The Everyday Jobs of Ancient Romans β Life Behind the Empire ποΈ | Boring History for Sleep
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What is discussed at the start of this section?
Hey, quick question. When you picture ancient Rome, what do you see? Emperors in gold, gladiators, marble temples, maybe Russell Crowe yelling at a crowd, and yeah, sure, that Rome existed. But behind every toga-wearing senator eating grapes was a guy who baked the bread, fired the clay, and hauled the trash. A whole civilisation running on people history barely bothered to remember. Tonight we're telling their story. The bakers, the blacksmiths, the market hustlers, the people who actually kept Rome alive while the philosophers were busy writing about how beneath them hard work was. Spoiler, it wasn't beneath them when dinner time rolled around. So drop a comment right now. Where are you watching from?
What city? What country? What time is it there? I genuinely want to know who's here for this. Now settle in, because we're about to meet the real Roman Empire, and it smells nothing like marble. Just outside the ancient walls of Rome, wedged between a later medieval gateway and a stretch of road that has seen more history than most countries combined, there stands a tomb. Not a particularly elegant one by Roman standards. No weeping angels, no polished marble columns, no inscription listing military victories or political offices held. What it has instead is dough. Carved in stone, in careful relief, running along the entire exterior of the structure, workers kneading dough, loading grain into mills, pulling loaves from ovens, stacking finished bread into baskets.
The whole operation, immortalised in limestone wrapping around a building shaped, and historians have debated this with great enthusiasm, like a series of giant grain containers stacked together. It is, in a word, a monument to bread. The man who built it was called Marcus Vergilius Euryzises, and if that name doesn't ring any bells, that's exactly the point. Eurysthes was almost certainly a former slave. His name suggests Greek origins, which in Roman society often meant someone who had arrived in chains from the eastern Mediterranean. At some point, through a combination of skill, timing and the particular Roman institution of manumission, the formal freeing of enslaved people, he gained his liberty, and then, apparently, he got to work.
By the time he built his tomb, probably sometime in the first century before the Common Era, Eurystheses had become wealthy enough to commission a structure that would have made minor aristocrats uncomfortable. The inscription identifies him plainly, a baker and a contractor, someone who supplied bread to the Roman state, not a general, not a senator, a man who fed the city and who decided that deserved to be remembered. What makes the tomb of Eurysaces so remarkable isn't just its survival, though that is remarkable considering how much of ancient Rome was plundered, burned, repurposed or simply buried. It's what it tells us about who Rome actually was. We have a deeply ingrained habit of thinking about ancient Rome in terms of its most famous residents, the emperors, the orators, the legions marching through conquered territories, the senators arguing in marble chambers.
These people existed, of course. They were very busy, very loud, and very good at making sure people would write about them for the next 2,000 years. But underneath all of that, quite literally keeping the whole enterprise from collapsing, were millions of people doing much less glamorous things. Baking the bread, tanning the leather, hauling the water, building the roads that everyone else got to walk on. Eurysaces understood something important, that the work itself was worth commemorating. He didn't try to pretend he was something he wasn't. He didn't commission sculptures of himself in military poses or claim descent from some distinguished family. He said in stone that he had mastered a trade, run a business and fed a city.
And then he made sure it was the first thing anyone approaching Rome from the East would see when they came down the road, which is either a statement of immense dignity or the ancient world's most aggressive piece of personal branding.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is discussed at the start of this section?
0:00β11:36
2
Who was Marcus Vergilius Euryzaces and why is he significant?
11:36β37:54
3
What did Romans actually think about work?
37:54β1:19:12
4
How did social status affect perceptions of work in ancient Rome?
1:19:12β1:59:12
5
What were the working conditions like for tanners in ancient Rome?
1:59:12β2:01:59
6
How did child labor manifest in Roman trades?
2:01:59β2:05:10
7
What was the social status of butchers and other 'dirty' trades?
2:05:10β2:08:28
8
How did the Edict of Diocletian shape economic life in Rome?
2:08:28β4:10:35
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Boring History for Sleep
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