The price of labour/goods in Ancient Rome? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

We have some information, but unfortunately not enough to give us anything approaching a full look at the range of economic levels that existed within the robust Roman economy. Besides the fairly well documented economic means of the extremely wealthy our best information, incomplete and unsatisfactory though it is, is arguably for the poorest part of the population. The proportion of the population that existed at this level is highly debatable (based, essentially, on Cicero's assertion that the capite censi almost outnumbered the entire first class, which might be taken to mean that the capite censi was very large or that the first class, with nearly half the centuries and a likely property requirement of between HS 40k and HS 400k, was enormous), but the free unskilled laborers who occupied the lowest rungs of the economic ladder likely made up the bulk of unlanded workers. Unfortunately there are significant gaps in our knowledge of extremely important segments of society. The economic means of shopkeepers and skilled artisans, who theoretically made up the middle levels of urban society, are almost unknown to us, and the economics small-time free farmers, who made up the majority of Rome's (always agricultural) economy, are distressingly short of evidence. Which leads to problems beyond merely the economic realm. Were urban shopkeepers wealthy enough to be in the first property class, as a rule? The second? Or were they in fact only a cut above the capite censi, perhaps even capite censi themselves? What was the economic condition of most free farmers throughout Italy? Did they have enough of a cash surplus to trek to the city for voting? Or did they have to work at their fields all the time merely for sustenance?

We have precious little to work with. Cicero tells us that as a laborer Roscius could have earned three denarii per day, but he was educated and was above labor. This three denarii figure is troublesome as a base level--Cicero is not talking about some regular person, and even as an average it's hard to square with some of our other information. The lex Ursonensis from the Flavian city of Urso preserves in its contents the prescribed rates of pay for the staff of the city's duoviri. These range from HS 300 per year to the HS 1200 per year that the two scribes were to be paid, but discounting the large salaries of the scribes (I think the next highest salary is only HS 800) as outliers for exceptionally skilled staff members the average salary is only HS 466. How these figures relate to workers at large is hard to tell. These staff members were technically skilled workers, in that they had a specific trade (in the case of scribes they were certainly skilled). One would expect wages to go up between the late Republic and the Flavians, as we know they did in the army and from sources like the Price Edict, but at the same time the wages at provincial Urso might not line up with the wages in the city, which may have been considerably higher. In addition, many members of the staff of the duoviri do not necessarily have to have been constantly employed by the magistrates alone. People like the praecones, a sort of herald, would have found employment at a wide range of places (included, in the case of praecones, auction) and we're not told that the staff of the duoviri had to restrict themselves to working only for the magistrates. Still, even if we take Cicero's figure of three denarii per day we'd get a yearly sum--provided that a worker could find work every day of the year--of HS 4380, nearly four times the wage of the scribes at Urso. That seems unlikely, although accounting for days without work it's more plausible. Another method is to look at the wages of soldiers. Caesar raised military pay to HS 900 per year, but before him it was only HS 480. Domitian raised it again to HS 1200. But how does military pay actually relate to the civilian day labor market? Soldiers are employed 24/7 and, in the Roman army at least, had to pay for their own equipment. They were supplied by a constant pipeline of materials coming from their camps and bases, and they were not especially integrated into the labor economy at large, in which they played little direct part. Domitian's raise to HS 1200 might have been in part based on some real economic situation, to try and even a soldier's pay up with some type of worker's pay or to make it more attractive, but it's hard to see how Caesar could have effectively doubled a legionary's pay by trying to line it up with an average laborer's wage. I'm inclined to think that while military pay had some relationship to workers' wages the economics of that relationship are too unclear for military pay to be especially useful in calculating "normal" wages at all.

I mention that a worker would have to find work for every day of the year to achieve the above figure, which is crucial to remember. The Roman world knew no such thing as hourly employment and free unskilled laborers were, essentially, day workers. If they could not find work for a day they were not paid. Even accounting for the possibility that workers might routinely have worked every day of the week (regardless of festival days or market days), however slim that possibility really is, the Roman unskilled laborer still had to find work. How frequently he did so is hard to say. Many common sources of labor, like the monumental building projects, likely provided seasonal work on a more or less regular basis. Likewise the suburban agricultural labor that Brunt postulated many urban laborers participated in seasonally probably provided fairly steady income for that season, provided the laborer could find employment at a plot that actually needed the labor. But these sources of labor only needed so many workers, and for the many that were likely not lucky enough to find employment there it's hard to say how regularly work could be found--the plight of the modern day laborer should attest to this no less strongly. Cicero tells us all the time of groups of apparent lowlives hanging around the basilicas and temples, and Sallust in the Catiline seems to refer to some sort of solicitation of workers for violent activity, through the enigmatic "duces multitudinum." The rapidly changing nature of the day labor market in any society means that statistics would be hard to come by in the best of times, and we simply do not have anything approaching the information to make much more than educated guesses.

Taking some of the calculations above, however, more or less for argument's sake, we can at least attempt some calculations of basic cost of living. For the sake of time and space I'm only going to try and work out the basic price of food, which we have some decent information on. Cicero tells us in the In Verrem that Verres was told to extract grain from Sicily at HS 3 or HS 3.5 per modius, depending on exactly where the grain was coming from. The price of grain could fluctuate wildly in the Republic, but Cicero's figure here seems to be as good an estimate for stable grain prices as any, accounting for the fact that when sold at Rome the price would be slightly higher. Starting with C. Gracchus five modii of grain per month were provided at low cost to the head of each family, and after Clodius' lex frumentaria in 58 this amount of grain was provided for free. Five modii per month is enough to feed one person and maybe a little bit more, if we expand the calories contained in that much grain, so we're likely talking about the need to purchase ten to fifteen additional modii of grain a month to keep a family alive, provided that the household is three or four people. At fifteen modii per month at Cicero's stated figures a family would need to spend something like HS 540 on grain alone. To this we may add clothing, rent (see Frier's study on rents at Rome), and from it we must subtract the days of work lost. Now, it seems very likely that more than one member of working households tended to work, but it's hard to say whether that additional income really made too much of a difference or whether it more or less only would serve to offset the loss of another family member's inability to find work. However, to which income figures do we apply these numbers? To Cicero's? If so we lack the statistics on days of work missed to calculate yearly income in any reliable way. To those in the lex Ursonensis? But we don't know whether the figures there are supposed to represent those workers' sole source of income, and it's more or less impossible to estimate how much additional income they might have drawn. The most we can say is that according to the figures we have the cost of food alone was a significant expenditure and, if we take the low-end estimates, might even have taken up by itself alone the majority of a worker's income. But we're not really sure

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