History’s Earliest Hustlers

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Review of Kim Bowes, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2025, 512 pp., $39.95).
Bowes reconstructs the lives of ordinary Romans—what she calls the Ninety Percent—using archaeological discoveries, bookkeeping records, and human skeletons.
Emphasizes a complex, “global” ancient economy marked by high consumption and low incomes, where credit, pawning, and borrowing against future income were central coping mechanisms.

The classical historical record focused on elites; Bowes remedies this by centering ordinary working Romans.
The economy featured:
- rapidly expanding demand for cheap consumer goods (greater varieties of food and drink; highly standardized pots, jugs, and jewelry);
- low income and limited opportunities to earn a wage.
Coping strategies for scarcity included credit, pawning possessions, and borrowing against the next harvest or other future income.
Social mobility depended on accumulating small amounts of capital that could generate income, e.g.:
- a plot of farmland;
- a yoke of oxen;
- a pottery kiln;
- a loom for weaving.
Occupational categories (farmer, artisan, wage laborer) often break down in practice; ordinary Romans relied on multiple income sources.
Boundaries between adult and child, rural and urban, creditor and debtor, free and enslaved were blurred in everyday economic life.
Bowes draws explicit comparisons between the precarious economic existence of many working Romans and the experiences of a wide swath of 21st century American society.
Discussions of modern economic thinkers—Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Thomas Piketty—are used to add contemporary resonance.

Uses recent sources that have come to light or received rigorous scientific analysis only in the past 20 years.
Draws on a combination of:
- archaeological discoveries;
- bookkeeping records;
- human skeletal evidence.
Provides dozens of illustrations and photographs to support storytelling and empirical claims.

Ancient Egypt’s Soterichos family: turned to cash crops to pay off debt—illuminates smallholder agriculture.
Pompeian pawnbroker and moneylender Faustilla: illustrates access to credit in times of want.
Army supplier Philokles at Krokodilo in Egypt’s Eastern Desert: example of income earned by working for the Roman state, including exploiting prostitution services.

Lively storytelling aimed at specialist and general readers alike.
Bowes argues: “It’s amazing how much we can know about the 90 percent just by listening to them.”

Overview based on Finance & Development, September 2025, Nicholas Owen.

History’s Earliest Hustlers
- History’s Earliest Hustlers (Markdown version)
- History’s Earliest Hustlers (PDF)