What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
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Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#2My 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.
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#3The 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.
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#4My 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.
It'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).
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#5How did rich people keep their wealth? Interesting, they had banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_ancient_Rome
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#6The 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.
amazingly there's a game (nearly) based on that value proposition: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20082/pecunia-non-olet-g...
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#7One 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.
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#8One 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,…
Farming is the big one - if your job sucked too hard you’d just go back to being a subsistence farmer like most everyone else.
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#9"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.
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#10One 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,…
You've omitted the mines, which were a pretty notorious place to work, and I'd personally rank it the worst job of the lot. My understanding is that the miners were almost all slaves because of the poor working conditions.