The hidden financial world of ancient Rome

0:00These are people who would force their mother to lend them money at interest. These are people who would sell their children to live another day. These are people who are not going to go quietly. And I think all of these things defy the kind of categories that we put on people in the past. When we really dig into the complexity, I think we find a world that really astounds us for the amount of grit and determination that people had.

0:34Today, on the story of money. Ancient Rome's brutal economy and how ordinary people survived it. And yes, sure, it was a time of bustling cities, expanding empires, new trade routes, a sophisticated civilization with a thriving economy. But for most ordinary Romans, day laborers, tenant farmers and the like, everyday existence wasn't quite as prosperous or even that stable and here to tell us how they survived is kim bows professor of ancient history and archaeology at the university of pennsylvania hi kim hey robin it's great to have you here because we wanted to do a roman episode for a long time it feels we can't really do a history podcast even if it's money focused without doing the romans at some point and you're going to tell us the story of just how creative the average roman had to be just to, well, frankly, stay financially afloat, right?

1:31Yes, absolutely. And you say you couldn't do a podcast about money without including the Romans. I hope to convince you and all your listeners that ordinary people got by in ways which were far different than maybe we've supposed they'd gotten by. They were immensely complex in their financial lives. They used a whole range of financial instruments and money played an enormous role in their lives. To paraphrase the Wu-Tang Clan, money rules everything around me. Well, we're going to go into Roman hustle culture, debt, credit, money, subsistence in ancient Rome. And that's coming up here on The Story of Money.

2:10Gillian is away this week. I'm Robin Wigglesworth.

2:18What happens next in The Story of Money? Nuveen has spent over 125 years helping clients answer this question. By investing in the growth of businesses, real estate, infrastructure and natural capital, we continue to deepen our expertise across income and alternatives so investors can confidently write the next chapter of their own portfolio stories. Nuveen. Invest like the future is watching. Visit nuveen.com slash future to learn more. Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible.

2:54So, as I mentioned, we're not going to be focusing on the ancient Roman elites, the senators, the emperors, all that jazz. We're going to be focusing on the 90%, roughly speaking, at least. Specifically, how the 90 % lived in ancient Roman Egypt. Kim, why are we focusing on Roman Egypt today? Well, as I talk about in my book, Surviving Rome, the most solid evidence that we have for how the 90 % survived actually comes from Roman Egypt. The papyri particularly are preserved in the very dry climate of Egypt. And those papyri preserve an extraordinary range of financial data, which we just don't have from other places.

3:36Now, we will talk about other places. We'll talk about places like Pompeii. We'll talk a lot about Roman Britain, for which we actually have pretty good evidence. And we'll talk, of course, about the city of Rome. But interestingly, if we're interested in ordinary people's economics, Egypt is really the place to start. OK. I mean, I know that Pompeii, a lot of the things were preserved by the famous eruption of the volcano. But why do we know so much about Roman Britain specifically? Well, the Brits are extraordinary archaeologists and they've actually managed to leverage archaeology and all of the kind of stuff that you don't necessarily think of as being financial data, like pollen and animal bones and things like this, to create a really sophisticated picture of that particular province.

4:21Okay, well, we're going to start in Roman Egypt. So let's imagine a fictional family living at this time. It's 100 AD. There's a father, let's call him Satyricus. He's an entrepreneurial tenant farmer who did in fact actually exist in Roman Egypt, right, according to historical records. And let's say he's married to a Thesis and together they have the son Horus and the daughter Attia. So, Kim, can you tell us a little bit what his daily routine would have been like around that time? Yeah, I think his daily routine is maybe not too different from our own in the sense that someone like Satyricus and Thesis would wake up and immediately start thinking about money.

5:04They're a tenant farmer. They're thinking about the price of wheat at that moment. They're thinking about how are they going to get labor to work their small plots? What kinds of things are they growing? Again, not too unfamiliar. They certainly would have had a plot of wheat. They certainly would have been growing some hay for their animals. But maybe surprisingly for us, they also would have had some small plot of pretty specialized stuff like dates. And in fact, our historical satiricus actually went all in on a field of time at one point. so pretty specialized what we would call maybe cash crops Was that the point of the time that you can make a bit of cash money from time?

5:45Yeah, presumably, I mean he's not eating it, one wouldn't think No, that's a weird thing, just that munching I don't know, maybe it's like crisp back then, I don't know No, I think even then it would have been a strange thing to be eating so he's almost certainly selling it he's also got a little plot probably of some grapes to make some wine out of he's also not drinking that, he's selling it So you have to imagine someone who has, who thinks a lot about money and is juggling a whole bunch of different kinds of crops, some of which he's eating, but an awful lot of which he's going to sell. Okay.

6:16So he's a pretty hardworking guy. He's trying different things. I mean, how much money would he be making from all this work of grain, wheat, barley, even time, I guess? So I spent an awful lot of time trying to figure this out. And we wish we had things like crop reports for the Roman world, which of course we don't. And so you have to use a little bit of archaeology, some more evidence from these financial records. The short answer to your question is he would have made more money by selling what he grew than by eating it, if you see what I mean. So he would have been much better going for the market rather than simply being self-sufficient.

6:55Now, of course, that depends on what the market looks like in that particular year. And therein, right, as the Bard says, lay the rub for people like Satyricus. They lived in markets and they died by markets. So he would have woken up thinking about what the price of crops were in that particular year. You mentioned the satiricus and I love his name. Most of my familiarity with the Roman Empire sadly comes from Asrix and Obelix. I've mostly studied those of slightly newer centuries, but this is delightful for me. You mentioned he's a tenant farmer, right? So he didn't own his own land. Is that the normal way of things back then for the ordinary plebs?

7:34I think it became more normal as time went on. One of the things about the Roman world is it's incredibly densely populated. There's less and less land. The price of land goes up almost certainly and it gets harder to own. And so renting land was an obvious alternative. I do think sometimes we imagine a world in which everyone was, you know, attendant for somebody else. And actually, Egypt is one of those places where we can see people actually do own land. They own tiny plots of land. They often own different plots of land and they're renting plots of land. So they have very complicated, if you like, land portfolios.

8:10So what do these portfolios look like? Like, were there sort of a tiny plot of land that they might own themselves outside their own home and then they rent larger tracts somewhere else, a mix of them? Do they have to travel far to get to these things? When we have something like a whole archive where we can see all the different, if you like, land portfolio of even a really small farmer like Satyricus, we can see them constantly changing their portfolio. So the land that they own, they own. That's great. Right. Satyricus, the real Satyricus, didn't actually own any land. He was renting all the time.

8:45But the plots that they rented or owned are almost never next to each other. So, you know, you say you rent land, it comes up on the market as being up for lease. And you think, gosh, that's really good land. It's really well irrigated. It's a bit of a walk away. It's worth it to me. And so I'm going to rent it. Then say your father dies and leaves you a plot of land, which is nowhere near where you're actually living. Obviously, you're not going to turn that down. So this portfolio actually imagines a lot of hustling moving around from plot to plot. OK, well, that sounds suboptimal, but probably unavoidable.

9:20Yeah. So Satiricus doesn't own his own land in the real Satiricus. He's poor and, yes, rented on a fairly short term basis. I'm curious, what did that cost? Like what were the land rent rates at the time? The real satiricus and any imaginary person in Egypt has got it particularly bad in that regard. Land rents in Egypt are really high. In most instances, they're taking half your crop. And in many Egyptian farmers like satiricus, they're taking two thirds of their crop. And then once you add in all kinds of other things, you're looking at, you know, an awful lot of whatever it is that you're growing disappearing.

9:57So obviously, if you can own your own land, that's better. but then you got to pay taxes. All of this stuff is eroding, you know, what you're actually able to take home and either eat or sell. I think land rental rates are probably also going up as land becomes rarer and more expensive. So Satyricus is living at a particularly rough time during the Roman Empire when rates are pretty high. If life was that tough and, you know, the money he ended up with was so low after having worked all year round on all these different plots of land. How did his family survive? Did they have enough? So the word you just used there is key.

10:35His family survived. I think, you know, too often economic historians of any period just tend to imagine people like Satyricus, the male wage earner or the male laborer. And of course, there's an entire rest of the family. We've got Thesis and Harus and Atiyah. All of them are working. All of them are bringing in different kinds of income. That's absolutely necessary for them to survive. Because the margins are so narrow with the high rents, this is the only way that you can actually pull this sort of thing off. Because, I mean, we tend to think of, in the popular imagination, ancient Rome, even sort of non-Roman parts, direct Roman parts like Egypt, as being fantastically wealthy.

11:20But life sounds quite tough for not just, you know, our little hero Satyricus, but also little Attia, little Horus as well, right? This is a world which is really pronounced by instability and precarity. So there may be a lot of wealth in the system, but it's always coming and going. And the only way to sort of manage that and to sort of steer it to your advantage is actually to use money in really complicated and sophisticated ways. And that's also true for ordinary people like Satiricus. So it's not like they're just sitting around on their farm while the rest of the world or the wealthy world, as it were, the Ciceros of this world, are using money and banking and all this stuff.

12:07They're all actually using all of those same kind of complicated instruments. So it's not just a rich, poor binary. And I think this is one of the hardest things that we have to get rid of, is the way in which ordinary people are actually doing incredibly complex things in their economic lives. Yeah. Yeah, well, we're definitely going to be talking more about those sort of complex products sometimes that they use. But on your book, Surviving Rome, you also talk about the 90%. Do we know roughly what sort of, was there a 90 %? Was it an 80 % that people were sort of poor? Was it 99 % under David Graeber's famous sort of framing of it, the anthropologist?

12:43He talked about how really 1 % really kind of owned everything. Do we have any sort of even rough sense of what inequality was in ancient Rome? So I'm a real pessimist on these numbers. I think it's impossible to figure them out. People have done a really valiant effort to try to do it. And so I use the term 90 % as a bit of a throwaway because you're right, could be 80%, could be 99 % of people who are, in my definition, working with their hands, having to negotiate this precarious and risk-filled world. But as far as the actual numbers concerned, I really wish we knew. But for all the data that we do have, it's extremely difficult to actually come up with not only an average income, but then figure out how that worked across the Roman population.

13:32So with all due respect to David Graeber, I wish we could talk about the 99 percent and the 1 percent. But alas, I think it's it's pretty difficult. Yeah, it's annoying how reality is sometimes complex and difficult and hard to figure out. It really is annoying, isn't it? It drives me crazy on a daily basis. But I'm curious, why is this perception of Rome as a wealthy economy so prevalent? This just seems to be the common view everywhere that Rome was super rich. Why is that? Well, you know, we have a lot of pop culture that's really emphasized this in our minds. One of my personal favorites is Gladiator, which, of course, imagines this enormously opulent world, at least at the upper ends of things.

14:16And of course, you know, the writings that come down to us from this world are written by the people who have money. You know, imagine a history of the United States written by Elon Musk is not going to feature McDonald workers or people working on a chicken factory line. People write from their own perspective. And so Cicero and co, as I call them in my book, really dominate our view of this world. And they tend to represent and reproduce their own perspective. Yeah, I guess also historians sometimes are tempted as well, right, to focus on the deeds and the activities of the great and mighty and wealthy.

14:53Even David Graeber did that, right? That, you know, you tend to think of the rich and the poor, and even if you care about the poor, you still focus on the actions of the rich more than anything else. I would also throw in there another extraordinary book, of which I'm a great admirer, Thomas Piketty's Capital, insofar as this is a book which is interested in the origins of wealth inequality, is really focused on rich people and how rich people get richer, which has really dominated our conversation about inequality. And in the process, we've sort of forgotten about ordinary people because their wealth is so statistically insignificant.

15:28So there's lots of ways in which we've sort of left ordinary people behind, both because the evidence for them is a lot harder to come by and because sometimes when we think we're talking about the non-rich or the 99%, we're actually really focused, even if we're really angry, we're really focused on the 10 % or the 1%. So this is a challenge that historians have in every period. We have it even in the present. And so we're constantly having to think about whose history are we really telling here. Yeah. Well, today, Kim, we are going to start redressing the balance. Hooray! Let's dig into a bit more of that of the satiricus and his family.

16:08Life sounds pretty hard, but there must have been some good life. I mean, what did they do for fun, for an enjoyment? What did they spend their tiny little bit of extra money on? This is one of the things that most surprised me when I was writing this book. You know, we tend, when we think of rich and poor, we sort of sap the poor of everything. We imagine they had literally nothing. That defines poverty. When in fact, once you dig into all the new archaeology, you start looking at the financial records that we have, These are people who actually have quite nice clothing. They have quite a lot of clothing.

16:40They wear jewelry. They have perfume. I excavated myself in Italy, you know, poor farmers who are wearing perfume. Just because people are poor doesn't mean that they're not spending their money on little luxuries. Rome is a world full of these kinds of consumer goods, and ordinary people and even very, very poor people also consume those goods, not just the super, super rich people. I think we also have to imagine people eating a whole range of foods that we imagine only rich people ate. We might conjure to mind rich people eating things like dormice and thrushes and all this stuff that appears in Roman literature.

17:23But we now know, thanks to some great archaeology, the extraordinary range of things that ordinary people ate. So the new excavations in Pompeii have found ordinary people eating snails and citrus and 10 different kinds of cheeses and a whole range of goods rather than just a very narrow, you know, sort of bread and water type diet. So life was difficult, precarious, but also, if you like, diverse and complex. How well fed were some ordinary Romans then compared to somebody in the Victorian era or even today, I guess, in some of the poorer countries? I mean, how do we compare this? So we've always assumed that poor Romans are basically eating at the caloric minimum.

18:10And we somehow imagine that amounts to what the United Nations today constitutes a caloric minimum. In my view, Romans are eating a lot more than this. Even the very poorest Romans, even enslaved people working on a farm are eating a lot more in calories, not least because they're doing an awful lot of work. So on the one hand, I would argue that they're much better nourished than we imagined. It's hard to compare them to your Victorian children, but I suspect in many instances they are better nourished, not least because they're partaking of the foodstuffs from what we might call a global empire.

18:47Now, if you live in the countryside, right, then just like today, there's far less different kinds of food available in the countryside than there are in a place like Pompeii or Rome. so the countryside you're not going to get that citrus and peppercorns and all this imported stuff but you said like in roman britain people did ordinary people drank wine right french wines that you know they had a decent life about half of roman farmers from what we can tell show signs of having drunk at least a little bit of wine uh they're not mostly growing it themselves and they're mostly importing it which is kind of amazing the farmers that i excavated in italy they're clearly making their own wine.

19:29Obviously, they're Italian farmers. But they're also drinking wine from what's today Gaza. So they're importing wine because clearly they think it's better, it's better tasting, whatever, even as they're growing things themselves. And this is the thing that was most surprising to me. You always imagine, well, if I grow it, I don't need to buy it. Well, if you have a sophisticated palate and you prefer X over Y, then you're going to go buy X. And they certainly did that. OK, so they are able to piece together a little bit of extra money or resources. It's not affluence, but at least it is a little bit of non-essential consumption, which is nice.

20:06But what kind of money were they using for these things? Because money and credit was fairly developed in the Roman Empire, right? So the money system has to be explained a little bit because it's very different from our own monetary system. Yeah, let's do the basics here, right? Because there's a coinage system, and that's what people maybe see. You can go to a museum and see the coins, but then there's the whole broader ecosystem of money and credit around it, right? That's exactly right. And this is a show about money, so maybe we should dig into for a second about actual money. So it's a tri-metallic system, so it's pretty complicated already.

20:44It runs on gold, silver, and bronze. The gold coin of the realm is the aureus. The silver coin is the denarius. And then because so many ordinary people need so much, you know, small change for their ordinary lives, there's a whole range of different bronze coinages. The sestercius is the largest of those. The ass, yes, I know the ass is among the smallest, but then they even develop sort of fractions of the ass. In different parts of the empire, they use a slightly different system because the Romans, for all that they are brutal in lots of ways, they also allowed economic systems that had existed for a long time, say in the Greek East or in Egypt, to simply carry on.

21:29So our man Satyricus in Egypt is using, in his ordinary life, the drachma, which is the basic coin. coin and then it's a bronze coin it's a bronze greek coin essentially it's the the greek equivalent of the sister say that's correct and then he uses the obel uh which is smaller than the ass uh as a coin of of sort of daily use so if our man satiricus uh worked for wages he would almost certainly be paid in obels okay yeah well i only know the sister say from from again asterix and obelisk. Sorry about that. But how do they account for these things? Were there some ledgers? Were there the records of money going in and out?

22:10Yes. So in many cases, just like today, right, it's way easier to keep track of your expenditures on a ledger rather than having to carry coins around with you. And in many cases, we can see in Roman Egypt, that's exactly what they did. So we have these long accounts from farms mostly, but also from small businesses, in which people are basically paying for things by putting them on account. When I was growing up, this was a normal thing that we used to do, and we would go to the grocery store so we wouldn't carry all the money around with us. We would just say, put it on my account. And because people are highly numerate, even people who couldn't read were numerate, they could negotiate these kinds of systems.

22:47And you have a whole population of shopkeepers and managers, some of whom are enslaved people, some of whom aren't, who are basically in the business of keeping all these accounts. So barter, what often people think of as poorer people having to do, especially in a place in a time like ancient Rome, that wasn't as prevalent as people might think. No, this is a world where everyone really thinks in money. And so even if you're not paying in actual coins, everything has a price that you are actually negotiating and imagining in denarii, cisterci, whatever. So even though there are parts of the Roman Empire where people don't have coins ready to hand, that doesn't mean that they're using barter.

23:29Everything has a price in money. Well, I mean, let's return to our sort of heroic family, the Satyricuses, I guess. I mean, what's a typical last name? Do they have last names? Not always. Let's go with the Satyricuses. Sounds good. Okay, the Satyricuses. Satyricus and his kids and his family, his children, his wife Thesis. Does he control the finances of the family? What does the family look like as a sort of economic unit, but in total, as it were? Because I assume it wasn't just him controlling everything. No, this is, in fact, one of the other many of the things that surprised me and that I argue in my book is, A, that the entire family is contributing income in order to get by.

24:15And B, the people who really run the family finances are very often women. So Satyricus' wife Thesis, if we're imagining this hypothetical family, it's far more likely that she's the one who's actually keeping the books, managing how much money is coming in and out, and juggling all of these different complicated ways that these folks have to get by. What about the kids? Would they be working? When can Horus the son go out and help his dad in the fields? So we have a lot of what we would call child labor in the Roman world. Romans probably wouldn't think about it that way. They don't have a separate concept of childhood as a time when you go to school and you're free from work and you're somehow in a different life phase.

25:03Instead, children worked as soon as they were able at doing any age-appropriate tasks. So our kid Horace is going to start by doing things like picking up leaves. He'll graduate to controlling some donkeys. His sister, Aitia, might work at herding geese or working with other kinds of small animals. And then they work their way up as soon as they're strong enough and old enough. Well, I have to say, I quite like the sound of that. My children scream child labour as soon as I ask them to tidy up their rooms. Well, you can just threaten them with donkey driving if they give you too much grief. I'm going to try that, Kim.

25:42I'm definitely going to try that. To be fair, they'd be thrilled if they heard that we were getting a donkey there. That sounds quite fun. Yeah, well, actually, I could come up with manure spreading. How about that? That sounds far more like it's a proper punishment. But did Horace, would he have gone to school at all? How much would he earn out in the fields at all, if anything, really? So there's no public education. If Satyricus and Thysus want to send Horace to school, they're going to have to pay. And given that we're talking about the countryside, although there are very large villages, it's probably unlikely that he went to any kind of school.

26:19School would have been life, as it were, the school of life. But he would have learned quite a lot, actually, by doing things. Imagine a world in which everyone's thinking in money. Learning basic maths would have been one of the things that he would have grown up with. He also, though, might have been educated by being put out as an apprentice. His parents would have sent him off to work for, say, a weaver or someone working in an olive press, and he would have learned whatever that particular trade was. If he was an apprentice, he probably would have been paid almost nothing and his wages would have been given to his family, but he would have received his food and his clothing.

27:00If he's going off in the fields and spreading manure, for instance, he's making about what half his father would have made. So boy wages are a little bit more than half of what male unskilled wages are. So they're not nothing, right? And they really matter for a family that's really on the edge, particularly if you have a couple of children, right? Those two children can earn almost as much as an adult if you can get them work all day long. How much would Horace and his father be making? Do we have even a rough idea of how many sisters a day or the equivalent in grade? Yes, we have good records for what wages would have been in the time of Satyricus.

27:46They would have earned a male wage laborer, would have earned just shy of the equivalent of a drachma or Sestercius a day. And Horace, as I said, a little bit about maybe half of that. And that's not enough to live on. You'd have to get work every single day. And that's incredibly unlikely. How many Sisterci in Denarius and how many Denarius in Tenorius? Because they probably would have changed depending on how much silver and gold was in circulation, I guess. But do we have a rough idea? Yes. No, we know pretty well the equivalencies or the, if you like, the relationships between the different metals.

28:23So there's four asses to the Sistercius and lots of payment, remember, is happening in these fractions. There's four Sesterci per denarius. And then there's 25 denarii and an arius. So the arius is a really high value coin. It's worth a lot more money. You know, we used to think that the arius was a kind of savings coin or a kind of, you know, one of these coins that you would use, you know, is, I don't know, some sort of prestige item and you wouldn't actually use it in day to day exchange. This turns out actually to be wrong. We know this from Pompeii. We have the cash boxes of businesses and they've got ari in them.

29:00So if someone's rolling up and is going to buy some really high value item, they're going to use the coin that's best served to do that. They're going to use the arias. And we know that even though these silver coins have a higher value than the bronze ones and the gold are really valuable, even ordinary people, if they have to do high value transactions, and remember, farmers at harvest time, right, they've got a lot of stuff moving through their hands. They're going to use these same coins. They may not get to hold on to them because they have to pay a lot out in expenses as they're bringing in an income.

29:35But they're using the full range of coinage available. If I rocked up at some merchant in Pompeii, for example, and had an aureus, what could I get for that? Well, you could get many, many, many days of food, obviously, probably many months of food if you're eating pretty frugally with your aureus. You could also buy, I would say, many lengths of cloth. Cloth is very expensive and clothing is very expensive. What about Thesis? Would she be working? What would she be doing apart from controlling the purse rings, I guess? Thesis is working a little bit beneath our radar because we have lots of wage records.

30:17Most of those wage records involve men and boys. And every once in a while, we see women appearing in our wage records and they're not necessarily working for wages per se. They're doing things like selling small amounts of pretty highly specialized agricultural products like carob seeds. They seem to be doing a lot of selling of feed for animals, particularly birds and things. But the other thing that women are doing to make money, they're almost certainly working in the fields alongside their husbands. But we have a lot of evidence for women really working in the sort of more complicated areas of finance.

30:54They're big money lenders. Lots of the evidence that we have for the lending of money comes from women. We have some women in Pompeii who appear to be working out of perhaps their family's workshop. And presumably they're helping run the books for that workshop. They also appear to be lending money. And this makes sense, right? If the women are the ones who are the managers and the bookkeepers of the family, it makes sense that if anyone's going to get involved in money lending, it's going to be them, right? Because they know how much money is coming in and coming out. The other thing that women do, and this also applies to girls, so Atia, Thysus' daughter, would have certainly been doing this.

31:32All women are spinning. Cloth is very difficult to make. You have to spin the wool or linen, and then you have to weave it. And everybody can spin. In the Roman world, it seems only women spun, women and girls. And we don't have a ton of evidence for how much they could make doing that. But the evidence that we have suggests that they might actually make almost as much as an unskilled male laborer doing spinning if they were quick. So I think spinning and the textile industry generally is a big part of women's contribution to overall family income. So that would have been both the wife Thesis and Atia would presumably be helping out as sort of a spinning cloth at home because they could sell it for lots of Sesterce and Denarius, I guess.

32:19That's right. Or in Egypt for Obels and Drachma. Yes. Yes, exactly. Can we return to how they control the finances? Because I guess even if some of them didn't work or didn't do that much work or we don't know exactly what they did, how did them being in control of the finances work in practice? Women's sort of place in the Roman economic world is sort of contradictory, right? On the one hand, it's a patriarchal society and women in theory are not allowed to participate in politics. They're not allowed to achieve the highest ranks in Roman society. But in practice, they actually had a huge amount of economic power for one reason in particular, which is in the Roman world, very unusually historically, women are allowed almost total control of their dowries, which meant that if a Roman couple divorced, the woman gets to keep her dowry.

33:15The man usually gets to use a portion of it during their marriage, but he has to return it, its value, right, if they separate. And this meant that whatever women took into their marriage, which in some cases was even for poor families, a not insignificant amount of money, several months worth of income at the bottom end, not to mention some plots of land, etc. They got to use that and they got to use that as collateral for loans. They got to use that in the event of some sort of economic hardship. So in that respect, women's sort of de facto, very low position actually becomes a position of a certain amount of power and influence.

34:00Well, I mean, this is fascinating. We are going to be taking a quick break here, though, Kim, because, I mean, we have so many things I still want to ask about. When we come back, we're going to be talking about something we've been talking a little bit around the edges, but how ordinary people managed their debts in the ancient Roman Empire. because there would have been, of course, plenty of years where droughts ruined harvests, interest payments start mounting up. What was a family to do? Well, the answer lies in ancient Rome's hidden credit system. And we're going to get to that right after the break.

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35:14And we are back. So, we're in the second century Roman Egypt. We're discussing how the economy at the time operated for the 90%. Not the elites, not the senators, not the emperors, just ordinary people, the plebs. And to do this, we're looking at a semi-fictional ancient Roman farming family. There's Satyricus, our tenant farmer, his wife Thesis, and his lovely children, son Horace and daughter Atia. And we're about to throw them, well, sorry, some terrible, horrible, no good economic problems that were typical of the time. Let's say there was a drought and the Satyricuses find themselves deep in debt because of it.

35:56So Kim, what would happen in that kind of scenario? So drought is a big one. And in Egypt, right, even having too much water, say the Nile flood is too high. This also throws our family into jeopardy. All of these things, particularly for a family that's really living with really small margins of survival, this creates enormous problems for them. So we have families who we see confronting this, and they would take their children, like Horace and Attia, and they would basically put them into a form of kind of debt bondage. This also means that you might look for other ways to get members of your family off your books, as it were.

36:35You might try to put them into an apprentice arrangement. But the most likely scenario is these Romans are not just going to lie down and die when something like this happens. These folks are real hustlers. They're going to try to find a way out of this problem. And in a world in which everything revolves around money, they're going to try to get a loan. Just quick on debt bondage. Was it that they were collateral for a loan or they were kind of sold into debt, kind of indentured servitude? What would it look like? We have some really incredibly sad archives of a family who actually they're not even that poor, really.

37:10The guy is a priest in a local village. He has a certain amount of status. He's constantly running out of cash. He has a big family and he basically exchanges what is his very younger sister and in earlier cases, his brother and his daughter, a whole range of his family members in which their labor serves as the interest on a loan. So he still has to pay back the principal and their labor serves as the interest. And they do this arrangement for years, years and years and years. And then they come back and do the same thing with their children. They basically let their children out in term for either the loan itself or for the interest on the loan.

37:52So these arrangements, they look horrific to us, right? We can't imagine children being used as the collateral on a loan. This seems to be pretty common practice, particularly in these moments where families get into financial difficulty. Yeah. Well, I guess they have value, obvious value for the families. I guess it makes sense in a terrible way. Well, I mean, just to return to the loan system, the credit system, obviously one of my favorite issues of all time. There's this tremendous line in your book from a Roman dream interpreter. What's he called? Artemidorus. and I just want to read it out because I think it will resonate with people even today, right?

38:32According to Artemi Doris, to dream of borrowing money portends death. To dream of the death of a money lender portends life. And that, I think, you know, for anybody who's owed a hell of a lot of money to somebody like a bank will, you know, that's going to ring true, I think, unfortunately. Can you tell us a little bit about what kind of financial instruments or credit system there was for to a family like the Satiricus's? They're very complicated and they range from, you know, Satiricus goes and finds a friend and he gets him to lend him some money and there's, you know, that's the end of it.

39:09We used to think that this was how Roman credit worked, just between friends, right? No interest, you know, this is just one of the glues that knit society together. Increasingly, we're convinced, alas, that this was not true. And most credit loan arrangements were for money, for interest. So that might take the form of simply borrowing money with interest and we write all this down. It might take the form of using something as collateral. We just talked about using children as collateral. It might mean using your wife's dowry as collateral. It might mean using the house that you're living in as collateral and use these to basically cement the loan, as it were.

39:52If you're a farmer like Satyricus, here's an extraordinary thing that you might do. Satyricuses, we talked about, might have a tiny plot of, say, vines for making wine. They could try to sell their grapes before they're ready in advance, as it were, as a kind of futures. This would guarantee them a certain kind of return. And then the person who bought them, if they could then turn around and sell that wine for more, would actually make some money. So it's a kind of form of futures trading. And it's a means of offloading risk onto somebody else, but also offloading potentially a little bit of profit that you might make.

40:33So there's a whole range of ways in which Romans might actually get a loan. We have a really interesting case of a shepherd who, not unlike the satiric, is actually doesn't seem to own any of his sheep. He's leasing them from someone else. He sells their future wool, which is really interesting, before it's being sheared. OK, well, I mean, the financial nerd in me is positively thrilled at the idea of a shepherd selling wool futures on rented sheep. Yeah, on rented sheep as well. That's amazing. Exactly. But so obviously women played a huge role in the financial management of a family. What role did they play when they hit financial difficulty?

41:15We have quite a lot of evidence of women actually lending money, so acting as money lenders, and they are the ones conducting those arrangements. They're figuring out what interest rates they're going to charge. They're above all figuring out what collateral they're going to ask in exchange for these loans. We have some graffiti, actually, which serve as the actual textual contractual contract between some female money lenders in Pompeii and the people they're lending their money to. It's kind of amazing, right? Like you scratch it on the wall as, you know, the record of our credit debt relationship.

41:50The other thing that women do, because they're in charge of the household, they're also in charge of the household things. And as I said before, despite, you know, this economic precarity, Romans have a lot of things. They take their little bit of money and they invest it in, you know, consumer goods. Those consumer goods, of course, have a resale value. Pawn shops. And the records that we have from pawn shops are overwhelmingly dominated by women. Women going and pawning everything from clothes to any metal objects. Metal objects have certain value and they retain that value. we have a woman pawning her bathtub which seems to be made of metal and because women control those objects they're the ones who are going to go to the pawn shop pawn them for some kind of cash when the family needs cash and then hopefully go and redeem those pawns when the family's a little bit more flush were romans in general everywhere always in death or was it something that would wax and wane a little bit depending on i guess the the droughts or the flooding of the Nile or volcano eruptions?

42:53The evidence that I've found doesn't describe, as maybe David Graeber would have it, a world of people who are in debt and that sort of class of debtors. Instead, what people are using, they're using credit as another monetary instrument. So let's imagine that I have, I'm a farmer again, let's go back to our guy Satyricus, and the harvest has just come in and I got a ton of grain, but I have actually no cash. I don't really want to sell my grain right now because the price is really low because it's the harvest. So I'm going to take out a loan because I need cash, right? But I'm actually not poor right now.

43:29I've got lots of one kind of thing, but I need another kind of thing. This we see all the time. So that people are using debt and credit relationships, not necessarily because they're desperately poor, because they need a certain kind of money, right? And money can be cash money. It can be credit. It can be a commodity. And they need to move between those, if you like, modes of money. And in this complicated money world, this is what people are using money to do. So just like today, right, just because, you know, I have a mortgage on my house doesn't necessarily mean I'm poor. I don't know why we assume this of ancient people, right?

44:09Because they have to take out money, they're necessarily poor, or that only poor people take out debt, right? And rich people are all creditors. Lots of the 90 % are lending money to their neighbors, so they're the creditors. They're just doing it at a tiny scale. And I think one of the most interesting examples of this, where you really see how complicated these relationships are, is some of the poorest people that we know about from the Roman world, and that's miners. These are people working the most miserable job, right? They're mining granite in the middle of Egypt. It's hot. It's horrible.

44:43And we have all of these records of them basically using their rations and their tiny amounts of pay in these complicated credit relationships. But is it the problem, almost like we talk about the heuristic of us thinking the Roman Empire was wealthy, ergo, Romans were wealthy, but in the same way we think of money, the physical gold or silver coins as money and debt is inherently bad and you're poor. But in reality, credit is a system that, you know, the difference between credit and money sometimes gets very wishy-washy in practice. And certainly even in everyday Roman economics, that is the case with like shop ledgers, for example, where you buy stuff, a lot of it on credit, essentially.

45:25It doesn't mean anything other than that it's a simple way rather than lugging coins around all the time. That's right. And in a world in which, okay, we would say in money parlance, it's highly monetized. That is to say there's a lot of cash money around. There's still times and places where there aren't. And so you have to come up with some system in which you're going to get around that problem. And so using the ledger, right, Right. Ledger accounting is one way of getting around that, but also using credit and debt as a means of moving money around or compensating for one kind of money with another.

46:01That's another way of dealing with that. OK, so let's return to our imaginary, semi-imaginary family, the Satyricuses in second century AD in Roman Egypt. And let's imagine two scenarios. Let's say the family does manage to get out of debt. They managed to stay afloat. It's all great. It's all gravy until tragedy strike. Satyricus, our doughty fictional farmer, he sadly passes away. How did poor people manage funerals, especially specifically, I guess, in ancient Roman Egypt? Yeah, you know, in Egypt is fascinating. Yeah, they care about death and everything that happens after. They really do.

46:42And that doesn't end in the Roman period. So they continue to practice mummification right the way through the Roman period. And so the Satyricus family, if they could have, would have set some money aside in order to pay for Satyricus's burial and ideally his mummification. And we have mummies of ordinary working people from Roman Egypt. So we know that this wasn't impossible. It was costly. You definitely had to plan ahead. So you had to save. We kept talking about debt and credit a minute ago. We didn't talk about savings. Savings is hard, but one of the things that you would have saved for, in addition to your daughter's diaries, was your funeral.

47:19In parts of the Roman world, we also know of clubs. These are almost like savings clubs, but particularly to save for funerals. So you join one of these clubs, you'd make a small contribution on a yearly basis, and then the club would see to your burial. Particularly, for instance, if you didn't have a family that might look after your burial. So, yep, someone like Satyricus is not going to take that problem lightly. Okay, well, let's turn to a slightly more depressing scenario where the Satyricuses didn't get out of debt. They are financially stricken and then our farmer hero passes away anyway.

47:57What happens to the Satyricuses after Satyricus himself passes away? There's the positive potential outcomes and the negative ones, right? Let's look at the negative ones first. Yeah, let's do the negative. If I want to end on a happy note for our IRA family. Yeah, we're going to end on a happy note. Don't worry. Exactly. This is a happy podcast. And it's actually true to boot. So the negative scenario, right, is that those kids get sold off into that form of debt bondage so that their mother might get a loan in order to pay back some of these other expenses that they may have. This potentially both gets her kids off her books, as it were.

48:36She doesn't have to pay for their upkeep while she may then incur debts, which are potentially maybe easier to pay off. So they might have had to sell their children off. They might have, if they could, put them in apprenticeship. I mean, worst case scenario, right, they starve. We certainly have human skeletal evidence that people suffered from malnutrition. So that's the negative scenario for a family like Satyricus, who's the Satyricus family, if the main wage earner dies. Remember, though, right, it actually could be his wife that dies because she may make as much money spinning as he does as he does.

49:14Positive scenario. And this actually happened in the case of the real satiricuses. He did die and they have a mountain of debt. And then the records break off. We find them about 10 years later. And suddenly Thysus has managed to clear all of his debts. Hundreds of drachmas in debt that somehow she manages to clear. We don't know how she did this, so we can only speculate. How in the world might you do this? The first is that you really double down on some of those cash crops and you get lucky, right? You do your field of time or your grapes, and it's a year where everybody's crops fails and yours don't.

49:50The prices are really high, and boom, right? In one season, you've actually managed to wipe out those debts. There's lots of other ways that potentially we can imagine. the hustling that we see these people doing, selling other kinds of things, selling commodities, selling their own labor, making a killing on money lending. These are the kinds of things that allow you to put away small amounts of money. That I think is one of the ways in which a family that loses a wage earner, maybe not the male one, maybe losing the woman is almost as bad, how they might have actually managed to clear some of those debts.

50:32Well, I'm glad that Thesis proved to be such an incredible find. I said that she managed to get her family out from under this. She did. Maybe Satyricus, maybe he was the useless guy, really. Maybe she's the real hero of our story. I take it all back. Yeah. So she's the hero. She is in the end, actually. She is. I mean, turning a little bit to modern parallel, I mean, the whole hustle culture thing, that sounds quite similar, right? I mean, what I guess rich people call a portfolio career or, you know, other people call a gig economy today. But like basically you might not have enough money to survive from your main job.

51:08You cobble together all these different other income streams. You do whatever you can to stay afloat. That sounds quite similar, right? It's becoming more and more similar. The United States' most recent census has shown that more and more poor families are having to get by with multiple income streams. We live in a wage-earning society, and in the United States, our minimum wage is extremely low. So it used to be that a minimum wage job could just barely provide the foundation for a family income. That's no longer true in the United States. And so this hustle economy, right, having you say you work a salary job, but then you drive for Uber or, you know, you do something online.

51:50These are becoming increasingly the way that modern American families get by. They would have found much to understand in ancient Rome. Having all of these different income streams, watching some of them come and go, using the little bit of money that you have to actually give out in loans to other people so you might make a tiny bit of interest. All of this, what I'm calling hustle, I think, is one of the surprising things about how Romans got by. It's super complicated. I don't think the founding fathers quite envisaged where they thought of America as a modern Rome, thought about that kind of basic having to work constantly just to say afloat was kind of what they aspired to.

52:32No, in fact, and you know, it's interesting. Americans' relationship with ancient Rome is a very particular one. And they, particularly now, we imagine very particular aspects of Rome. We certainly don't imagine how ordinary people survived as one of the things that we've borrowed in creating the American Republic. I mean, sadly, we are coming to the end of this week's episode. So Kim, thanks so much. This has been fascinating. I am curious, what is like one thing you'd want listeners and viewers as well to take away when it comes to the financial lives of ordinary Romans back then? I would love it if people imagined ordinary people and even poor people as not just passive people, you know, at the mercy of some sort of systems of power.

53:20These are people who would force their mother to lend them money at interest. These are people who, you know, would sell their children to live another day. They show an astonishing amount of grit, even doing things that we might regard as morally abhorrent. But they're not passive. And they live their economic lives through these immensely complex instruments. And I think all of these things defy the kind of categories that we put on people in the past, rich and poor, debtors and creditors. We like to divide the past into these categories because it seems so remote and we don't have a lot of information.

53:59And so it's easier to just simplify things. When we really dig into the complexity, I think we find a world that, A, we can relate to a lot more. And B, that really astounds us for the amount of grit and determination that people had, in addition to their constant, complicated sophistication. Okay, well, that is a tremendous note to end on. So thanks for being here today, Kim. Thank you so much, Robin. Well, that's sadly it for this episode of The Story of Money. If you like this episode, then please do subscribe, comment, like the show, we read the comments. And if you really enjoyed it, well, then come and join us at the FT Weekend Festival this September at Kenwood House in London.

54:46Gillian and I are going to be talking to the author David McWilliams about what Dante thought about bankers. Shock horror. It's not good. It's definitely one of the worst circles of hell. The details, including a special discount promo, are in the show notes. And until then, I'm Robin Wigglesworth and we'll meet here again next week.

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