Kim Bowes, "Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Mar 12, 2026

Kim Bowes, professor of archaeology and ancient history who studies non-elite Roman lives. She explores how ordinary Romans hustled to survive: mixed incomes, women’s textile work, child labor, and fragile savings. Archaeology and texts reveal consumption, markets, and bodily evidence of intense labor. The conversation links ancient survival strategies to modern precarity.

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INSIGHT

Familiar Financial Practices Beside Brutal Living Conditions

Many economic behaviors feel familiar: small-scale credit, lending at interest, and mobility for work.
Yet the Roman world was brutal: widespread slavery, low life expectancy, and bodily wear from manual labor.

INSIGHT

Households Hustled Multiple Income Streams

Most households cobbled multiple income streams because wages alone were insufficient.
Women’s textile work often provided the break-even income while family members combined farming, wages, and small crafts.

INSIGHT

Spinning Made Girls Key Earners In Poor Families

Women’s spinning was a measurable and significant income source, especially for poor families.
Girls learned spinning early, making them important contributors to household finances.

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The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton UP, 2025) unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor.

Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children’s toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans’ most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status.
Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today’s laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world.

Kim Bowes is professor of archaeology and ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire and Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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