Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler Cowen. Today I am here chatting with Kim Bows. She is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and she has a new book out called Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the 90%. It has perhaps been my favorite economics book of the last year, though I think to the rest of the world it is more of a history book and an archaeology book. Kim is also extremely well published in the history of Christianity, religious space Christian spaces, what homes were like, what rooms were like in the Roman Empire, and much more. Kim, welcome.

Thanks, Tyler. It's great to be here.

I have many, many questions. Let's start with houses. If I were back in time and I visited a Roman elite house, what is it you think I, or say you, would find most surprising?

I think you would find surprising the extraordinary amount of color and decoration that surrounds you. I mean, every single surface of that house would have been covered in some sort of decoration in ways I think we would have found garish. We would be astounded by how kitschy those houses were to our modern, to our modern eye.

And the kitschy spaces, how were they treated? So say there were mosaic floors. Is it like, oh no, you can't walk on this, it's beautiful? Or people, the dogs would just trample on it? Or how was it?

Yeah, I think that's another thing that might surprise us, right? We would see that decoration as somehow being special and fenced off because that's the way we manage decoration in our own spaces, but not in that world because everything is sort of encrusted with some sort of decoration. Everything is used in ways that I think would really surprise us too.

Reminds me of my house, in fact. Now, could you do business in these homes? You'd have a few people come by, there'd be a room.

That's what they're built for. They're built for business. I think that's another thing that would surprise us most about this world is the idea of going off to work is entirely a, you know, probably a 19th century idea. And prior to that, for all of human history, work was in the space of the home. And the Roman house, particularly the Roman elite house, is a machine for the production of social status. And that status meant a space to do deals, to meet your clients to show off things that we would never dream of showing off, right? Members of our family, the most intimate aspects of our daily lives. All of that is literally built into the fabric of a Roman house.

And you just walk to your boss's house. There's no GPS. Are there even addresses?

Are there even addresses? Now, that's a great question.

Because how do people find—

Not in the way that we seem to use them, no.

So it's like latter 20th century Tokyo. You just have to get there somehow.

You just have to get there somehow. And you know what people use? They use other humans, right? That's how you navigate your way around an ancient city, is you ask people. And of course, ancient cities are a lot smaller than our own cities. So the chances are, moving around in a city, you know people. Rome is the largest city potentially on the planet at the time, at a million people. And most Roman cities, right, are probably 2,000-3,000 people. Nothing for us more than a large village. So you find your way around by using other humans.

So here's a very crude, you know, real estate-influenced question. There's a home for 5 people. How many bathrooms does it have?

Probably none.

None. So what do you do for, you know?

So pots. Romans are great users of pots for that sort of activity. Of course, there are public latrines, that you could go out and use. But even those are not present in an awful lot of cities, as far as we can tell. And, you know, of course, they called these public latrines after the Roman Emperor who started to charge for using them. If you can imagine naming public latrines after any of our American presidents.

Do you know what the charge was?

Uh, no. And that's the sort of information I'm really interested in, but no.

And so let's say it's 3:00 AM. And I do something in my pot, how does that then connect to public waterworks, if ever?

So in a city that has a robust public waterworks system, like we now know Pompeii had, you can go out and chuck that stuff in the drain. But those cities that didn't have them, and I think were amazingly ill-informed about this really critical question, then it just winds up in the street.

And how clean is that drainage system? So say you and I are walking around Pompeii or you know, parts of Rome. Are we having to hold our noses, or is it like a city in India today, or what would you compare it to? What's your sense?

Yeah, I mean, of course, Indian cities are moving very quickly to clean up their hygiene. You're absolutely holding your noses. And this is, I think, what's really interesting about the Roman world. On the one hand, it has some of the most advanced, and they put so much energy and treasure into things like public infrastructure, like sewers and drains. At the same time, right, these are incredibly dense, unprecedentedly dense spaces, and so getting on top of the poop problem is a kind of insurmountable problem. So if a visitor, any of your listeners, goes to Pompeii, you will notice that there are stepping stones to get across the street, and this is to keep you out of all of the refuse in the street. And this is a city that has really good public sanitation. It's just not quite good enough.

An elite home. Are there pets?

Oh yes, they have dogs. And of course, famously, both from actual images and from the famous story of the visit to this Freedman Trimalchio and his dinner party, you might even be greeted by an image of a dog instead of an actual dog that says literally in Latin, "Cave canem," beware of the dog. So you could have, you would have dogs and you would have fake dogs.

Only dogs or other pets too? Anyone had a pig or—

So they kept animals in, if we're talking about elite homes in the city, this is something that we're starting to learn about, how much urban agriculture there is. So people might keep small animals. Pigs are good. Chickens, strangely, they don't eat chickens as much as you'd think they would.

They're noisy. They wake you up in the morning, right?

It's true. I just don't get it though. I mean, there's so much protein. They're little. You can stick them in a small space. Anyway, Romans are amazing under-eaters. Ears of chicken in ways we don't understand. Strangely, not so much in the cat— in the cat universe, more dogs than cats. In fact, very few cats do we find.

We would call it zoning. Do they have something comparable?

A bit of a controversy, really. For the most part, no, they don't have zoning. And elite houses and the houses of the 90% all rub cheek by jowl up against one another in these cities. What there are are places that have more public-type buildings than private-type buildings. You have to remember too, Tyler, that the only city that we've excavated enough of to even remotely begin to answer these questions is Pompeii, and to a lesser extent, Herculaneum, and maybe a handful of other places. I'm trying to answer your questions on the basis of not very, not very good data, but in general, from what we can tell, not a lot of zoning.

But you know better than anyone else, I might ask, right? Do Jewish homes use space differently at all, or it's just the same?

Jewish homes.

Yes.

So the first question you ask is, how do you identify a Jewish home?

Can you?

Not easily. And the best way you're probably going to do it is excavate houses in places that we know are majority Jewish populations. Now, there is one thing that you might use in such areas, which is the presence or absence of a mikveh, a ritual bath. But there's a lot of controversy about how you differentiate one of these ritual baths versus, say, a bath in general or some sort of foot pool or whatever. Jewish houses, I would say, are distinguished mostly by the presence or absence of one of those ritual baths. And again, if you're a poor working Jewish family, you probably don't have one of those anyway. Other than that, they're pretty much indistinguishable as far as we can tell.

When it comes to Roman Empire Christianity, say after Constantine, what would surprise us most about their practices?

I think what would surprise me most, and many of my scholarly colleagues, is how few Christians there are. We somehow think that, you know, Constantine declares his support for this religion and then boom, everyone's Christian. When in fact, of course, they're, you know, most people aren't Christian for a really long time. And since you were asking about rich people, you know, it takes a good 50 years, if not longer, for Christian rich people, or for rich people to really say, okay, we're going to go along with this new religion. So, I think that's one of the biggest things that would have surprised us in a post-Constantinian world is how few Christians there really are, especially when you went to the countryside. You went to the countryside, you find very few Christians at all for at least 200 years. It takes a long time for people to be convinced of what's still a new religion.

Do we have a sense of what they actually believed? Is it something they went along with, or say they had an active belief in the Trinity Or what did it mean to them to be Christian?

You know, I think if you'd asked that question 20, 30 years ago, we could have given you a really clear answer, right? They believed in supporting members of their community. They believed in the Trinity. They believed above all, and this is, I think, probably still we think this, they believed that their God had special powers vis-à-vis what would happen to them after they died. That they would experience a bodily resurrection. And that was new in the world, right? The idea that you would actually come back after you died, your actual physical body. This is something that Christian God believed and had proven, right, through miracles like the raising of Lazarus, in ways that were very and really quite unfamiliar in a Greco-Roman world and even in the Jewish world. But you know, Tyler, I think one of the big changes that we've realized as we've looked more critically at the sources over the last 20, 30, 40 years is that what bishops wanted Christians to believe versus what Christian ordinary people actually believed were two very different things. And I think that Christians for many centuries afterwards wore many hats. And when they went to church and when they picked up the pieces of the scriptures that they could read or have read to them, they would avow a belief or a set of practices, probably more likely, that we would identify as Christian. And then the other 6 days of the week, they might do things that were entirely different. And this really worried Christian bishops, that Christians weren't behaving in ways that looked sort of differently Christian, because I think, you know, people kept on doing what they had always done.

To deploy a much abused term, but the pagans of that time, did they believe in something concrete, or they're just superstitious, they're going along? With different rituals, different festivals, or they have these things, you know, here's my god, my gods, and they actually believe, to ask the Paul Vane-like question.

So we know that people in the Greco-Roman world who believed in the traditional pantheon of deities above all were less interested in belief and more interested in what you did, right? They were practicers. They insisted and thought it was really important to behave towards the gods in specific ways so that the gods would in turn— this is a quid pro quo, backscratching world— the gods would do to them unto what they had done to the gods, right? So, they would ask, I think, much less, "What do you believe?" That being said, by the time we get to the end of our period, right, say the 3rd century or the 4th century, pagans live in a world in which lots of people are asking questions about belief. And they are starting to wrestle with questions about belief, and they are particularly interested in people— holy men, if you like— who seem to have special powers. And there are lots of questions about what kind of powers these people have. People who can levitate, people who can live for years without eating. And these weren't just Christians who claimed these powers, or, or Jewish holy men. There were all kinds of holy men out there in the sort of marketplace of religion who claim to have these powers. And so from a world in which mostly you would be asking, what do I need to do I think increasingly people were starting to ask, "What do I believe?" And for the Christians, do they have altars in their homes? Do they have altars in their homes? So, a vexed and interesting question. In the beginning, I suspect not. But because they live in a world in which all religion, if it's practiced correctly, has some sort of material form, right? You don't just sit and do religion in your head in the Greco-Roman world, because the Greco-Roman world, as we were just talking about a minute ago, is full of stuff. The second that there start to be enough Christians and they are really integrated into their communities, because they are, they start to have a material piece of their religion. They might not have an altar, but they might have a lamp that has a Christian symbol on it. They have something that is a direction of their worship and that is a kind of thing that expresses their religious identity. They start to have them pretty early, as far as we can tell.

And they don't wear crosses around their necks or in any other way?

The cross is a latecomer to Christian identity. They have other ways of expressing their religious belonging. And remember, the earliest cross in the Christian world isn't a cross like we think of it as a cross like this, right? It's the initials of Christ, which is a Greek chi and a rho, Christos, that are set in a kind of emblem that looks like an X and a P superimposed. And that's the earliest, if you like, symbolic representation of Christianity. Not the cross.

So say back then there's a Christian private cult, the private cult aspect of it, what would that be organized around? Is it a charismatic leader? Is it some belief? Or is it what part of town you lived in?

So, right, early Christianity is entirely private because it can't be public in the sense that it is not officially approved by the Roman state. That being said, at least by the time we get to the 3rd century, uh, if you traveled out to the borders of the empire in Syria and went to the town of Doryeupolis, you would find a thriving Christian meeting group of probably, who knows, 20, 30 people who are meeting in a private house. And their rituals, from what we can tell, they are practicing baptism because they've built themselves a little baptistry. They almost certainly are reading the scriptures with each other because they have a long space seemingly for doing that and praying together. But if you walked by on the street outside on your way to the Mithraeum, which was next door, or to the Jewish synagogue, which was further down the street, all these buildings right on the same street, you would know exactly what was going on in there. So are they private? I mean, not by our definition of private, but by the Roman state's definition of private, they are, right? Because they're not an officially approved religion. And I think the thing that we ought to be asking is, in this world in which Christians are not an officially approved religion, and there's a lot of stories about them being persecuted, and yet when we can see them archaeologically, which admittedly is rare, They are not hiding, right? Everyone knows what they're doing. All the new evidence and work on the catacombs has also suggested that the catacombs are filled with people buried, right? That people are buried in the catacombs of all different religious persuasions, and they're all buried one right next to each other. So, no one is hiding their religious persuasion from one another. So, to the extent that these folks are practicing private religion, I think it just makes us ask what we think private means.

Post-Constantine, are there Christian mausoleums?

Yes, and we can identify them through the presence of some of these insignia, or, you know, sarcophagi and other things that have Christian stories on them. So yes, there are. Very often, if you're in the catacombs, right, right next to tombs of pagans or Jews.

Here's a question I've wrestled with for a long time. I've never made progress on it. As you know, in your own book, Surviving Rome, you show the Romans had quite sophisticated and advanced economic lives. But why is it the Romans never had anything resembling economic reasoning? You can read any Roman text and no one sits down and says, well, here's how supply and demand work. But there are advanced contributions to many other areas, right? Is supply and demand that tough an idea?

They have absolutely an idea of supply and demand. They understand, and you see this never laid out in those terms, But they absolutely understand that at the harvest, when there's a large supply of whatever's been harvested, the prices go down. They know this for sure and they respond and they make planning on the basis of this basic understanding. I think though what you're asking, Tyler, is what we don't see, what we have a harder time seeing, is them making future planning around profit in a quantified way. That we would understand as part and parcel of an economic thinking that involves supply and demand.

There's nothing like Euclid, right? Or even Plato from ancient Athens, who defined the terms of philosophy. Ancient Rome had no Adam Smith, right? Nothing remotely close to him.

No, that's correct. That doesn't mean that they don't have economic thinking. They just have economic thinking that doesn't look like our economic thinking. They absolutely make planning around the assumption of supply and demand. They're clearly interested in profit, but what they don't have, and I think this is really what you're getting at, is that they don't have an organized, systematized way of thinking about economic activity that is discrete and separate from other kinds of activity and laid out as a kind of formal branch of reasoning. And this is, I think, what's thrown us for a long time. We thought because there's no obvious Adam Smith that they had no economic thinking at all, which isn't true, but it requires that we accept a kind of, and a whole spectrum of economic thinking that looks different from our own.

And most of the currency in use, it's bronze. Is that correct?

For ordinary daily use, yes.

Does gold have any role at all or it's too valuable and the pieces would be too small?

We used to think that it was a sort of ceremonial coin or a collecting coin, or it was a wealth-saving coin. The amazing new work that's been done on Pompeii, where we can see gold coins actually in cash boxes and collections of coins that are being used for day-to-day use, we can see gold as a coin of day-to-day use. And some colleagues of mine are doing new work statistically trying to recreate how many gold coins were circulating in the Roman Empire, and it's a lot. So gold turns out to be, I think, probably more important than we've given it credit for.

And say when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they're just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?

They're not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It's just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they're doing this. And what I think is most interesting, and what we're all still sort of wrestling with, is, I mean, from, you know, even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver. And then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs— that's a little bit of a pun, right?— the actual silver content of that coin. And so people are willing to just sort of suck it up and deal, and they keep using it. There is inflation, and inflation we can now tell thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the 1st century, the 2nd century, the 3rd century, but nothing like the amount. It's not proportional to the amount of silver that's being pulled out of the coins. So people basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, right, simply by supporting ordinary people's coin use that, you know, that the coins, the coins work and that they're going to back their coins even though they're They're slightly pulling, pulling the silver out.

And why was there so much decentralized money lending? You would think that banks would have economies of scale, offer better terms, just like I wouldn't borrow money from my friends. I would go to the bank. Why doesn't the Roman Empire evolve that way?

The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. But the Roman big state is really a kind of mask for an empire of friends and family. So you borrow money from friends and family, and banks such as they exist are really nothing more than friends and family. So even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family. So the difference that you're making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear-cut in a world in which the bank is your family, or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It's not that Romans don't use banks, they do use banks, and we can see them most often, wealthier Romans using banks. It's a lot harder to see the 90% using banks, and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it's not such a huge distinction in a world, right, in which there's no FDIC, in which the bank isn't guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are. The distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is much less clear.

But still, in Renaissance Europe, there are plenty of banks which are large. They might be family-based, such as in Florence, but they still were proper commercial banks. And is it the case Rome had these incredible roads, aqueducts, whole system of empire, but didn't have ordinary banks for the 90%?

Well, my colleague Ed Cohen is really going to disagree with me about this. He's the person who's thought most carefully about banking, more in the Athenian Greek world than in the Roman world, for which, to be honest, we have quite a bit less evidence. It's very hard to find the ordinary person using banks. Now, I would say it's not quite as— it's not quite so easy to see ordinary people using Florentine banks either, right? Florentine banks, we mostly find larger merchants using, and certainly we can see merchants using banks. We also see merchants using things like auction dealers and kind of entities that are functioning a little bit like banks. The important records that we have from Pompeii, from The auctioneer, man of affairs, Cacilius Iacundus is a nice example of someone who isn't quite a banker in the way that you are imagining, but is facilitating monetary exchange by both lending money at mostly short term and bringing people together, which is some of the most important things that banks do, but we wouldn't quite call them a bank. I think it's another way, Tyler, in which Trying to translate our modern terms on into an ancient world that doesn't quite operate the same way, but nonetheless manages to do the same things and get those things done, causes a little bit of disconnect.

Are there forward markets back then, if I may use that term?

That's a great question. Morris Silver has argued that we can see Roman people essentially doing futures trading, mostly around agricultural surplus. And I argued in that book that we all can almost see the poorest of the poor. These are some mine workers in Egypt who are basically using their wages, or not even their wages, their rations, in a way that almost looks like futures. People could absolutely disagree with me about this, and I would probably accept it. Future thinking doesn't quite look like what we would imagine it to be. Let me give you an example. We have a case of an Egyptian shepherd. He's too poor to own any sheep, but he leases his sheep, and then he sells his sheep's future wool before he's sheared it, right, at a rate that's quite profitable to him. And the question is, is this person really thinking in a future sort of way, or do they just not have the money to pay the lease on their sheep, and so they're selling the sheep's wool in anticipation to get the money in advance? Which is simply basically a loan. It's hard to know which of these is really—

But it's both. I mean, loans and forward markets can be isomorphic, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

They can. That's true. And so in a way, the debate about these issues is, I think, probably ancient historians' discomfort with the idea of the modern notion of futures as applied to an ancient world.

For you, what is the biggest puzzle about the Roman economy?

Gosh, that's a really good question. I'm currently really puzzled about how Roman money worked. If I can go back to another question— Sure.

And what do you mean by that?

So I said that Romans basically trusted the state to produce money that had value, even in the demonstrable face of its opposite, namely that the Roman state was also pulling silver out of their coinage. And at some point after the period of the that I talk about in my book in the later 3rd century, they seem to stop trusting the state and there is massive inflation. And that inflation comes in waves over a period of a century through the 4th century. This is inflation like, you know, real inflation, right? 1,000% inflation. And somehow they continue to use money throughout this period. They shift to a gold coinage, right? The, the silver coinage is ultimately abandoned, in part because the state can't support it because it doesn't have enough silver. But ordinary people continue to use money, and they even continue to use bronze, which has really lost all its value. And as you, you really have to carry around in huge sackloads in order to buy anything, but they still use it. Ordinary people still use it. In other words, there's a lingering faith in the state's ability to produce money. And ordinary people, despite the inconvenience, still find it more convenient to carry around these sacks of coins than to be like, the hell with this, we're just gonna go for barter, which they probably do in increasing quantities, but they still stick with coins. And those coins remain the basis of what will become the Byzantine economy for 1,000 years.

I don't get it.

Why don't they just bail on coins altogether? Why didn't coins just go away? They don't.

Well, what should they use instead of coins? Bills of exchange?

Well, they would have to go— yeah, they would just go to a barter system.

Yeah, but that's very costly, right? They'll do some barter at the margin typically in hyperinflations. But in Weimar Germany, we all know the famous videos of people wheeling around the wheelbarrows of paper money, right?

Yep, that's right. It's true. And there are a lot of historical examples with which I should familiarize myself more of people really sticking with coinage even in the face of its great inconvenience because barter is even more inconvenient. Convenient. Now, that being said, Tyler, in early medieval Europe, we have a really hard time finding daily use of coins. So they probably do abandon most coin use on a day-to-day basis except for really high-value exchanges. So that probably does happen. In the Eastern Empire, they continue to use now a gold and a bronze currency, you know, for 1,000 years. And I suppose it's for the reasons you described, because the alternative is simply too awkward.

To pose the Bob Fogel question, was Roman slavery profitable?

Was Roman slavery profitable?

Or is it just the going rate of return? I mean, you wouldn't lose money on average or you wouldn't do it, but it was— was it just another business? Was there somehow a big surplus?

In some industries, it's clearly profitable. Romans, I think what's interesting, they debate what those industries are. Some of them would say certain kinds of agriculture only are profitable using slaves and otherwise don't bother because either the rate of return is too low or, and this is what really matters, agriculture is seasonal, a slave is not seasonal. You have to feed and clothe and support a slave 24/7. Those two things combined are the equation around whether slavery is profitable or not. The other places we used to think that slavery was profitable were in industries that were too dangerous or too unpleasant to be able to recruit free labor. But we now know— and those are the mines, right? We now know the mines were worked— oh, we don't have the numbers, but we know that there are free people and slaves working side by side in the mines and that recruiting people to work in the mines seemingly— I'm not going to say it wasn't difficult because the wages that are being paid to free workers in the mines are much higher than wages that are being paid in sort of unskilled agriculture right nearby, but they can. They're doing it. They're going quite far afield though to get those people. If you look at the mines in Egypt, they're getting people from Syria, from all parts of the East, not just from Egypt in order to work in those mines, but they are able to do that.

But that has puzzled me. Well, why isn't it the case that either free or slave labor is more efficient? Just put that in your minds, and that you're mixing the two seems unlikely.

I'm going to give you an unsatisfactory answer to this question, which I haven't thought about enough. One of the things that's intrigued me most is the population of the Roman Empire, the free population, or just the population generally, if you like. It's crazy high. It's way higher than I think we thought.

How high?

Well, it used to be that we thought, right, that, I don't know, 20 million was high. I don't think that's high. I think it's as high— I'm not going to give you a number. It's as high as it was in most parts of the Mediterranean until the 19th century, maybe in some places a little bit earlier than that. Population really gets higher than that. But so basically we're looking at potentially early 19th century population levels. In that kind of a world, if the majority of that population is free, that's awfully, that's an awful lot of cheap labor. That's an awful lot of cheap child labor.

And how big would that number be? I'm not trying to get you to commit to it, but for our audience—

You are trying to get me to commit to a number.

No, just, you can say it in the third person. In the early 19th century, the population of the area of the Roman Empire was about fill in the blank.

I have no idea what it was in the 19th century. So you're not going to get to me. You're not going to get me to commit to a number. I'm just going to say that it was hot.

It's a lot of people, a far-flung empire. I'm sure you know the map of the Roman Empire at its maximum. Transportation is slow, even with an excellent road system. I know this is an amorphous question, but how exactly did they hold it all together? And we know they didn't eventually, right? But for as long as they did, how did it work? That someone at the far edge of the empire would actually pay attention to the empire as a whole?

So I don't think they cared about the empire. I don't think they paid attention at all. I think there were— there's a set of glues that held the whole thing together, and some of them are the ones we knew about, and some of them are ones that I happen to think were glue.

But they're sending in tribute, right? Someone is paying attention.

They are paying taxes. So taxation is one of the things that holds the whole thing together. If only as the stick and not the carrot. I think the carrot that holds it all together, strangely, is consumption. That it's a consumer economy, there's massive amounts of consumption. And on the one hand, that binds people together because people are participating in a shared consumer universe, but economically, it produces a whole set of knock-on effects that begin locally and expand out to a much broader extent that raise consumption levels really high, which allows this tax apparatus to keep chugging along. And when they both collapse, they collapse together. In other words, when we can't see people consuming anymore, we, we suspect they're no longer paying their taxes. So it's an interesting world from that perspective. And the state and its, and its ability to collect taxes also relies, going back to a previous question you asked me, on these non-state networks of friends, of family, of business networks The Roman state is largely a privatized affair, and it depends on the web of commerce that is happening more generally rather than the other way around, although there's a kind of reciprocity of, if you like, private commerce and state commerce. Insofar as the Roman state really needs people to be exchanging goods in order for it to do the work of collecting its taxes, this consuming world actually helps float the whole boat up. So that's one of the things that I think held it together.

So people did it for the clothing?

If you like, and the new sneakers and the iPhones.

And what were your clothing options like then? Say you're part of the empire, you know, at or near its peak. What should you buy in terms of clothes and how would it be made? How would you get it? Who would ship it where?

So we used to think that everyone just made their own clothes, sort of Little House on the Prairie style. And now we know that's not true from some new archaeology. We can see standardized weaving. We can see people, even really poor people, getting clothes from actually quite a long distance away. So you would probably get your clothes if you lived in a rural village from whoever the local weaver is. If you lived in a city, you might get your clothes— if you lived in Rome, I bet your clothes might even come from sheep in Gaul, which are then woven either in Gaul or somewhere in between and shipped to the capital. So you're probably not making your own clothes, which was a surprise to all of us, I think. And you're wearing and keeping and having a lot more clothes than we ever thought. We have some great— since you asked before about Jewish households, we have some great Jewish evidence for what constitutes the absolute bare minimum of clothes that anyone needs to have. And we used to think it was a tunic and that was it. It turns out to be at least 2 or 3 tunics and 2 or 3 cloaks and a whole range of undergarments and socks and a whole bunch of other things. And they were colorful. Even poor people had clothes that were, you know, purple stripes and yellow stripes and all kinds of different patterns. So I think we would be surprised actually at how colorful and well-dressed and variegated people's clothing were and their shoes. They had the most extraordinarily elaborate shoes. Anyone of your listeners who has a trip to England planned, go to Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall up in the north and look at the collection of Roman shoes. Extraordinary different styles for men, women, and children. This is the frontier of the consuming society.

So in your view, you know, parts of Europe, the wealthier parts, maybe did not reattain Roman standards of living until what, the mid-18th century?

Yes, I think that's true.

Say France or, you know, Spain, it would be later yet, right?

If by standards of living you mean access to consumer goods, yes.. And you can run some math on, you know, this is quite a fun thing to do actually. How many different kinds of dishes did an ordinary person in, say, 17th century England have versus how many different kinds of dishes did the same sort of ordinary person, Roman person, have? And the Roman person had more different kinds of dishes of more different shapes and sizes and materials than the English person.

If you try to cook a Roman meal from an old recipe, is it any good?

I was just looking at some TikTok videos of someone who's done exactly that, uh, and really done a brilliant job, actually. They don't taste like what we think of as tasting good, because again, this is the leitmotif of this conversation, Tyler. It's a completely different culinary world. It combines flavors that we just don't think belong together, like oysters, and eggs, and honey.

That sounds okay to me.

Really? Okay. Go dig out the recipe book of Apicius, and you can go make his various mixed dishes, which really contain some of the most astonishing variety of ingredients. In particular, this mixture of the savory and the super sweet, which I think we would find hard to take.

And a lot of medieval cooking is the same, like, we think, right?

Some medieval cooking is the same. Exactly.

Yeah.

And continues to be some North African cooking is the same. So there are culinary traditions that continue that mix these two things. But yeah, I mean, of course, and then the Romans famously included ingredients that we— dormice and things like this that we don't eat today.

And there's no market in ice, is there?

Some of these recipes call for snow.

And where's that coming from? The Alps?

Presumably, these are recipes that are designed to be made in very elite households that are actually bringing in, bringing in snow from, yeah, the Alps, the nearest mountains, and somehow preserving it.

But the somehow, that's a very interesting word, right? So the Alps are far from Rome. You could carry it in a box, but the snow's going to melt without some kind of technology. What is it you think they actually did?

Well, so I come from a part of the world where we long had icehouses, so this is not an insurmountable problem. But if you want to know what I think they did, so first of all, this has got to be a seasonal dish that is not made in August. But the other, the whole point of including the snow is to show you could pull it off, right? That you could somehow roll up in lowland Italy with some snow and astonish your guests. Even if that meant sending your slaves, since you asked about them, right, off to the nearest snow and make them bring it back in a— almost certainly they are using clay and other kinds of ceramics as insulation. We can actually— there's some from Pompeii, there's some wonderful preserved eggs which they've figured out how to preserve by encasing them all in clay. It's kind of a refrigeration device.

In terms of technology, you know, one reads various crackpots suggesting the Romans had much more advanced technology than we had thought. But those views to me are not obviously wrong. I'm not persuaded by any single one of them, but you've revised the historical picture enough. Do you ever have thoughts about Roman technology being quite a bit more advanced than what we had thought?

So I think what the sort of maximalists of Roman technology would argue is that the Romans didn't invent too much. That hadn't already been at least in the works in the Greek world. What they did was make it bigger and increase the size of everything from all kinds of water-powered devices, which is mostly what we credit them with, to the expansion of the use of mortar and inventing mortar that set underwater, which is a huge innovation. So that the Romans are not so much inventors as they are giganticizers, right? They make everything bigger and they expand the scale. Now, what I wish I could see more of but still don't see is ordinary people having access to this technology. We still can't see, you know, water wheels, for instance, being used on sort of small farms. That would be a game changer to my mind. But we don't see that yet. I can only think of, you know, a handful of examples where we can see small farms with water power. And agriculture is the biggest industry. They make their looms really big. So textile manufacturing is the biggest industry after agriculture. Their looms get bigger. Do they really change textile manufacturing? They don't ever invent the spinning wheel, as far as we can tell. That was a game changer. So, you know, I'm a maximalist, if you like, on the matter of scale, but it still bothers me that there isn't the trickle-down effect into ordinary people's economic lives that we see, say, beginning in the 18th century in Northern Europe.

Well, when Romans go, say, to Ptolemaic Egypt, where science was quite advanced. Did they have science envy, or they don't care, or it's ho-hum, or they already knew it, or how do you interpret that?

Well, of course, the Romans beat the Ptolemaic kings and take over Egypt for their own, and they certainly regard themselves as the inheritor of Greek knowledge. But I don't know that they would look at it in terms of envy any more than they do any other Greek things, right? They understand that the Greeks are their superior in all branches, all kinds of branches of not only knowledge but art and the sort of, if you like, the art of living. And they acknowledge their debt to that. But I, given their sort of seamless integration of many of these, if you like, technologies, I think they see it as their due.

And how much contact does Rome have with China back then? Do they know about China? Do they have China envy? They learned from China, or—

Do they have China envy? Not that we can tell. They certainly have contact with China, but through lots of middle— middlemen, if you like. And increasingly we can see and understand the scale of the contact that they had with India and the Indian subcontinent. In fact, some of the real maximalist estimates for Roman trade look at some numbers that come out of trade with the Far East. With certain kinds of commodities like peppercorns, which the Romans were very fond of. And in fact, we can now see ordinary people using peppercorns at least occasionally if they lived in a city. Those they had to get from the East. Certain things like that we imagine, like ivory and other kinds of commodities that can only be found in the East. And the value of those is extremely high, even if the scale quantities of that movement are probably pretty low. So today, right, it's not only the monetary value, but the scale of our relationship with China that makes us think. I think the Roman trade with the East, it certainly wasn't around basic staple commodities in the way that it is today.

Say I'm a well-to-do Roman and I decide I want to walk to India. Other than my own common sense, is there anything that will stop me?

No. You could walk to India if you wanted to.

So I could do it?

Sure, you could do it. Why would you want to?

Curiosity. You know, why did people cross the Atlantic, right? That was really insane, but they did it.

Well, I think the real issue that I'm asking is about the walking rather than the sailing, which is certainly what they would have done rather than walk. Romans never walk anywhere unless they— if they can take a boat, because it's obviously much quicker and faster to sail.

What would you most like to learn from the Vesuvius Challenge Scrolls? They're being deciphered, right? Using AI. Yeah.

Well, I frankly, not very much, actually. I'm a little perplexed about this project, not least because it seems as though many of these works we have, some of them will doubtlessly be new, but obviously I'd prefer we spent more time on the millions and millions of papyri that exist in museum collections and libraries around the world that haven't yet been published, which relate to the activities of ordinary Romans. Rather than spending millions and hopefully not undertaking unnecessary excavations for a few admittedly very sexy but ultimately, I think, not game-changing papyri in that villa.

But say there's a lost book by Aristotle in there.

A lost book by Aristotle?

Right, which is entirely possible.

It's true, but you're asking the wrong person. Do I think that we should be putting all of our limited amounts of academic treasure into a new book of Aristotle or revealing the lives of the 90%? I'll back the 90% any day. And we don't have to do any more digging to find them, right? Because they've been excavated. We just have to study the stuff we have.

Why don't we know more about ancient Carthage than we do?

Ah, well, there is a rather large modern city sat on top of it.

But same with Rome, right?

That's true. I was getting to the second part of my answer. There's been a great work, right, over the years done on Carthage. The Romans so successfully built on top of the Carthage I think you're talking about, Punic Carthage, that they eradicated, you know, huge swaths of it. So it's very difficult to get at those really early pre-Roman levels. So that when the Romans claimed that they destroyed Carthage, they didn't so much completely level it as they just built a massive Roman city, which was extremely wealthy and very big, on top of it. So actually getting underneath to find Hannibal's Carthage is a really tricky business, complicated by the modern city. And of course, we didn't care, right? We believed the Romans when they said they destroyed it, and we believed the Romans when they said that they had eradicated, you know, those, those, those nasty Carthaginians, and we didn't care. And now I think we're realizing how important the Carthaginians were and how important the sort of whole Punic-speaking world was. And now, now we're gonna— now we're gonna go back and find them. It's great.

Now, there's very longstanding debates on why Rome declined. You look at Rome from a different perspective, that of the 90%, using archaeological methods. Does that give you a different view on why Rome declined?

So I am writing a sequel to the book that you had in your hand a minute ago on exactly this question, or maybe not the question of why Rome declined, but what it was like to live through those years, those centuries. Of if not decline, then complete transformation. I think that the— I will propose ultimately a really different answer than the one that's been proposed before. That is, that is obviously an economic answer, and it has to do with the state as well and its ability to collect taxes. But it also has to do with the synergy between ordinary people's consumption and production and the ability of that state to survive. They both needed each other. Ultimately, a whole series of things happened that broke that feedback loop. One of those things I think has to be— this is what I'm puzzled by, you asked me about that previously. I said money. The second thing I'm really puzzled by is demographics. I'm not going to give you an answer to how many people lived in the Roman Empire, but I can tell you that an awful lot fewer people lived in, say, the 5th century. And population decline sets in in Roman Italy almost certainly even by the late 2nd century, so maybe even, you know, it's already starting under the reign of Hadrian. And this isn't true across the empire as a whole, and population numbers are radically different, say, in Britain versus Italy versus Egypt, but it's clear that the population declines. And in some cases it declines precipitously and stays low. And this has an enormous set of knock-on effects for the state and its ability to collect taxes, but also for that cycle of consumption and production that works at a kind of local level. It just— it falls apart. It worked when population was high and dense, and then it failed to work when that population emptied out, particularly in the countryside.

And how does the plagues hypothesis fit into your view?

Yeah, I don't think it's plague. I think plague is working on a population that's already declining. Or rather, it's not the plague that we think. The Justinianic Plague is too late. That ship has sailed by the mid-6th century when— or the early to mid-6th century when the Justinianic Plague gets going. But of course, remember, there's at least 2 other major plagues that we know about and probably a whole bunch of ones that we don't, which, if you think about it, and I'm right that the population is unusually high, are an inevitability. Right? And in a world which, circling back to your earlier question about sanitation, in a world which is hyperdense, hyperurbanized, and yet still never really managed to solve the urban sanitation problem, endemic disease of cities, cholera, dysentery, all the real killers are really important and very high. The possibility for a bigger event to cause a demographic shock is high. Why those population numbers then would have stayed low is something that I still have to figure out. But if you want my early forecast, inflation and population, those are the two culprits behind what happened to the Roman Empire.

A few questions about method. Just tell us, what is landscape archaeology?

Landscape archaeology is using mostly non-excavation methods. So picking up ceramics on the surface of the ground, using new technologies like geophysics, or aerial photography, or now drones to examine whole landscapes rather than individual sites, most often in what we call non-invasive methods. That is to say, not digging. And so the goal of landscape archaeology is to actually understand large swaths of mostly the countryside and its changes over time rather than cities on the one hand and individual sites on the other.

So put aside your teaching, put aside your writing, If someone asks, like an 8-year-old asks, what do you do? You're out there somewhere. You wake up in the morning. What is it you actually go out and do?

Sometimes I'm being very flip and I say I dig up dead people's garbage, which isn't untrue, but I guess that's what we do. But if you're asking, what do you do on a dig?

Yeah. Do you hold the shovel? Do you give the orders to the people with the shovels? Do you— what is it you do?

I try to hold the pick, my favorite instrument, as much as possible, although I am very often don't get to do that. Excavation is a lot, I imagine, like going to war or making a movie. Any of these activities that involve huge disparate activities that all have to be choreographed in order for the thing to get pulled off. And so that means everything from organizing porta-potties to food to working with local landowners and local government. To actually swinging the pick myself. And my favorite piece is swinging the pick. But very often I have to do all those other things as well. And the projects that I do, my favorite part, even more than swinging the pick, is actually getting to work with local, local farmers and local landowners who are partners in doing archaeology. It's their land. They're the inheritors, if you like, of the Romans who used to live on their land. And they are oftentimes our greatest source of information about how that land was used and what they found there. And they're fantastic to work with.

How much is there still to discover, do you think? Practically speaking.

Oh, so much. Oh, it's amazing how much there is to discover. I'll give you an example. So how in the world did they build Rome? Well, Rome is not only a city of marble, as Augustus claimed to have left it, but it is above all a city of brick. Where did those bricks come from? We used to think the bricks were made right there in the city of Rome. And some brilliant colleagues of mine figured out that in fact, that's not the case. That the Romans could never have made all the bricks that built Rome right in the city of Rome because they'd already cut down all the forests. So they had to keep moving farther and farther outside of Rome in order to actually make the very fabric that the city was made from. And we didn't know this until 20 years ago. And only recently have we actually found this massive industrial belt of brick factories going up and down the Tiber Valley. Probably 80 to 100 kilometers away from Rome. That's a kind of big thing to have missed. That's like having missed Pittsburgh. And, you know, 20 years ago we figured this out. So there's so much to discover. Think about it. In— for Italy, the number of farms— this is the majority of the economy— is smallholder farmers. How many farms have we excavated? 10? 15? That's amazing. So much left to discover.

Now, you grew up in Big Moose, New York. How has that influenced how you approach the Roman Empire?

So I think I understand what it means to live in small communities, and most Romans lived in small communities. I didn't grow up in a city. Most Romans, despite the fact that we now know a lot more than we thought, lived in cities. Most Romans still didn't live in cities. I think the thing that made the biggest difference to, to me though, Tyler, is that I grew up in a small family business. And most businesses in the Roman world were small family businesses. And that gave me an interest and experience in the multitude of things that have to happen for a small family business to work. The Roman world, as I keep emphasizing, right, is a world of friends and family. It's a world that, while bigger in scale than most worlds before the 19th century, still operates very much at that level of friends and family. And that was, yeah, that was the small business, small world that I grew up in.

A doctoral student comes to you and says, I want to find something like those newly discovered brick factories. Where should I actually go and look? Where do you send them?

Increasingly, actually, I've been sending, since you asked about papyri, I send them to the papyri. So these amazing efforts by colleagues who work on papyri have increasingly put huge swaths of what amount to the economic records of the ancient world online. Papyri.info. Any of your listeners can go and look it up. There are so— there are thousands of papyri that have not been either published or analyzed or, you know, really made use of in the ways that we now can do, now that they're so available to us. And those papyri, although they only relate to Roman Egypt, or mostly, So, a tiny corner of the Roman world. It was arguably, right, the breadbasket of the Roman world, one of its most important economic regions, and they have so much to teach us. In 20 years' time, I think we're going to think completely different things about the Roman economy, and that's going to be because of the papyri. The second place that's going to change the way we think about the Roman world, or the ancient economy generally, is all of the new excavations that are going on in advance of modern construction. And once Italy and Spain and Southern Europe start to have the same rules and laws that basically make partners of development and archaeology, we're going to have huge amounts of data from those places as well. And so it's really modern construction and the archaeology that goes on around modern construction that's transformed our knowledge about, say, Roman demographics or Roman farming or any of these other activities that make up the heart of the Roman economy. A lot of that material hasn't been studied. It's all out there. So that's where I send them.

And is it much harder to do work outside the EU? Say someone wants to go to Tunisia. Is that just as easy or there's additional obstacles, legal, regulatory, cultural?

Excavation is, I don't, it's challenging everywhere, right? And for reasons that in many cases are correct, right? These are countries that have experience of foreign archaeologists coming in and taking stuff and leaving with it. Leaving them with nothing, and they're quite keen, understandably, to prevent that from happening in the future. I don't know that it's harder to dig in Tunisia than it is in Greece. It's really hard to dig in Greece.

Because of the law.

Because of the law and because of the way in which, again, responses to sort of foreign predation of Greek antiquities produced a set of structures which one has to work within, and those don't exist necessarily in Tunisia, and there's amazing Tunisian colleagues with whom one can partner and develop projects that are of interest to, you know, both parties. As far as archaeology is concerned, there is no such thing as the EU. You really are operating at the level of the nation-state, and in some— inside some of those nations like Spain, you're really working at the level of the province, and that's your partner, right? That's the person or the entity with which it's either difficult or easy to work. So it really varies all over the place.

Last question. Put aside Rome and assume there's no monetary constraint. An educated person comes to you and says, I have 3 weeks. I'd like to do a tour of the Roman Empire, but you know, I've already seen everything in Rome. What do you outline for the tour? Where should they go? 3 weeks, give or take. If you need another day, that's fine.

So I think I would start them off at Hadrian's Wall. Hadrian's Wall is extraordinary for a whole bunch of reasons. As one of the few places the Romans actually built a border, it's a kind of extraordinary statement of empire. And this amazing archaeological site at Vindolanda, which is actually run by a family and excavated by a family, is just such an eye-opener to see how ordinary people, soldiers, very often most of whom, of course, are not Italian, right? They're recruited from Gaul, they're recruited from all over the place, right? Are living up at literally, for them, the end of the world. And you can see everything from their shoes to their pieces of their clothing to, you know, very grubby daily lives. So you go first, I think, to there. You're going to skip the heart of the empire, are you? Your person is sick of Italy and sick of Rome, so I guess they're not sick of Italy, but they've done Rome.

Everyone knows to go there, right? You send them to Trier, to Segovia, to Split.

Let's stick with our theme of trying to understand empire as empire while also understanding ordinary people. Yeah, sure, let's go to Split and see the great Palace of Diocletian. Which is now home to some beautiful cafes and restaurants and gift shops, right inside the great courtyard where Diocletian would have greeted you if you were lucky enough to obtain an audience. And this is an amazing palace, right, because it's a testament to an emperor who said, "I am stepping down," right? "I said I was in here for a limited amount of time. I'm gonna observe my term limits." It's the first and only time in the history of the Roman Empire, and most empires, in which a leader has said this, and, "I am going to retire," and retire he did, and retired to this extraordinary palace/military garrison on the coast of Croatia. Then, okay, let's assume that your traveler is able to cross military lines and go to some places that maybe, let's hope within our lifetime, will once again be safe. This is an aspirational trip.

Sure.

The last place that I would send them, again on the theme of empire and ordinary life, is the extraordinary town of Duriropos excavated by Yale University. In fact, your tourist could stop briefly at the Yale Art Museum to see some things— the Mithraeum, the Christian church— that were excavated by Yale University in Dura and brought back to New Haven. Dura-Europos was another frontier garrison town on the Euphrates and preserved for us because it was sacked by Rome's greatest— one of their greatest enemies, the Parthians, in the late 3rd century. And preserved a whole town with all of its religious diversity and ethnic diversity, including the ordinary lives of merchants who penned their graffiti accounts on the wall, to people's daily meals, and this extraordinary succession of religious buildings with which we began this conversation: a Christian church, a Jewish synagogue, and a Mithraeum.

Awesome. Again, a plug for Kim's great new book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the 90%. Kim Bows, thank you very much.

Thanks so much, Tyler.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.