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What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?

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21–30 of 86 posts

Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?

#21
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was arable land easy to come by for a poor Roman or would you be more likely to have a landlord requiring some cut?

In 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.

Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?

#22
post #7

One 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,…

Mining was among the worst types of work with very little chance of doing it for longer. Which is why it was allmost only slaves doing it, like most of the other hard work, which is why there allways needed to be new wars to get new slaves to keep the system running.

I think mines switching to free labor to some degree in the imperial period since slaves became more scarce and expensive

Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?

#23
post #5

How did rich people keep their wealth? Interesting, they had banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_ancient_Rome

Sometimes 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

You just know at least one person got nailed for it.

Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

Quora 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.

which is a bit sad since the majority of answers on Quora are worse than useless…

Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?

#25
post #7

One 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,…

Working with the sewage system is what first came to my mind.

As far as germs that is so modern. Ignaz Semmelweis was considered a moron for suggesting that doctors wash their hands between handling dead bodies and delivering babies.

He died in 1865 with the establishment believing he was basically spreading misinformation.

Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?

#27
post #7

One 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,…

Also, are we talking about jobs, or work?

Subsistence farmers worked, but didn't have 'jobs'. A blacksmith worked, but might have had a 'job', or, depending on how many people were working under him might have been more of business operator.

Being in any army sucks, so soldiering wasn't exactly a great 'job', either - although it often provided opportunities to rob and enslave other people.

Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?

#29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes 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

You just know at least one person got nailed for it.

Supposedly

Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?

#30
post #5

How did rich people keep their wealth? Interesting, they had banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_ancient_Rome

Sometimes 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

Actually the vandalism was from the Galileans. The Judeans totally adored their market makers.
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