So I'm going to play the evidence card on this one and basically tell you that we don't know. Partly because this is really where our evidence starts to fall apart but also because I spent something like six hours altogether today doing the legwork for another question (luckily tangentially related to a paper I'm writing, so not a total loss of time) and I ain't about that life right now.

Our evidence for fairly fluid movement of unskilled labor within the city and the suburban districts (that is, the rural areas closest to the city, on the ager Romanus) is fairly good, if scattered and unable to give us a truly coherent picture. It was first noticed in a serious way by Brunt, whose work generally coincided with the beginnings of a larger scholarly movement to "rehabilitate" the plebs from its previous position as a parasitic, politically-disinterested, uneducated rabble. There are certainly a lot of questions still there, most of which can't really be answered directly for lack of evidence. For example, the big one: how much of the city was made up of this very low-level unskilled labor? Unskilled laborers must have heavily outnumbered skilled laborers and the wealthy. But, we really don't know by how much, or how many of those laborers were "permanent" residents of the city or their vici. The evidence from the economy is poor, and the evidence from social and political references is poor and confusing. For example, Cicero says that the capite censi was nearly as large as the first voting class in the centuriate assembly. The capite censi was very large, especially considering that it was counted as a single century, but the other side of this remark is the tacit acknowledgement that the first class must also have been very large. The first class included people with a a wealth distribution of probably ten times between the highest and lowest centuries, so it's not the very very wealthiest and maybe not that surprising on the whole, but even so the implications should make us think. On a related note, we have zero idea where to place most skilled labor. Did shopkeepers regularly make it up into the lower centuries of the first class, as Yakobson thinks? Or were they only marginally better off than the capite censi? How many of them were there, was it a large enough number to carry some of these centuries or even classes? Turning back to the economy, were the economic conditions of unskilled urban labor so poor that, as Mouritsen thinks, urban workers were simply unable, as well as unwilling, to participate even in contiones? Or, setting aside ideology, does Diminishing Returns take over and at some point was continuing to look for work for the day not only so hopeless but such a useless expenditure of money and time that it wasn't worth it? In which case, as at least some of our evidence seems to suggest, would these unlucky workers be ripe political manpower, so to speak? We really don't know, and these questions have much larger implications than just the immediate labor market of the city.

If that's the condition for the city, what's the picture for the rest of Italy, and for the interactions between those units? The evidence here, unsurprisingly, is probably even worse. Let me go through some of these specifically to give you an idea:

was there much overlap between the day-laboring urban poor of Rome and the hired laborers working agricultural estates during harvest time?

We have no clue. Brunt's argument that urban labor moved seasonally out to the areas immediately around the city seems to be a pretty good one, and people interested in the movement of labor generally tend to adopt it or some part of it. There are of course lots of people who don't really care much about the movement of labor who still talk as though all inhabitants of the city were there permanently. Part of the issue here goes beyond the economic and into questions of urban theory. Premodern cities worked very differently from their modern counterparts. Patterns of urban residence in particular are hard to reconstruct but must have looked completely different. The work on trying to apply premodern urban models to the city has only just started (there's a fascinating chapter in Lisa Marie Mignone's The Republican Aventine and Rome's Social Order on just this problem, which is probably one of the fullest, if not the fullest treatment of this fairly new method). It remains to be seen whether this will work out or even be continued--at the moment it's highly speculative. To my knowledge there's currently zero work on this sort of premodern urban modeling with relation to the hinterland, which is really what we want to know. Patterns of residence in the city are fine and dandy, but what would be really nice for a lot of people is figuring out how all that works together with the immediate hinterland, which was of such critical importance to all ancient cities in a way that is not true of modern cities. That's not there. To make things worse, getting the theory there is a fairly tall task, since the evidence is lacking.

We know there was a fair amount of movement between the ager Romanus and the city. Every eight days was a market day at Rome, when public business ceased and farmers from the extra-urban districts came into the city to sell their produce. This has a lot of implications, some of them controversial, across all sorts of areas of study. For our purposes it's noteworthy that the people moving in and out of the city regularly on market days were probably mostly those living within a day's distance, or at most a couple of days. It's possible that people from further out might have come from time to time, especially if they brought luxury goods or something with them, but we have zero evidence for that. There's fairly good evidence, although still lacking and unsatisfactory, for people coming into the city from pretty far away for markets, festivals, games, possibly voting. The rate of temporary movement out of the city might well be pretty high too, but we don't have the evidence. There were certainly a large number of small farmers and larger agricultural units that needed seasonal workers at various times throughout the closer regions of the ager Romanus, otherwise market days couldn't work. Since grain was mostly brought into the city from elsewhere much of this agriculture (and pasture, we shouldn't forget herding, although I question how good the evidence for it on the ager Romanus is) was probably produce other than cereals--in other words, not subsistence farming, though not necessarily true cash crops either. Which would mean that that obstacle to bringing extra work would be removed.

1/2