than useless…
- lph 3y agoSeems like only a matter of time before LLM-powered search is also injecting ads. "Ancient Romans had a difficult life with a variety of unpleasant jobs. But after work, they liked to kick back and enjoy all-new garum-flavored Doritos!"
- baron816 3y agoIf you’ve ever wondered what would’ve happened if Nazi Germany had won the war and had become a Thousand Year Reich, Rome is basically your answer. Militarism, War, Genocide, Slavery—it’s all right there.
- gattilorenz 3y agoNot sure what the point of your post is. Rome (and Greeks before them) did certainly see the difference between Romans and Barbarians, but they also integrated the newly conquered tribes into the army, and eventually society. At some point there were even “barbarian” senators, and Roman citizenship was granted to everyone residing in the empire. They clearly didn’t have the same idea of race that the Nazis, or most of the western world until not long ago, had.
- anthk 3y agoNo. Romans assimilated any race into their empire. They were practical.
- RobotToaster 3y agoBeing Vedius Pollio's servant?
- sb618 3y agoOne thing they don't mention is that the pay for being a legionnaire was (as far as I know) quite a bit better than average.
- gumby 3y agoNot a terrible job, but uncertain was parasite. Basically you were paid to accompany someone and say how good they were. One of the few things I remember from high school was translating some plays in which a parasite was part of the cast. (Another thing I remember was the supposed punishment for parricide: to be sewn into a sack with a rooster, a cat, and some stones, and then be tossed into the Tiber.)
- BirAdam 3y agoAncient punishments were insane. Death was usually just a side effect of whatever the actual punishment was. Bothered me for weeks after reading about that stuff.
- gumby 3y agoFor the teen-aged students of my boys-only school that kind of stuff was always worth reading, and the Greek and Latin teachers knew it so made sure we got a good supply of such stuff. Much more interesting and worth translating than Caesar marching around. One of the most thumbed books in the library was "Pompeiian Graffiti". I learned some sexual terms that don't exist in English.
- kami8845 3y ago[flagged]
- BirAdam 3y agoMining and military service are definitely worse than groveling, especially since Rome did have the bread line. The military definitely had a pay advantage (and it got better over time in the imperial era, so much so that it began to bankrupt the state), but Rome was always killing people, either Romans or barbarians. The warfare was absolutely horrifying by modern standards, and I imagine that even the best warriors of Rome would have had severe PTSD. Add in practices like decimation and the life of a warrior could be shorter than any other. As for mining, most miners were slaves. Worse, many slaves were captured and conquered people. Rome had slaves that were treated well too (accountants, physicians, potters, bakers, barbers, and so on), especially after various reform movements (legal claims could be made against slave owners who mistreated slaves, but it is not certain just how successful these claims were), but the majority performed brutal work in bad conditions (beyond mining, many prostitutes were also slaves, and some of the worst parts of construction in Rome were done by slaves).
- laverya 3y ago> The warfare was absolutely horrifying by modern standards, and I imagine that even the best warriors of Rome would have had severe PTSD. I'm not actually sure this was the case. We don't actually really hear of things like PTSD for anything before the Great War - and we do have veterans of prior wars saying something was different about WW1. It seems that the constant, unending chance of combat or death really might be different than what came before.
- NoPicklez 3y agoI read the same thing somewhere on here many years ago. The concept of war and killing was "more normal" during those times than it is now and the alternative to war still wasn't sunshine and rainbows for most. I think what I also read was from the side of the wives. Deaths due to war were much more normalised and were a higher occurrence, therefore there were better support networks of wives whose husbands had been killed in battle.
- BirAdam 3y agoNah Herodotus wrote about it, as did Assyrian scholars. In the case of Assyrians this psychological problem was attributed to the spirits of slain enemies tormenting the sufferer. Given the extremely spiritual viewpoint of almost all ancient peoples, I have feeling that this is why it’s not heard of more frequently.
- 3r3rni9 3y agoAt this juncture I must heartily recommend the very silly and good natured anime/manga Thermae Romae [1][2]. It's about a Roman bath architect who secretly discovers a way to time travel to modern Japanese baths to steal ideas (though he is slow to understand them). The original run is a little more pure than the Netflix reboot, where the humor / seriousness balance is off (it's never too long of a slog). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermae_Romae#Episode_list_(DLE) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermae_Romae#Episode_list_(DL... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermae_Romae#Episode_list_(Netflix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermae_Romae#Episode_list_(Ne...
- alephnerd 3y agoIt's one of the few animes where you HAVE to watch both the Dub and the Sub - there are different jokes in both. Also highly recommend Bessatsu Olympia Kyklos by the same creator for the Tokyo Olympics
- npsomaratna 3y agoHow about the movie? Is it any good?
- jtolmar 3y ago> "Great heavens, what poor specimens of humanity the men were! Their entire bodies formed a pattern of livid bruises. Their backs, which bore the marks of the whip, were not so much covered as shaded by torn shirts of patchwork cloth... They had letters branded on their foreheads, half-shaved heads, and chains round their ankles. Their faces were a ghastly yellow, and their eyes had contracted in the smoke-filled gloom of that steaming, dank atmosphere, making them half-blind. They resembled boxers who coat themselves with dust when they fight, for their bodies were a dirty white from the oven-baked flour." > Apuleius, The Golden Ass Being sent to become a mill slave was considered one of the worst punishments available for Roman slaves. Essentially a slow death sentence where you turn a millstone in an unlit chamber until your lungs give out from breathing flour and stone dust. Mining held a similar status.