Ancient Rome was a rigidly hierarchical society where the ruling elite stigmatized everyone who had to work with their hands. Yet Roman workers still found ways to resist exploitation through strikes and other forms of collective action.
Class struggle isn’t a modern invention — it’s been with us for thousands of years.
Sarah Bond is a professor of classics at the University of Iowa and the author of Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire. She tells Jacobin how members of the laboring classes in ancient Rome organized themselves to demand a better deal from the Roman social elite.
This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.
- Daniel Finn
When you write about the history of the Roman Empire from the vantage point of the people who didn’t belong to the Roman social elite, what are some of the main challenges in terms of finding source material to work with?
- Sarah Bond
The most difficult thing is that all of the sources we have, except for a few mentions within literature, come from things like papyri, inscriptions, and graffiti. A lot of these sources are nonnarrative ones, in the sense that they were never meant to tell a full story or to serve as biographies of people.
The way that we access history from below is predominantly through these very small vestiges of the past that can give us windows for looking at regular people. But those hundreds of papyri, and about 3,200 inscriptions for things like the Roman collegia (associations), were never meant to tell the full story.
Part of this involves going back to a kind of patchwork quilt that provides a larger story and narrative. It’s difficult to take all these quilt pieces and stitch them together into one cohesive narrative of Rome.
History from below can give us lots of micro-histories, but turning it into a larger macro-history can be challenging, because the evidence itself comes in bits and pieces that don’t necessarily give us the full picture. It takes an imaginative historian to try and bring all the evidence together and make some sort of story out of it.
- Daniel Finn
When we talk about the Roman Empire, obviously it lasted for several centuries and covered a vast geographical space, with the frontiers of that space shifting over time. Can we generalize about the nature of work and the social conditions for the majority of the population who were living under Roman rule? What were some of the main trends and patterns that we can identify?
- Sarah Bond
It’s very hard to generalize about every single worker or the entirety of the labor pool, but it’s important to understand trends such as servile labor. There was a big increase in enslaved labor, especially in the second century BCE, during the Roman Republic, and it continued increasing well into the second century CE. Understanding enslaved labor in particular is very important for understanding the reactions within the workforce and the working conditions.
In addition to understanding slavery, which in places like Italy could be as high as 25 percent of the working population, we also have to understand things like manumission — which types of people were manumitted from the status of an enslaved person in order to join society as a citizen themselves?
We can see that slavery increased, as did manumission, from the period of the late republic into the early empire. But in general, it’s important to understand that the Roman elite carried on holding prejudices about manual labor in particular that were very pernicious and entered into legislation, literature, and the way that they treat individual workers.
There was a lot of prejudice against what in Greek are called banausic laborers — that is, manual workers. They constantly had to push back against the idea that those work with their hands are out for quaestus, which in Latin means profit. There was a view that that if you were living your life for quaestus, creating ceramics, working in a mine, or working as a construction laborer, the desire for profit and wages was driving you rather than, for instance, a love of literature or of your country.
Even though we can’t say that all workers were x or all workers were y, there were millions of different artisans and craftspeople across the Mediterranean who were working with their hands and fighting against a form of prejudice from above. It came from people like the senators and equestrians, who were about 1.5 percent of the entire population.
Those were the ones who often expressed in writing very stereotypical and biased reactions to artisans — people like Cicero or Juvenal, or even the jurists within Roman law, who spoke about workers in a very negative light. While I can’t generalize about all of the workers in ancient Rome, there was an incredible amount of pride among the workers themselves who had to fight against the elite bias that carried on for many hundreds of years.
- Daniel Finn
If we think about the city of Rome itself, the idea of a divide between patricians and plebeians is a familiar theme. People might think of Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus, not to mention the opening words of the Communist Manifesto. How much of that image of the divide between patricians and plebeians is actually grounded in fact, and how did that divide compare to class divisions in modern times?
- Sarah Bond
In the Communist Manifesto, there is a focus on something called the Struggle of the Orders. This was a struggle that went on for more than two hundred years between two groups of people called the patricians and the plebeians. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels thought that the plebeians constituted a class — a group of people that share common relations to labor and the means of production. That would be the modern idea of class.
However, what we know about the plebeians today is that they really didn’t constitute a class in the Marxist sense. The plebeians came from different economic levels and had different ways of working and serving the Roman Republic. We have to understand that the plebeians and the patricians were actually groups with their own hierarchies and internal divisions.
The patricians were the original patres — the families within Rome when it was first founded — while the plebeians were everybody else. It wasn’t a single economic group. Not all of the plebeians were poor, not all of them were wealthy, or what we might see as a middling group of people. There was no cohesion in terms of sharing common experiences of labor or a shared relation to the means of production.
When we look at the Struggle of the Orders, Marx and Engels were correct to say that there were people in the plebeian group who chose to withhold their labor from the military levy as a way to get better working conditions and secure representation within government as magistrates, for example. They were using collective action in a way that is very attractive to Marxist philosophers and theorists.
At the same time, however, they had different reasons for withholding their labor or occupying the Janiculum Hill or refusing to serve in the military levy. It’s important to talk about the patricians and the plebeians, because they are familiar to many people who have read about the Struggle of the Orders. But when we discuss the plebeians, it was a category that went from high-ranking military officers all the way down to the poorest farmers who were in debt bondage at the time. It was by no means a group of people with similar economic interests.
- Daniel Finn
What proportion of the labor force was comprised of people who had been enslaved, and did that proportion vary over time? What would you say were the implications of slavery, even for those who had not been enslaved?
- Sarah Bond
Enslaved people generally came from Roman expansion and from captives being taken by the Roman army. But their ranks were also being added to by those who lived within households and had children born into slavery within a Roman domicile. We know that about 60 percent of the enslaved people within this vast empire of about seventy million people at its height were working in a rural context, with the rest working in an urban context.
Looking at those in the cities, nine out of ten would probably be manumitted in the future, but only one out of ten of the rural agricultural slaves will be manumitted. It made a big difference whether you were assigned to work in the fields or in a domestic context, as a teacher of children, for example, or as a stenographer, a librarian, or a nursemaid. All of those jobs had at least a higher possibility of manumission, which doesn’t in any way validate slavery or make it ethically correct, of course. But in an agricultural world where you were constantly working in the fields, that meant in all likelihood you would spend almost your whole life enslaved.
There was tension between enslaved workers within the world of agriculture and a lot of animosity towards enslaved people working in a domestic context. But overall, Rome was a slave society that depended heavily on enslaved labor in order to be successful. The citizens of Rome, especially in Italy and the city of Rome itself, were highly dependent both on slaves and free people to do a lot of the manual labor that they themselves did not want to do.
- Daniel Finn
You talk about the role of associations as a vehicle for collective action among the laboring population in ancient Rome. What was the nature of those associations in their various forms, and how did they function as vehicles for collective action?
- Sarah Bond
Associations existed everywhere across the Mediterranean during the period from the death of Alexander until the coronation of Charlemagne. We have evidence for about 3,200 different types of groups and associations. They all had different characters and different purposes, and they went by many different names.
The most popular name was collegium, which is where we get the modern word “college” from, but we also have another names like ecclesia in Greek, for example. These are all different names for groups of people that came together to worship a god, to serve (for example) as carpenters or silversmiths, or to bury the dead.
It’s just like today, where people have different groups that we belong to and identify with. You can have multiple memberships within them. Sometimes those groups become activated as political entities, and sometimes they’re just drinking groups where you get together at the local bar and have wine or beer together.
Romans were no different. They loved having social time — they loved having clubs. But my book focuses on the idea that these collegia at certain times could use their collective capabilities and specialties in order to get better wages or a better working environment, and also to improve their status within the city that they were living in. Like modern labor unions, collegia could use their expertise and professional nature to get better contracts or to get certain special benefits from the emperor.
- Daniel Finn
Could you give us some examples of collective action and popular protest throughout the course of Roman history?
- Sarah Bond
The evidence we have suggests that strikes and collective action were not as regular an occurrence in the ancient world as they are today. I don’t want to promote the idea that every single day there was a large-scale strike. But at certain time periods, we have evidence of both formal and informal groups using their power and their necessity to the state to try and improve their working conditions.
The most famous example is the one we’ve already discussed: the Struggle of the Orders and the various secessions of the plebs. Those secessions were boycotts by another name. Even though the term “strike” was not coined until the eighteenth century, we can see the same forms of behavior we associate with strikes and boycotts happening in antiquity.
The plebeians took advantage of the fact that they were needed for the Roman army to expand the Roman imperial purview. They removed themselves in these secessions at various times — there were four, five, or perhaps even six secessions, depending on which author you’re reading.
I also look at some lesser-known examples of strikes and collective action around 200 CE. In the city of Ephesus, we have a case of bakers who were told by the governor of Asia that they had to stop meeting as a faction. They were told that they couldn’t withhold bread and had to keep order within the city. We can figure out from the inscription that tells us about this episode that the bakers were probably either hiking the cost of bread or withholding their bread in order to get better prices or a better contract with the Roman government.
In that case, we have the governor of Asia stepping in and saying, “You have to stop this behavior as a faction or association.” These bakers appear to have been trying to make use of their monopoly on bread, which represented a very large proportion of the dietary calories consumed by most Romans, who ate bread every single day.
The authorities were telling them that they couldn’t collectively withhold bread or hike up the prices. We’ve been living through a period of global hyperinflation, so probably all of us can empathize with why the governor was trying to get the bakers not to engage in price gouging in pursuit of more money and better contracts.
We also have papyri that tell us how regular women and enslaved workers from textile workshops in Egypt, for example, practiced walkouts. They refused to work until they got higher wages. Even informal groups of textile workers who might not have come together as a formal collegium could decide that they were going to do a walkout.
The most significant example in the book is probably something that happened in the late third century, when mint workers under the reign of Aurelian refused to mint coinage and locked themselves in the Roman mint. They were withholding something very important — the gold, silver, and bronze coins that were circulated as a means of payment in the Roman world.
It’s important to say that it is not just modern workers and labor unions that are able to harness the power of collective action for their own interests. The ancient economy was not primitive in any way — it was an integrated market economy. The workers within that economy often knew their worth and knew that they had the capabilities and knowledge to withhold their work so they would be better off in the future.
- Daniel Finn
If people think about social conflict in the ancient world, the one episode that they’re likely to be familiar with is the revolt led by Spartacus. How did that revolt develop, and what were its legacies for later periods of Roman history?
- Sarah Bond
The Spartacus rebellion is certainly the best known of any of the rebellions that we have across the entire history of the ancient world. Within its own context, it was understood as an effort to push back a rabble-rouser named Spartacus who had originally come from the area of Thrace. In 73 BCE, he led a rebellion from his gladiatorial school in southern Italy.
This is a point that Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 movie gets right. The familia of gladiator was the smallest social unit for these gladiatorial troops. Gladiatorial families were essentially enslaved troops that had their own hierarchies within them. Spartacus activated his own troop and they broke into the kitchen, using utensils in order to kick off the original challenge against the gladiatorial camp.
They began to travel through the regions of Italy to the area of Mount Vesuvius, then north to the Alps, and then south again. They got more and more people following this small troop that had originally started the uprising. We are talking about a shift from somewhere between seven and forty people in this smaller familia to around a hundred thousand following Spartacus in rebellion.
I want to make a clear differentiation here between many of the episodes that I talk about in the book and the revolt led by Spartacus, because the ultimate goal of Spartacus was not to go back to work. He was not planning to go back to the gladiatorial school and get higher wages from his captors. His ultimate goal and that of the hundred thousand enslaved people that were following him was to achieve their own freedom.
They did not seek the abolition of slavery writ large across the Mediterranean. We have no evidence of that being one of their demands. They simply wanted to break free themselves and never return to slavery. For collegia to be able to withhold their labor in order to eventually go back on the job was a very different kind of tactic than a rebellion in pursuit of freedom, where the ultimate objective was liberty.
Even though Spartacus was not successful, by the time the war ended in 71 BCE, he had sent waves of terror throughout the Roman Republic. They were scared that these gladiators could be very effective militias when they came together and form what we might today call an army. It was especially threatening to the senators in Rome.
As a result, they started to break up the various gladiatorial troops and schools, placing them further away from the city of Rome so they were less of a threat. The Spartacus rebellion is very important to understand, not only because it inspired a number of other rebellions across the Mediterranean on smaller scales, but also because it created a specter that continued to follow the senators around.
They feared that if you had a gladiatorial troop that was too large, or if it fell into the hands of the wrong politician, they could use those troops as militias and personal bodyguards in ways that actually did happen later on in the history of the Republic.
- Daniel Finn
In the later history of the Roman Empire, we saw the rise of Christianity initially as an outlawed religion and later on as an official faith. What implications did Christianity have for the way that people thought about work and about the wider social order?
- Sarah Bond
Many of the Christians that were elevated to high positions after Constantine promoted the status of Christianity and helped to make it licit came from very traditional Roman backgrounds. They continued to have the same prejudices towards manual labor that existed before.
We can see changes in the types of work that were allowed within the Roman Empire. For instance, you began to see the outlawing of sex work, because Christian ideas on the subject were very different from earlier Roman ideas that it should be legal. Brothels were quite common in Roman cities. That is the best example of how Christianity changed work and labor.
But we also had new types of labor in places like monasteries, where both female and male monks were working with their hands. There was a belief that manual labor in service of God and in service of piety was much more acceptable than manual labor in pursuit of individual profit.
Many of the ideas of Christianity began to seep into the philosophy of work coming into the late Roman empire. Monks were given a pass in terms of their banausic labor because they were doing it for God, in the same way that mosaic artists working within newly built churches were seen as magnifying the glory of God.
Many of the clerics still looked down on what we might call blue-collar workers, and they certainly didn’t promote the idea that laborers should be at the upper echelons of the Christian church. The snobbery towards workers that we saw from people like Cicero was still perpetuated well into the late Roman empire and the early medieval period as well.
We would love to believe that Christianity changed the perception of work, and now people were all going to be leather workers like the Apostle Paul, for example, who was a tanner. But the reality is that a lot of the prejudices and snobbery that we saw in existence before were perpetuated well into the medieval period and beyond.
- Daniel Finn
If we look at the history of Medieval and Early Modern Europe, we can find various examples of people from the poor and the laboring classes who were imagining a different kind of society altogether, one without private property. They would often refer back to Christian texts and the early history of Christianity in support of that vision. Is there any evidence of that kind of millenarian thinking in ancient Rome?
- Sarah Bond
Often the evidence we have in relation to the philosophy of work comes from the literature of the elite. We do have examples of individuals from the impoverished classes who were imagining a different kind of society, but most of them were not engaging in rebellion against the Roman Empire, and they weren’t writing down much of their feelings or their plans.
However, at various points within Roman history, there were petitions to the emperor that tell us a lot about society and the conditions that many workers wanted to see. We have a number of petitions from the late second century CE. They come from Africa and from people that we would now call peasants.
They were petitioning the emperor directly, saying that they wanted improved conditions and didn’t want to be taken for granted, since they were the ones creating the grain supply for the free bread that was given out in Rome, Constantinople, and other places. When we look at petitions like that, or other petitions to the emperor from the tecniti of Dionysus, for example, they were signaling to us that they had pride in the work that they were doing and they wanted to see changes in the way they were treated by the elites.
We can see individual rebellions that were counted in the hundreds, and sometimes in the thousands, during the period of late antiquity, from people like the circus factions in Constantinople. But overall, we don’t get a lot of insight directly from people about the ideal society that they would have wished to have.
However, many of the epitaphs for artisans and workers do tell us that they believed in what they were doing and that they loved the status that they had, not only as an artisan but within their collegium. Many of them mentioned the fact that they belonged to professional associations so that even if they couldn’t get status within the Roman Empire, they could achieve it within their individual club or association.
One of the important things about studying collegia is recognizing that they provided an opportunity for prestige and status on a very small level. That gave people a sense of identity and selfhood that they never could have achieved across the whole of the Roman Mediterranean. These people were never going to be senators or equestrians. But they could become president of their club or secretary of their collegium.
- Daniel Finn
What kind of hopes do you have for the way that the research you’ve done might alter people’s perception of Roman history?
- Sarah Bond
One point that my book is trying to introduce is the idea that comparative history is very important. Back in the 1980s, Moses Finley, who was an ancient historian and a theorist of the Roman economy, came together with a man named Orlando Patterson, who is still an emeritus professor of sociology at Harvard. They had coffee together at Cambridge, and they talked about a book that Patterson was putting together called Slavery and Social Death.
That became a hugely important book for our understanding of slavery, because Patterson looked at sixty-six different slave societies and said, “These are the commonalities, these are the continuities, these are the nuances, and these are the differences.” His study of social death brought together historians from pre-modernity, the medieval world, and the modern world in conversation.
What I’m asking for with this book is not for you to agree that every single collegium was a labor union, which was not the case. I want to encourage people to come together and have conversations between the ancient world and the modern world. Too often, modern economists think that the history they need to engage with starts with the industrial revolution and goes forward from there.
Bringing Roman history into the conversation and saying that Roman workers had the capacity to behave in similar ways to modern labor unions is a way of creating commonalities. But it’s also a way of understanding the behavior and lived experience of workers, and the ways that collective action can benefit us today.
This post was originally published on Jacobin.