Money talks

JESS VENNER welcomes a wide-ranging look at how non-elite people in ancient Roman society managed to get by from day to day

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For centuries, the economic history of Rome has been written from the top down.

Senators, emperors and great landowners dominate the narrative, while the vast majority of the population - farmers, labourers, artisans, enslaved people and the urban poor appear only dimly, if at all.

In Surviving Rome, Kim Bowes sets out to correct this imbalance, offering a compelling and often surprising reconstruction of how the "ninety percent" actually lived, worked and survived.

Bowes' central argument is that most Romans were not marginal, isolated subsistence farmers scraping by on the edge of starvation, as older models have suggested.

Instead, they were economically active, deeply enmeshed in markets, and accustomed to juggling multiple income streams.