## SURVIVING ROME: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent

## Source details

**Canonical URL:** [SURVIVING ROME: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2025/09/books-owen.pdf)

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### Scope and purpose
- Kim Bowes seeks to remedy the omission of ordinary people from classical narratives dominated by elites such as Cicero, Livy, and Tacitus.
- The book focuses on the economic lives of the “Ninety Percent,” i.e., ordinary working Romans.
- Author credentials: Kim Bowes is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania and former director of the American Academy in Rome.
- Publication details preserved from source: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2025, 512 pp., $39.95.

### Sources and methodology
- Draws on archaeological discoveries, bookkeeping records, and human skeletons from across the Roman Empire.
- Many sources have surfaced or been subject to rigorous scientific analysis only in the past 20 years.
- Rejects the practice of retrojecting from better-known peoples/places to fill gaps; instead uses region-specific, empirical evidence.

### Key findings and empirical vignettes
- The Roman economy emerges as far more complex than previously supposed.
- Paradox at the heart of the economy:
  - High consumption and rapidly expanding demand for cheap consumer goods (including greater varieties of food and drink, and highly standardized pots, jugs, and jewelry).
  - Combined with low income and limited opportunities to earn a wage.
- Common survival strategies:
  - Use of credit, pawning possessions, or borrowing against the next harvest or other future income during months of scarcity.
  - Accumulation of small amounts of capital to generate additional income (examples: a plot of farmland, a yoke of oxen, a pottery kiln, or a loom for weaving).
  - Graft, hustles, and money maneuvers undertaken persistently by working Romans.
- Illustrative individual cases presented in the book:
  - The Soterichos family of ancient Egypt who turned to cash crops to pay off debt, illuminating smallholder agriculture.
  - Faustilla, a Pompeian pawnbroker and moneylender, showing how Romans accessed credit in times of want.
  - Philokles, an army supplier who pimped out prostitutes to a garrison at Krokodilo in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, illustrating income earned from working for the Roman state.
- Social and occupational categories are fluid:
  - Neat analytical categories such as farmer, artisan, or wage laborer break down in practice.
  - Distinctions between adult and child, rural and urban, creditor and debtor—even between free and enslaved—become blurred in ordinary lives.

### Comparative and theoretical resonance
- Bowes explicitly compares the precarious economic existence of many ancient Romans with the precarious economic existence of many people today.
- The persistence of working Romans “squeezed a living out of their circumstances” is likened to the efforts of a wide swath of 21st century American society.
- The discussion includes references to modern economic thinkers to add contemporary resonance: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Thomas Piketty.

### Presentation and audience
- Lively storytelling accompanied by dozens of illustrations and photographs.
- Intended to interest both specialist and general readers.
- Noted author quote: “It’s amazing how much we can know about the 90 percent just by listening to them.”

*Nicholas Owen, F&D book review, SEPTEMBER 2025.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2025/09/books-owen.pdf_