Working Lives in Ancient Rome

This book sheds new light on labor and laboring in the Roman world. It starts with the individual laborer and works up, emphasizing their agency in navigating, transforming, and transcending the systems and structures around them. Taking advantage of the broad applicability of notions of work and labor to human lives at every rung of Roman society, the volume also offers numerous overlapping frameworks for thinking comparatively between many different kinds of work, whether in agriculture, craft, trade, politics, art, or literature. The book is organized around the ‘typical’ work-life experience of the modern 9-to-5 and provides a means of thinking in a rigorous way about how the working lives of scholars of Rome are caught up in ancient discourse and practices.

0 Preface.- Part 1: Getting Up, Brushing Up, and Going In.- 1 Introduction (Del A. Maticic and Jordan Rogers).- 2 The Politics of Pesto: Making Metaphor Work (Moretum) (Tom Geue).- 3 Wandering Workers: Mobility and Skills in the Roman World (Claire Holleran).- 4 Working, Learning, and Living Environments: The View from Dolium Repairs (Caroline Cheung).- Part 2: Showing Up.- 5 Looking at the Laboring: Fictions, ‘Realities’, and a Culture of Competence (Ann Kuttner).- 6 Rapacious and Chatty, Deceitful and Memorable: Finding Non-Elite Stereotypes of Roman Merchants (Jane Sancinito).- 7 Working Relationships in Roman Asia Minor (Rebecca Sausville).- 8 Labor as Religio in Imperial Rome: the Fabri Tignarii Relief (Jordan Rogers).- Part 3: Escaping, Commuting, and Passing Out.- 9 The Flight of a Literary Assistant and an Unnamed operarius: Between Professional Responsibility and Personal Duty (Nicole Giannella).- 10 Arachne and the Metamorphosis of Labor (Marco Formisano).- 11 Libitina's Laborers: praeficae and the Origins of the Roman Funerary Trade (John Bodel).- 12 The Vergilian Work of Life (Del A. Maticic).

Del A. Maticic received his Ph.D. in Classics from NYU, USA and is currently the Blegen Research Fellow at Vassar College. His research concerns Roman literature and culture, with a special focus on problems of nature, agency, and materiality.

Jordan Rogers received his Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania, USA, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University. His research concerns Roman social and cultural history, especially the sociology of small communities in urban environments.