CHAPTER THREE
5. Concluding Thoughts on Mobility
The foregoing section has demonstrated that a vital working class engaged in non- agrarian economic activity was developing at Rome in the late fourth and early third centuries. Mobility directed towards the urbs Roma was high during the Middle
Republic, and free labor made up a component of some of this movement. These people moving to Rome were involved in mercantilist activities, and some were involved in the building industry. Demand was high, and there was consequently wealth and status to be gained for free Romans from participation in the building industry. This movement of population towards the urban center did not abate in the early second century: in 184, embassies from the Latin allies arrived in Rome to complain to the senate that their cities were being depopulated by emigration towards the capital. The senate responded by
expelling 12,000 Latins from the city and sending them to their hometowns, thus
relieving Rome, as Livy says, from a burdensome crowd of foreign-born residents (39.3.4
multitudine alienigenarum…onerante).
A final note: this trend of non-Romans seeking work in Rome during the third century finds confirmation in the biographic traditions of our earliest Latin literary figures, who are largely a non-Roman class moving to Rome in the same period. Ennius was from Rudiae. Early playwrights such as Livius Andronicus, a Tarentine and perhaps a freedman, or Maccius Plautus, a freeborn Roman from Sarsina, made their way
presumably of their own volition to the city.553 Though the biographical tradition of Plautus is highly dubious, we find in it the perfect example of professional mobility not only towards Rome but in the city once there: Plautus reportedly lost his fortune as a merchant, then found employment at Rome as a miller, before regaining his standing as a playwright.554
Wages
Literary or documentary evidence for wages in the Republican period is
extremely thin. Crawford suggests that a standard lowest daily wage paid by the Roman
553 Biographies in Conti 1994 passim.
554 The source is Varro as reported by Gellius, 3.3.14: Sed enim Saturionem et Addictum et tertiam
quandam [sc. fabulam], cuius nunc mihi nomen non subpetit, in pistrino eum scripsisse Varro et plerique alii memoriae tradiderunt, cum pecunia omni, quam in operis artificum scaenicorum pepererat, in mercatibus perdita inops Romam redisset et ob quaerendum victum ad circumagendas molas, quae "trusatiles" appellantur, operam pistori locasset, “But indeed Varro and several other sources tell that he wrote Saturio, the Addictus, and a third play, whose name I don’t now recall, in a bakery, since after losing all the money which he had obtained in work related to the stage-arts, he returned to Rome and had sold his labor to a bakery in order to obtain food, to turn the mills which are called the ‘trusatiles.’” Rejected by Conti 1994: 49-50, the episode is reminiscent of the plots of Plautus’ plays.
state in the Middle Republic was 3 asses.555 It is unclear, however, how applicable this figure is to the wage-laborer: two of his three examples refer to the payscale of the
legionary.556 The last, Scipio Nasica’s scornful offer to the Gracchan land commissioners of three obols each a day, is meant to be insulting, and may thus correspond to an
equivalent salary for menial labor, but we can only speculate in this regard.557 Commodity prices, which should have some relationship to wages, are even more invisible at this point.558 If only we had the ability to triangulate as Braudel did for medieval Europe between gain prices, calorie requirements, and wages, but the Roman evidence is trivial in comparison.559 Instead of looking for wages themselves, we need to consider the problem of wage payment indirectly by looking at the feasibility of such payments and their function in the Roman economy of the period. For this, we turn to numismatics.
This section argues that the development and usage pattern of coinage, and in particular the proliferation of smaller denomination coinage in the third and second century, point to an increasing ability at Rome to offer wage payments for labor. It is clear that employers, especially those contractors who bought state-let contracts including building construction and repair, participated in a cash economy. In addition, I argue, the
555RRC II 624.
556 The first is the much debated statement of the payscale for the Roman army by Polybius (6.39.12), though I am inclined to follow Crawford’s interpretation of the 2 obols paid to the legionary as meaning 3
asses (or, roughly a third of a denarius, which Polybius equated with a drachma), more on this below. Plautus Most. 357 does seem good evidence that trium nummum was considered the standard legionary pay at the time, thus in the early second century.
557 Plut. Tib. Gracch. 13.3; at 13.2, the patricians have denied the commissioners a tent on public expense, and so are clearly toying with them. But Plutarch also states that the pay as three obols each, not asses, and so we are back in the trouble of Greek and Roman equivalencies.
558 Livy gives some grain prices during the Hannibalic war; otherwise, all I have found is Plautus’ note that a pig cost a nummus in the Menaechmi, 289-90.
payment of cash wages was a necessary means of matching the state production of coinage to the consumer uses of coinage in the third century Roman economy.