LABOR AND IDENTITY IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE: AN EXPERIMENT IN FINDING THE NON-ELITE EXPERIENCE

Abstract

From its creation some two thousand years ago, to its discovery and interpretation in the modern period, ancient Roman literary and material evidence has slanted popular and scholarly understandings of the classical world in favor of elite narratives. The study of non-elite individuals, experiences, and perspectives therefore constitutes a persistent struggle to overcome a host of biases inherent in the nature, survival, and modern interpretation of the evidence. Such work has recently borne considerable fruit, thanks to the groundwork established over the past three decades by innovative literary and materially-minded scholars. Yet the task of finding those outside elite circles remains a challenge, especially for those just starting out in classical studies. This paper comes alongside the recent wave of scholarship on non-elites, combining all manner of material evidence— epigraphs, papyri, ostraka, workshop spaces, funerary monuments, and religious dedications—from select ports in the Roman period, with the goal of examining how communal groups could form in such intensely dynamic commercial environments. The study focuses on several groups of different backgrounds and commercial roles, exploring the ways in which their members related to each other, those outside their group, and the Roman state looming over them all. The comparison of these ports and their communities reveals a heavily work-centered sense of identity that could bind people together, while also placing them in a potentially paradoxical relationship with the Roman Empire, which could both facilitate and threaten the activities of these labor communities.