The cover of the book Work and Labour in the Cities of Roman Italy by Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga (G.-V.) features a well-known relief of a butcher’s shop (here, Fig. 1).Footnote ¹ Originally from Trastevere in Rome, it is now part of the Skulpturensammlung in Dresden. Unfortunately, nothing is known about its context, but in all probability, it is a funerary relief. Depicted on the right is a man in tunica cinta and shoes at a chopping block, cutting up pork ribs. Opposite him, a woman in a sleeved tunic and mantle with an elaborate hairstyle, pointing to prosperity and reminiscent of that of Empress Sabina, sits on a cathedra and writes on a polyptych. Behind the man is a rack on which various pieces of pork meat hang – a head, offal, belly, knuckles, leg, ribs – as well as another cleaver and a scale. All these cuts of meat are rather expensive. The man and woman are most likely a married couple. The prominent position of the woman and the way she is represented indicate that she was involved in the business and was possibly responsible for the bookkeeping.

Fig. 1.

Relief of a butcher’s shop from Trastevere in Rome. (© Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Skulpturensammlung Inv. Hm 418, Photo: E. Estel/H.-P. Klut.)

Several aspects are already anticipated here that will play an important role in the course of G.-V.’s study. For instance, the gender relationship is notable, as well as the work of members of the same family in a joint business, which was affected by factors such as the family life cycle, and the investment in education and human capital, symbolized here by the fact that the woman could read and write. The choice of the scene in the store was probably very deliberate, as it allowed the couple to be portrayed together, pointing to marital harmony, success, and economic prosperity.

G.-V. presents a thought-provoking study and an important contribution to the topic of urban work and labor. It is a revised version of her PhD thesis, which was completed in Leiden in 2017 and was originally part of the project “Moving Romans: Urbanisation, Migration and Labour in the Roman Principate,” under the guidance of Luuk de Ligt and Rens Tacoma. The author examines a subject of research that has recently been receiving increased attention. With the growth of the economic history of antiquity as a sub-discipline and the associated more systematic examination of various economic variables and factors, numerous works on labor and work have emerged in the last 20 years.Footnote ² So far, according to G.-V., scholarship has tended to focus on only part of the working population. In contrast, this study aims to capture urban work and labor in its entirety for imperial Italy via the two socio-economic institutions of the family or household and private non-familial associations.

The work is divided into six chapters. The introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the author’s aims, methods, and sources. The second chapter deals with labor and labor market theories and sets out the theoretical and conceptual foundations for the subsequent discussion. The core of the book is formed by the following three chapters: two of them deal with family economics, one focused on non-elite households and the other on the elite domus; the third considers non-familial labor collectives, especially professional collegia. The study ends with a conclusion and an attempt to situate the results within a global history of work and to demonstrate the potential of such a comparative approach. The chapters are further subdivided, which makes reading easier and, above all, allows the individual chapters to be read as independent units, but does entail certain redundancies. The structure of each chapter is the same: first there is a theoretical/methodological introduction, then the chapter outline, then the analytical part, and finally a short conclusion.

Three appendices follow: a “Catalogue of job titles,” “Apprenticeship contracts,” and a “Taxonomy of labour relations.” The book concludes with a bibliography and an index of the most important terms. In Appendix 1, the epigraphic references are lacking, which considerably limits its usability. A detailed structure like that of Appendix 2 would have been desirable. Unfortunately, an index locorum is also missing.

The aim of the book is a holistic study of work and labor in the cities of Roman Italy between Augustus and Diocletian in the context of the social institutions of the family and non-familial labor collectives. Conceptually, a distinction is made between work as “any human effort adding value” (11) and labor as “money-making […] activities” (1), but both are treated equally. This distinction is essential, as it means that unremunerated activities are also taken into account. It is assumed that there was a labor market “that was segmented along the lines of gender, status, and skills” (3). This closes a significant gap in the study of the urban economy of the Roman Empire, which has recently experienced a floruit.Footnote ³ The book is deeply rooted in an Anglo-American tradition that is best represented by the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, edited by Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard P. Saller and claims to be the New Economic History of Antiquity.Footnote ⁴

Inscriptions are the primary sources for G.-V.’s study. Between 2,000 and 3,000 epitaphs with occupational titles are known from Italy, half of these from Rome and Ostia.Footnote ⁵ In addition, there are around 100 figural depictions of craft and trade activities, or just of the relevant tools, also mostly from funerary monuments. Finally, 200 inscriptions of associations are also considered in this study. As a result, G.-V. was able to identify 580 job titles. This occupational differentiation is closely linked to urbanization, which favors horizontal and vertical specialization (34). On the one hand, this specialization can improve the possibilities of allocation in the labor market,Footnote ⁶ that is, reduce transaction costs in the logic of the New Institutional Economics; on the other hand, it can be understood as part of conspicuous consumption by elites (34). Already at this point, but also throughout the book, the possible biases in the epigraphic source material towards the male enslaved or manumitted are discussed with great care and diligence.

The aforementioned sources, which should be the backbone of the book, are sometimes used rather anecdotally. The occupational titles that G.-V. identifies do not always play a major role in the rest of the work, or they disappear for long stretches. A regrettable separation between epigraphy and images is also maintained. Not only are images completely absent from the book, but they are also largely neglected in the analysis, contrary to what is suggested in Chapter 1. The proposed default interpretation for inscriptions and reliefs is that they emphasize pride in and identification with a job, as well as self-respect (20). Pride in one’s work and its products is one of the more common interpretations of the images, but the same cannot be said for identification with a job or self-respect. It can certainly be argued that the former is in some way related to pride, even though – as is repeatedly stressed in the book – it is notoriously difficult to connect occupational titles with actual performed activities, as there seems to be no linear connection. It is more difficult with the latter. The choice to depict or name occupations shows that, unlike in some written sources and older, largely obsolete views,Footnote ⁷ they were not associated with shame or more generally negative sentiments and low status, at least in some milieus, but had a positive connotation (12–13). This made them suitable for funerary monuments, which, according to the communis opinio, generally served to represent one’s own socio-economic, cultural, or political position, or to convey certain roles, values, and virtues. Conversely, however, this does not necessarily mean a moral or ethical appreciation, of the kind associated with the concept of Beruf in German, for example.Footnote ⁸ It has been demonstrated that these representations of professions were often only one part of a more complex and multi-layered message.Footnote ⁹ It should also be taken into account that different messages, and thus representational strategies, could be chosen depending on the milieu, viewer, legal status, trade/craft, time, or region, or that the depictions of trade and crafts had different connotations. G.-V. emphasizes on several occasions that there was a bias in the inscriptions, as other forms of representation were chosen when available, such as family relationships (99) or the magistracies held in collegia (225). This would actually argue against the sweeping assumptions made earlier. The active choice to use an occupation as part of a complex image is to highlight one identity out of a complex web of complementary but also sometimes conflicting identities.Footnote ¹⁰ In order to gain a better picture of the self-image of labor, but also of work, a fresh look that includes different genres would be an appealing direction for future research.

G.-V. deliberately decides against the use of statistics and overly specific figures, as she pursues a synchronic approach and the dataset is relatively small (43). She argues that, all too often, statistics are based on a very small sample, which is why many results are less reliable than they appear to be. While this methodological caution is highly commendable, one should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the subsequent parts of the book, concrete figures would have been appreciated at least from time to time, as the scale of the phenomena described often remains unclear, making it difficult to weigh and contextualize the author’s observations. Between 2,000 and 3,000 epitaphs is arguably not too small a database.

The family, the household, and non-familial labor collectives are identified as the main socio-economic institutions. While the family was under the direct potestas of a paterfamilias, the household was characterized by the fact that all its members contributed to its economic success. It remains questionable whether the assumption that the family members named in the inscriptions necessarily belonged to one and the same economic household (89) is always true. G.-V. argues that non-familial labor collectives, on the other hand, comprised horizontal labor relationships and often formed trust networks. They played an important role in the economy, but also in urban society.

In the various chapters, very different topics are addressed and examined with reference to a wide set of theories. This is, at least in the eyes of this reviewer, not a disadvantage but, on the contrary, shows G.-V.’s broad knowledge and the connectivity of the topic. New Institutional Economics are central, but so are the price theory of supply and demand, human capital theory, New Home Economics, and more.

G.-V. argues for shifting the focus, asking not whether the Roman economy was organized through the market, but how its market functioned. Due to imperfect information flows, she does not assume that there was a uniform integrated market but argues instead for one that was fragmented according to region, skill, and gender, as expected in Labor Segmentation Theory. Even nowadays, the labor market functions differently from other markets and is by no means perfectly integrated. In the eyes of G.-V., the existence of slavery would not in principle speak against a labor market. We must therefore assume that not only labor but also laborers were traded on the market. In contrast to individual careers and job changes, which are almost never documented, we can easily trace changes in legal status from slavery to manumission. As slaves performed the same activities as the free, it seems plausible that they participated in the same market. Since the wages for unskilled labor were quite low, one can assume, in general, an abundant supply of labor. However, gender played a particularly important role in the segmentation of the labor market, as the participation of women was strongly predetermined by the family life cycle and its squeezes. In general, women are underrepresented in jobs in the epigraphy, but where they do appear, the range of occupations is quite wide.

Non-elite households are examined first. They comprise “family units in which family members contributed their labour power for the well-being of the collective” (81). Not only does this group probably account for the majority of the population, but most occupational inscriptions can also be attributed to it. Over the course of time, different models have been developed to describe the family economy, whereby the term “family-adaptive work strategies” is used in this case: “a family’s economic actions on the labour market and the unremunerated work that supported those actions” (84). G.-V. discusses some basic assumptions that form the basis for further analysis: she assumes a nuclear family as the norm, although there were probably often composite structures due to the high mortality rate; marriages were generally neo-local, whereby a new household was established; many households had one or two slaves.

The economic strategies of a family are further differentiated into categories that are quantitative (demography, slaves, etc.) and qualitative (labor allocation, investment in education, etc.). Demography is determined by the family life cycle, which for women in particular is strongly influenced by the dip caused by the birth of children. Besides children, there are also other possibilities for additions to the family (alumni, adoption). The qualitative strategies are dominated by discussions on human capital and especially the role of apprenticeships. Such apprenticeships, however, are only attested via contracts in Egypt. Evidence is lacking for Italy, where G.-V. nonetheless assumes an analogous situation. Female labor is given plenty of space in the discussion of economic strategies (124–37). The range of jobs for women recorded in the occupational inscriptions was decidedly smaller than for men. According to the epigraphic evidence, women were primarily active in the domestic or service sectors, for example, as nutrix or onatrix. However, it can be assumed that women were involved in family businesses, as indicated on the relief in Dresden. Even if only very few examples point to this, G.-V. concludes that “there is no doubt […] it was a common feature of Roman society” (128). In addition, freedmen played an important economic role through inheritances, operae, trust networks, and economic cooperation.

A large number of occupational inscriptions can be associated with elite households, especially in Rome. In contrast to non-elite households, elite households “could afford to have most of the required work and labour carried out by subordinates rather than by their own hands” (149). Accordingly, adaptive strategies were primarily realized via slaves, who are also likely to have been behind most of the demographic dynamics in the household. Elite households are likely not only to have made up a significant proportion of the urban labor market, but also to have accounted for well over 50 percent of the urban slave population outside Rome. Freedmen also played a major role, of course, many probably continuing to work in elite households after their release. In contrast, free hired labor was probably negligible. Specialization and job differentiation can presumably be largely associated with slaves and ex-slaves in elite households. It required a significant investment, which not everyone could afford under a high-mortality regime with the accompanying risk of never bringing these investments to fruition. It is therefore not surprising that skilled professions are attested chiefly for slaves and ex-slaves in the epigraphic record. The evidence that trained slaves could be sold at significantly higher prices suggests a market for skilled labor.

In order to get an idea of the structure and organization of these households, G.-V. looks at the columbaria in Rome. These are not, however, unproblematic. At least five of them are likely to have been used predominantly for the burial of members of a single elite household (Statilii, Volusii, Arruntii, Iunii Silani, or Livia). Other members of these households may have been buried outside, and not all burials bear occupational inscriptions. Marked differentiation between occupations can be observed among the burials. Some of the titles are so specific, such as the scoparius (sweeper), that it can be assumed that these people were also involved in other household activities. On the one hand, this differentiation is the result of a top-down process of conspicuous consumption and the representation of prosperity and cultural finesse. On the other hand, G.-V. assumes that “the fact that the resulting plethora of job titles was subsequently recorded in such high numbers reflects that, to the workers of the servile staff their job title was a distinctive source of pride” (207). Again, however, I would not consider pride, or pride in the proximity to masters (211), the only possible explanation. Particularly in the case of burials in columbaria – where all, or at least most, of the other buried persons belonged to the same household and the possibilities of distinction were generally limited in comparison to other types of burials – differences in status and individuality might also have been represented in this way.

Elite households were generally structured into three areas: domestic service and personal attendance, which is the focus of the study, administration, and other professions “that occasionally seem to suggest a kind of labour specialization for the market” (208). Most women worked in domestic service, especially in childcare. In rare cases, individual slaves could also have their own household. Regrettably, the aspect of specialization for the market is not pursued nor further explored. This would have been particularly interesting in giving an idea not only of the extent to which elite domus offered labor opportunities for the freeborn, but also of how they intervened in the market. Although the opus doliare was excluded for good reasons, it could have provided additional interesting insights.

Further to labor relations within households, horizontal labor relationships are reflected most visibly in non-familial labor collectives. Collegia provide a good basis for this part of the study given the sources available. They are primarily documented between the late 1st and late 3rd c. CE. They had strong internal hierarchies and could be recognized as legal entities. Nevertheless, there was also a hierarchy of collegia, with the three principal collegia at the top, followed by those associated with the annona. Through their internal cursus honorum, they offered opportunities for upward mobility, which was particularly intriguing for those who, due to their legal status, lacked such opportunities elsewhere. As the inscriptions tended to emphasize a collective identity, it is difficult to determine the proportion of slaves, if they were admitted at all, and of freedmen. There was no universal membership and probably even a majority of the urban population was never organized in collegia. You had to invest in membership, so it was expensive to join and money was a limiting factor. There are no women in the lists of professional collegia, but in very rare cases there were exclusively female collectives or women who appeared, for example, as mater collegii.

In the case of professional collegia, shared occupation was normally the determining factor, but occupational plurality may have been more widespread among professional collegia in smaller towns. Furthermore, as with occupational specialization, there is a clear correlation between urbanism and associations. Two thirds of all epigraphic evidence for collegia comes from Italy, and most of that from Rome. Ostia, as the port of Rome and city of the annona, holds a unique position in this regard and was home to a plethora of collegia. G.-V. assumes that collegia were also more important in Rome and larger cities because of the greater number of migrants, who did not have their families to rely on. Here, collegia could act as substitute families, even if the complementarity of families and collegia is highlighted. In small towns there tended to be almost exclusively the three principal collegia. While the fabri are everywhere, there are local differences in the distribution of the centonarii, which appear primarily in central Italy and the north, and the dendrophori, which are concentrated in the south. It is a distinct possibility that the economic benefit of collegia was less in smaller towns, where most people knew each other anyway and there were fewer people who could join, but that they could be actants and benefactors in the civic community.

Collegia essentially functioned as trust networks, between members, but also for external parties, as membership is likely to have increased trustworthiness. The importance of such trust networks has recently been widely discussed in the literature.Footnote ¹¹ Collegia reduced, moreover, transaction costs by bringing together information flows and reducing market uncertainties. Finally, the members of collegia benefited disproportionately from distributions of food or money.

The chapter “Conclusion: social structures and urban labour in Roman Italy” goes far beyond what is promised in its title. Although the central results of the book are first summarized, they are then tentatively contextualized within a global history of work. Integration into existing classifications of occupations such as HISCO (Historical International Standard Classification for Occupation) does not seem very useful, as G.-V admits. The taxonomy for labor relations, which is particularly suitable for investigating vertical labor relations, appears to be a more promising path. This is intriguing insofar as it shows that “labour relations are not determined by legal status or economic position per se” (284) and that different labor relations can often be observed within households and even among individuals.

G.-V. has succeeded in drawing a varied picture of urban labor, with its social and economic interdependence in families or households and non-familial labor collectives. That said, the specific nature of labor in urban Roman Italy is not really tangible. Egypt played a far greater role than Italian cities except for Rome, Ostia, and Pompeii. Apart from the regional specifics in the distribution of associations, which are not pursued further, and, more generally, the connection between specialization and urbanization, Italy plays no role as a spatial entity and is not specifically addressed in the analytical chapters. As G.-V. points out herself, observations from other regions such as Egypt cannot always be transferred to the Roman Empire as a whole.

The book is always at its best when it concentrates on concrete evidence. It would have been a welcome addition if more archaeological data had been included. The frequently cited inscriptions, as well as the images, largely come from actual grave monuments and can be linked to them, at least in some cases. Further information on family relationships could certainly have been found here, but also on the social significance of occupations. For example, the columbaria of elite households could have been contrasted with the family tombs of the non-elite households of the Isola Sacra.Footnote ¹²

The systematic inclusion of women, children, and unremunerated work in general, and the roles they played in different social and economic formations has made a substantial contribution to the discussion. Finally, Roman households included people of different social and legal status, ages, genders, and skillsets, and were subject to different temporalities. Here, it was possible to revise many older assumptions and open up completely new perspectives. By including different groups of people, social categories, and legal categories, a holistic picture of urban labor has been drawn. The book will certainly become a standard work in its field in the coming years. It is to be hoped that a similarly comprehensive and thorough study will soon be published for other regions, but, above all, for rural areas.