Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.
Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim’s not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome’s unraveling, and much more.
Watch the full conversation
Recorded February 2nd, 2026.
Thanks to Maximilian Roos for sponsoring this transcript.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am here chatting with Kim Bowes. She is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and she has a new book out called Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent. It has perhaps been my favorite economics book of the last year, though I think to the rest of the world it is more of a history book and an archaeology book. Kim is also extremely well published in the history of Christianity, religious spaces, Christian spaces, what homes were like, what rooms were like in the Roman Empire, and much more. Kim, welcome.
KIM BOWES: Thanks, Tyler. It’s great to be here.
COWEN: I have many, many questions. Let’s start with houses. If I were back in time and I visited a Roman elite house, what is it you think I or, say, you would find most surprising?
BOWES: I think you would find surprising the extraordinary amount of color and decoration that surrounds you. Every single surface of that house would have been covered in some sort of decoration in ways I think we would have found garish. We would be astounded by how kitschy those houses were to our modern eye.
COWEN: The kitschy spaces, how were they treated? Say there were mosaic floors, is it like, “Oh, no, you can’t walk on this, it’s beautiful,” or people, the dogs would just trample on it, or how was it?
BOWES: Yes. I think that’s another thing that might surprise us. We would see that decoration as somehow being special and fenced off because that’s the way we manage decoration in our own spaces, but not in that world. Because everything is encrusted with some sort of decoration, everything is used in ways that I think would really surprise us, too.
COWEN: Reminds me of my house, in fact. Now, could you do business in these homes? You’d have a few people come by, there’d be a room.
BOWES: That’s what they’re built for. They’re built for business. I think that’s another thing that would surprise us most about this world is the idea of going off to work is entirely probably a 19th-century idea. Prior to that, for all of human history, work was in the space of the home. The Roman house, particularly the Roman elite house, is a machine for the production of social status. That status meant a space to do deals, to meet your clients, to show off things that we would never dream of showing off—members of our family, the most intimate aspects of our daily lives—all of that is literally built into the fabric of a Roman house.
COWEN: You just walk to your boss’s house. There’s no GPS. Are there even addresses?
BOWES: Are there even addresses? Now, that’s a great question. Not in the way that we seem to use them, no.
COWEN: It’s like latter 20th-century Tokyo. You just have to get there somehow.
BOWES: You just have to get there somehow. You know what people use? They use other humans. That’s how you navigate your way around an ancient city, is you ask people. Of course, ancient cities are a lot smaller than our own cities, so the chances are, moving around in a city, you know people. Rome is the largest city potentially on the planet at the time, at a million people. Most Roman cities are probably 2,000, 3,000 people. Nothing for us more than a large village, so you find your way around by using other humans.
COWEN: Here’s a very crude, real estate-influenced question. There’s a home for five people. How many bathrooms does it have?
BOWES: Probably none.
COWEN: None?
BOWES: Probably none.
COWEN: What do you do for, you know?
BOWES: Pots. Romans are great users of pots for that sort of activity. Of course, there are public latrines that you could go out and use, but even those are not present in an awful lot of cities as far as we can tell. Of course, they called these public latrines after the Roman emperor who started to charge for using them. If you can imagine naming public latrines after any of our American presidents.
COWEN: Do you know what the charge was?
BOWES: No. That’s the sort of information I’m really interested in, but no.
COWEN: Let’s say it’s 3:00 a.m., and I do something in my pot. How does that then connect to public waterworks, if ever?
BOWES: In a city that has a robust public waterworks system like we now know Pompeii had, you can go out and chuck that stuff in the drain. Those cities that didn’t have them—and I think we’re amazingly ill-informed about this really critical question—then it just winds up in the street.
COWEN: How clean is that drainage system? Say you and I are walking around Pompeii or parts of Rome, are we having to hold our noses, or is it like a city in India today, or what would you compare it to? What’s your sense?
BOWES: Of course, Indian cities are moving very quickly to clean up their hygiene. You’re absolutely holding your noses. This is, I think, what’s really interesting about the Roman world. On the one hand, it has some of the most advanced, and they put so much energy and treasure into things like public infrastructure, like sewers and drains. At the same time, these are incredibly dense, unprecedentedly dense spaces, so getting on top of the poop problem is an insurmountable problem.
If a visitor, if any of your listeners goes to Pompeii, you will notice that there are stepping stones to get across the street. This is to keep you out of all of the refuse in the street, and this is a city that has really good public sanitation. It’s just not quite good enough.
COWEN: In an elite home. Are there pets?
BOWES: Oh, yes. They have dogs, and of course—famously, both from actual images and from the famous story of the visit to this freedman, Trimalchio, and his dinner party—you might even be greeted by an image of a dog instead of an actual dog that says literally in Latin, “Caue canem,” “Beware of the dog.” You would have dogs, and you would have fake dogs.
COWEN: Only dogs or other pets, too? Anyone had a pig?
BOWES: They kept animals in, if we’re talking about elite homes in the city, this is something that we’re starting to learn about, how much urban agriculture there is. People might keep small animals. Pigs are good. Chickens, strangely. They don’t eat chickens as much as you’d think they would.
COWEN: They’re noisy. They wake you up in the morning, right?
BOWES: It’s true. I just don’t get it, though. There’s so much protein, they’re little. You can stick them in a small space. Anyway, Romans are amazing under-eaters of chicken in ways we don’t understand. Strangely, not so much in the cat universe. More dogs than cats. In fact, very few cats do we find.
COWEN: We would call it zoning. Do they have something comparable?
BOWES: A bit of a controversy, really. For the most part, no, they don’t have zoning. Elite houses and the houses of the 90 percent all rub cheek by jowl up against one another in these cities. What there are, are places that have more public-type buildings than private-type buildings.
You have to remember, too, Tyler, that the only city that we’ve excavated enough of to even remotely begin to answer these questions is Pompeii and, to a lesser extent, Herculaneum and maybe a handful of other places. I’m trying to answer your questions on the basis of not very good data. In general, from what we can tell, not a lot of zoning.
COWEN: But you know better than anyone else I might ask, right? Do Jewish homes use space differently at all, or it’s just the same?
BOWES: Jewish homes?
COWEN: Yes.
BOWES: The first question you ask is, how do you identify a Jewish home?
COWEN: Can you?
BOWES: Not easily. The best way you’re probably going to do it is excavate houses in places that we know are majority Jewish populations. Now, there is one thing that you might use in such areas, which is the presence or absence of a mikveh, a ritual bath. There’s a lot of controversy about how you differentiate one of these ritual baths versus, say, a bath in general or some sort of foot pool or whatever. Jewish houses, I would say, are distinguished mostly by the presence or absence of one of those ritual baths. Again, if you’re a poor or working Jewish family, you probably don’t have one of those anyway. Other than that, they’re pretty much indistinguishable as far as we can tell.
COWEN: When it comes to Roman Empire Christianity, say after Constantine, what would surprise us most about their practices?
BOWES: I think what would surprise me most, and many of my scholarly colleagues, is how few Christians there are. We somehow think that Constantine declares his support for this religion, and then boom, everyone’s Christian. In fact, of course, most people aren’t Christian for a really long time. Since you were asking about rich people, it takes a good 50 years, if not longer, for rich people to really say, “Okay, we’re going to go along with this new religion.”
I think that’s one of the biggest things that would have surprised us in a post-Constantinian world, is how few Christians there really are, especially when you went to the countryside. You went to the countryside, you find very few Christians at all for at least 200 years. It takes a long time for people to be convinced of what’s still a new religion.
COWEN: Do we have a sense of what they actually believed? Is it something they went along with, or say they had an active belief in the Trinity, or what did it mean to them to be Christian?
BOWES: I think if you had asked that question 20, 30 years ago, we could have given you a really clear answer. They believed in supporting members of their community. They believed in the Trinity. They believed above all—and this is, I think, probably still we think this—they believed that their God had special powers vis-a-vis what would happen to them after they died. That they would experience a bodily resurrection. That was new in the world, the idea that you would actually come back after you died, your actual physical body.
This is something that the Christian God believed and had proven through miracles like the raising of Lazarus in ways that were very and really quite unfamiliar in a Greco-Roman world and even in a Jewish world. Tyler, I think one of the big changes that we’ve realized as we’ve looked more critically at the sources over the last 20, 30, 40 years is that what bishops wanted Christians to believe versus what Christian ordinary people actually believed were two very different things. I think that Christians, for many centuries afterwards, wore many hats.
When they went to church and when they picked up the pieces of the scriptures that they could read or have read to them, they would avow a belief or a set of practices, probably more likely, that we would identify as Christian. Then the other six days of the week, they might do things that were entirely different. This really worried Christian bishops that Christians weren’t behaving in ways that looked differently Christian because I think people kept on doing what they had always done.
COWEN: To deploy a much-abused term, but the pagans of that time, did they believe in something concrete, or they’re just superstitious, they’re going along with different rituals, different festivals, or they have these things, “Here’s my god, my gods,” and they actually believe, to ask the Paul Veyne-like question?
BOWES: We know that people in the Greco-Roman world who believed in the traditional pantheon of deities above all were less interested in belief and more interested in what you did. They were practisers. They insisted and thought it was really important to behave toward the gods in specific ways so that the gods would in turn—this is a quid pro quo backscratching world—the gods would do to them unto what they had done to the gods. They would ask, I think much less, what do you believe? That being said, by the time we get to the end of our period, say the third century or the fourth century, pagans live in a world in which lots of people are asking questions about belief.
They are starting to wrestle with questions about belief. They are particularly interested in people, holy men if you like, who seem to have special powers. There are lots of questions about what kind of powers these people have, people who can levitate, people who can live for years without eating. These weren’t just Christians who claimed these powers or Jewish holy men. There were all kinds of holy men out there in the marketplace of religion who claimed to have these powers. From a world in which mostly you would be asking, “What do I need to do,” I think increasingly people were starting to ask, “What do I believe?”
COWEN: For the Christians, do they have altars in their homes?
BOWES: Do they have altars in their homes? A vexed and interesting question. In the beginning, I suspect not, but because they live in a world in which all religion, if it’s practiced correctly, has some sort of material form. You don’t just sit and do religion in your head in the Greco-Roman world because the Greco-Roman world, as we were just talking about a minute ago, is full of stuff.
The second that there start to be enough Christians and they are really integrated into their communities, because they are, they start to have a material piece of their religion. They might not have an altar, but they might have a lamp that has a Christian symbol on it. They have something that is a direction of their worship, and that is a thing that expresses their religious identity, and they start to have them pretty early, as far as we can tell.
COWEN: They don’t wear crosses around their necks or in any other way?
BOWES: The cross is a latecomer to Christian identity. They have other ways of expressing their religious belonging. Remember, the earliest cross in the Christian world isn’t a cross like we think of it, as a cross like this. It’s the initials of Christ, which is a Greek Chi and a Rho—Christos—that are set in an emblem that looks like an X and a P superimposed. That’s the earliest, if you like, symbolic representation of Christianity. Not the cross.
COWEN: Say, back then, there’s a Christian private cult, the private cult aspect of it, what would that be organized around? Is it a charismatic leader, is it some belief, or is it what part of town you lived in?
BOWES: Early Christianity is entirely private because it can’t be public, in the sense that it is not officially approved by the Roman state. That being said, at least by the time we get to the third century, if you traveled out to the borders of the empire in Syria and went to the town of Dura-Europos, you would find a thriving Christian meeting group of probably, who knows, 20, 30 people who are meeting in a private house. Their rituals, from what we can tell, they are practicing baptism because they built themselves a little baptistry. They almost certainly are reading the scriptures with each other because they have a long space seemingly for doing that and praying together.
If you walked by on the street outside on your way to the mithraeum, which was next door, or to the Jewish synagogue, which was further down the street—all these buildings are in the same street—you would know exactly what was going on in there. Are they private? Not by our definition of private, but by the Roman state’s definition of private, they are, because they’re not an officially approved religion. I think the thing that we ought to be asking is, in this world in which Christians are not an officially approved religion—and there’s a lot of stories about them being persecuted—and yet when we can see them archaeologically, which admittedly is rare, they are not hiding. Everyone knows what they’re doing.
All the new evidence and work on the catacombs has also suggested that the catacombs are filled with people buried. People are buried in the catacombs of all different religious persuasions, and they’re all buried one right next to each other. No one is hiding their religious persuasion from one another. To the extent that these folks are practicing private religion, I think it just makes us ask what we think private means.
COWEN: Post-Constantine, are there Christian mausoleums?
BOWES: Yes, and we can identify them through the presence of some of these insignia or sarcophagi and other things that have Christian stories on them. Yes, there are. Very often, if you’re in the catacombs, right next to tombs of pagans or Jews.
COWEN: Here’s a question I’ve wrestled with for a long time. I’ve never made progress on it. As you know, in your own book, Surviving Rome, you show the Romans had quite sophisticated and advanced economic lives. Why is it the Romans never had anything resembling economic reasoning? You can read any Roman text, and no one sits down and says, “Well, here’s how supply and demand work,” but there are advanced contributions to many other areas, right? Is supply and demand that tough an idea?
BOWES: They have absolutely an idea of supply and demand. They understand, and you see this never laid out in those terms, but they absolutely understand that at the harvest, when there’s a large supply of whatever’s been harvested, the prices go down. They know this for sure, and they respond, and they make planning on the basis of this basic understanding. I think, though, what you’re asking, Tyler, is what we have a harder time seeing is them making future planning around profit in a quantified way that we would understand as part and parcel of an economic thinking that involves supply and demand.
COWEN: There’s nothing like Euclid, right, or even Plato from ancient Athens, who defined the terms of philosophy. Ancient Rome had no Adam Smith, right? Nothing remotely close to him.
BOWES: No, that’s correct. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have economic thinking. They just have economic thinking that doesn’t look like our economic thinking. They absolutely make planning around the assumption of supply and demand. They’re clearly interested in profit. What they don’t have, and I think this is really what you’re getting at, is that they don’t have an organized, systematized way of thinking about economic activity that is discrete and separate from other kinds of activity, and laid out as a formal branch of reasoning.
This is, I think, what’s thrown us for a long time. We thought, because there’s no obvious Adam Smith, that they had no economic thinking at all, which isn’t true, but it requires that we accept a whole spectrum of economic thinking that looks different from our own.
COWEN: Most of the currency in use, it’s bronze. Is that correct?
BOWES: For ordinary daily use, yes.
COWEN: Does gold have any role at all, or it’s too valuable, and the pieces would be too small?
BOWES: We used to think that it was a ceremonial coin or a collecting coin, or it was a wealth-saving coin, but the amazing new work that’s been done on Pompeii, where we can see gold coins actually in cash boxes and collections of coins that are being used for day-to-day use, we can see gold as a coin of day-to-day use. Some colleagues of mine are doing new work, statistically trying to recreate how many gold coins were circulating in the Roman Empire, and it’s a lot. Gold turns out to be, I think, probably more important than we’ve given it credit for.
COWEN: Say, when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they’re just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?
BOWES: They’re not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It’s just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they’re doing this. What I think is most interesting and what we’re all still wrestling with is, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver.
Then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care, and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs—that’s a little bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, and so people are willing to just suck it up and deal, and they keep using it.
There is inflation, and inflation, we can now tell, thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the first century, the second century, the third century, but it’s not proportional to the amount of silver that’s being pulled out of the coins. People basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, simply by supporting ordinary people’s coin use, that the coins work and that they’re going to back their coins, even though they’re slightly pulling the silver out.
COWEN: Why was there so much decentralized money lending? You would think that banks would have economies of scale, offer better terms, just like I wouldn’t borrow money from my friends, I would go to the bank. Why doesn’t the Roman Empire evolve that way?
BOWES: The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. The Roman big state is really a mask for an empire of friends and family. You borrow money from friends and family. Banks, such as they exist, are really nothing more than friends and family, so even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family.
The difference that you’re making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear-cut in a world in which the bank is your family, or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It’s not that Romans don’t use banks, they do use banks. We can see the most often wealthier Romans using banks. It’s a lot harder to see the 90 percent using banks, and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it’s not such a huge distinction. In a world in which there’s no FDIC, in which the bank isn’t guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is much less clear.
COWEN: Still, in Renaissance Europe, there are plenty of banks which are large. They might be family-based, such as in Florence, but they still were proper commercial banks. Is it the case Rome had these incredible roads, aqueducts, a whole system of empire, but didn’t have ordinary banks for the 90 percent?
BOWES: Well, my colleague, Ed Cohen, is really going to disagree with me about this. He’s the person who’s thought most carefully about banking more in the Athenian Greek world than in the Roman world, for which, to be honest, we have quite a bit less evidence. It’s very hard to find the ordinary person using banks. Now, I would say it’s not quite so easy to see ordinary people using Florentine banks either. Florentine banks, we mostly find larger merchants using. Certainly, we can see merchants using banks. We also see merchants using things like auction dealers and entities that are functioning a little bit like banks.
The important records that we have from Pompeii, from the auctioneer, man of affairs, Caecilius Iucundus, is a nice example of someone who isn’t quite a banker in the way that you are imagining, but is facilitating monetary exchange by both lending money at mostly short term and bringing people together, which is some of the most important things that banks do, but we wouldn’t quite call them a bank. I think it’s another way, Tyler, in which trying to translate our modern terms on into an ancient world that doesn’t quite operate the same way, but nonetheless manages to do the same things and get those things done, causes a little bit of disconnect.
COWEN: Are there forward markets back then, if I may use that term?
BOWES: That’s a great question. Morris Silver has argued that we can see Roman people essentially doing futures trading, mostly around agricultural surplus. I argued in that book that we all can almost see the poorest of the poor. These are some mine workers in Egypt, who are basically using their wages—or not even their wages, their rations—in a way that almost looks like futures.
People could absolutely disagree with me about this, and I would probably accept it. Future thinking doesn’t quite look like what we would imagine it to be. Let me give you an example. We have a case of an Egyptian shepherd. He’s too poor to own any sheep, but he leases his sheep. Then he sells his sheep’s future wool before he sheared it at a rate that’s quite profitable to him. The question is, is this person really thinking in a futures sort of way, or do they just not have the money to pay the lease on their sheep, and so they’re selling the sheep’s wool in anticipation to get the money in advance, which is simply basically a loan. It’s hard to know which of these is really—
COWEN: It’s both. Loans and forward markets can be isomorphic, right?
BOWES: Exactly. They can. That’s true. In a way, the debate about these issues is, I think, probably ancient historians’ discomfort with the idea of the modern notion of futures as applied to an ancient world.
COWEN: For you, what is the biggest puzzle about the Roman economy?
BOWES: Gosh, that’s a really good question. I’m currently really puzzled about how Roman money worked, if I can go back to another question that you asked.
COWEN: Sure. What do you mean by that?
BOWES: I said that Romans basically trusted the state to produce money that had value, even in the demonstrable face of its opposite, namely that the Roman state was also pulling silver out of their coinage. At some point after the period that I talk about in my book, in the later third century, they seem to stop trusting the state, and there is massive inflation. That inflation comes in waves over a period of a century through the fourth century. This is inflation, like, you know, real inflation—1,000 percent inflation—and somehow, they continue to use money throughout this period.
They shift to a gold coinage. The silver coinage is ultimately abandoned, in part because the state can’t support it because it doesn’t have enough silver. Ordinary people continue to use money, and they even continue to use bronze, which has really lost all its value, as you really have to carry around in huge sackloads in order to buy anything, but they still use it. Ordinary people still use it.
In other words, there’s a lingering faith in the state’s ability to produce money, and ordinary people, despite the inconvenience, still find it more convenient to carry around these sacked coins than to be like, “The hell with this, we’re just going to go for barter,” which they probably do in increasing quantities. But they still stick with coins, and those coins remain the basis of what will become the Byzantine economy for 1,000 years. I don’t get it. Why don’t they just bail on coins altogether? Why didn’t coins just go away? They don’t.
COWEN: Well, what should they use instead of coins? Bills of exchange?
BOWES: Yes, they would just go to a barter system.
COWEN: That’s very costly, right? They’ll do some barter at the margin, typically in hyperinflations, but in Weimar Germany, we all know the famous videos of people wheeling around the wheelbarrows of paper money, right?
BOWES: Yes, that’s right. It’s true, and there are a lot of historical examples with which I should familiarize myself more of people really sticking with coinage, even in the face of its great inconvenience, because barter is even more inconvenient. Now, that being said, Tyler, in early medieval Europe, we have a really hard time finding daily use of coins. They probably do abandon most coin use on a day-to-day basis, except for really high-value exchanges, so that probably does happen. In the eastern empire, they continue to use now a gold and a bronze currency for 1,000 years, and I suppose it’s for the reasons you describe, because the alternative is simply too awkward.
COWEN: To pose the Bob Fogel question, was Roman slavery profitable?
BOWES: Was Roman slavery profitable?
COWEN: Or is it just the going rate of return? You wouldn’t lose money on average, or you wouldn’t do it, but was it just another business, or is there somehow a big surplus?
BOWES: In some industries, it’s clearly profitable, and Romans, I think, what’s interesting, they debate what those industries are. Some of them would say certain kinds of agriculture only are profitable using slaves, and otherwise, don’t bother. Because either the rate of return is too low, or, and this is what really matters, agriculture is seasonal, a slave is not seasonal. You have to feed, clothe, and support a slave 24/7. Those two things combined are the equation around whether slavery is profitable or not. The other places we used to think that slavery was profitable were in industries that were too dangerous or too unpleasant to be able to recruit free labor, and those are the mines.
We don’t have the numbers, but we know that there are free people and slaves working side-by-side in the mines, and that recruiting people to work in the mines, seemingly—I’m not going to say it wasn’t difficult because the wages that are being paid to free workers in the mines are much higher than wages that are being paid in unskilled agriculture right nearby, but they can. They’re doing it. They’re going quite far afield, though, to get those people. If you look at the mines in Egypt, they’re getting people from Syria, from all parts of the East, not just from Egypt, in order to work in those mines, but they are able to do that.
COWEN: That has puzzled me. Why isn’t it the case that either free or slave labor is more efficient? Just put that in your mines, and that you’re mixing the two seems unlikely.
BOWES: I’m going to give you an unsatisfactory answer to this question, which I haven’t thought about enough. One of the things that’s intrigued me most is the population of the Roman Empire, the free population, or just the population generally, if you like. It’s crazy high. It’s way higher than I think we thought.
COWEN: How high?
BOWES: Well, it used to be that we thought that 20 million was high. I don’t think that’s high. I’m not going to give you a number. It’s as high as it was in most parts of the Mediterranean until the 19th century. Maybe in some places a little bit earlier than that. Population really gets higher than that. Basically, we’re looking at potentially early 19th-century population levels. In that kind of a world, if the majority of that population is free, that’s an awful lot of cheap labor. That’s an awful lot of cheap child labor.
COWEN: How big would that number be? I’m not trying to get you to commit to it, but for our audience.
BOWES: You are trying to get me to commit to a number.
COWEN: No. You can say it in the third person. In the early 19th century, the population of the area of the Roman Empire was about—fill in the blank.
BOWES: I have no idea what it was in the 19th century, so you’re not going to get me to commit to a number. I’m just going to say that it was high.
COWEN: It’s a lot of people, a far-flung empire. I’m sure you know the map of the Roman Empire at its maximum. Transportation is slow, even with an excellent road system. I know this is an amorphous question, but how exactly did they hold it all together? We know they didn’t eventually, but for as long as they did, how did it work that someone at the far edge of the empire would actually pay attention to the empire as a whole?
BOWES: I don’t think they cared about the empire. I don’t think they paid attention at all. I think there’s a set of glues that held the whole thing together. Some of them are the ones we knew about, and some of them are ones that I happen to think were glue.
COWEN: They’re sending in tribute, right? Someone is paying attention.
BOWES: They are paying taxes. Taxation is one of the things that holds the whole thing together, if only as the stick and not the carrot. I think the carrot that holds it all together, strangely, is consumption, that it’s a consumer economy. There’s massive amounts of consumption. On the one hand, that binds people together because people are participating in a shared consumer universe. Economically, it produces a whole set of knock-on effects that begin locally and expand out to a much broader extent, that raise consumption levels really high, which allows this tax apparatus to keep chugging along, and when they both collapse, they collapse together.
In other words, when we can’t see people consuming anymore, we suspect they’re no longer paying their taxes. It’s an interesting world from that perspective. The state and its ability to collect taxes also relies, going back to a previous question you asked me, on these nonstate networks of friends, of family, of business networks. The Roman state is largely a privatized affair.
It depends on the web of commerce that is happening more generally rather than the other way around, although there’s a reciprocity of, if you like, private commerce and state commerce. Insofar as the Roman state really needs people to be exchanging goods in order for it to do the work of collecting its taxes, this consuming world actually helps float the whole boat up. That’s one of the things that I think held it together.
COWEN: People did it for the clothing?
BOWES: If you like, and the new sneakers and the iPhones.
COWEN: What were your clothing options like then? Say you’re part of the empire, at or near its peak. What should you buy in terms of clothes? How would it be made? How would you get it? Who would ship it where?
BOWES: We used to think that everyone just made their own clothes, Little House on the Prairie style. Now we know that’s not true from some new archaeology. We can see standardized weaving. We can see people, even really poor people, getting clothes from actually quite a long distance away. You would probably get your clothes, if you lived in a rural village, from whoever the local weaver is. If you lived in Rome, I bet your clothes might even come from sheep in Gaul, which are then woven either in Gaul or somewhere in between and shipped to the capital. You’re probably not making your own clothes, which was a surprise to all of us, I think, and you’re wearing and keeping and having a lot more clothes than we ever thought.
Since you asked before about Jewish households, we have some great Jewish evidence for what constitutes the absolute bare minimum of clothes that anyone needs to have. We used to think it was a tunic and that was it. It turns out to be at least two or three tunics, two or three cloaks, and a whole range of undergarments, and socks, and a whole bunch of other things, and they were colorful. Even poor people had clothes that were purple stripes and yellow stripes and all kinds of different patterns.
I think we would be surprised, actually, at how colorful and well dressed and variegated people’s clothing were, and their shoes. They had the most extraordinarily elaborate shoes. Anyone of your listeners who has a trip to England planned, go to Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall up in the north and look at the collection of Roman shoes. Extraordinary different styles for men, women, and children. This is the frontier of the consuming society.
COWEN: In your view, parts of Europe, the wealthier parts, maybe did not reattain Roman standards of living until what, the mid-18th century?
BOWES: Yes, I think that’s true.
COWEN: Say France or Spain, it would be later yet, right?
BOWES: If by standards of living you mean access to consumer goods, yes. You can run some math on—this is quite a fun thing to do, actually—how many different kinds of dishes did an ordinary person in, say, 17th-century England have versus how many different kinds of dishes did the same ordinary Roman person have? The Roman person had more different kinds of dishes of more different shapes and sizes and materials than the English person.
COWEN: If you try to cook a Roman meal from an old recipe, is it any good?
BOWES: I was just looking at some TikTok videos of someone who’s done exactly that and really done a brilliant job, actually. They don’t taste like what we think of as tasting good because again—this is the light motif of this conversation, Tyler—it’s a completely different culinary world. It combines flavors that we just don’t think belong together, like oysters and eggs and honey.
COWEN: That sounds okay to me.
BOWES: Really? Okay. Go dig out the book, the recipe book of Apicius, and you can go make his various mixed dishes, which really contain some of the most astonishing variety of ingredients. In particular, this mixture of the savory and the super sweet, which I think we would find hard to take.
COWEN: A lot of medieval cooking is the same, we think, right?
BOWES: Some medieval cooking is the same, exactly. And some North African cooking is the same. There are culinary traditions that continue that mix these two things. Of course, and then the Romans famously included ingredients like dormice and things like this, that we don’t eat today.
COWEN: There’s no market in ice, is there?
BOWES: Some of these recipes call for snow.
COWEN: Where is that coming from? The Alps?
BOWES: Presumably, these are recipes that are designed to be made in very elite households that are actually bringing in snow from the Alps, the nearest mountains, and somehow preserving it.
COWEN: The somehow—that’s a very interesting word. The Alps are far from Rome. You could carry it in a box, but the snow’s going to melt without some kind of technology. What is it you think they actually did?
BOWES: I come from a part of the world where we long had ice houses. This is not an insurmountable problem. If you want to know what I think they did. First of all, this has got to be a seasonal dish that is not made in August. The whole point of including the snow is to show you can pull it off, that you could somehow roll up in lowland Italy with some snow and astonish your guests, even if that meant sending your slaves, since you asked about them, off to the nearest snow and make them bring it back.
Almost certainly, they are using clay and other kinds of ceramics as insulation. From Pompeii, there’s some wonderful preserved eggs, which they’ve figured out how to preserve by encasing them all in clay. It’s kind of a refrigeration device.
COWEN: In terms of technology, one reads various crackpots suggesting the Romans had much more advanced technology than we had thought, but those views to me are not obviously wrong. I’m not persuaded by any single one of them, but you’ve revised the historical picture enough. Do you ever have thoughts about Roman technology being quite a bit more advanced than what we had thought?
BOWES: I think what the maximalists of Roman technology would argue is that the Romans didn’t invent too much that hadn’t already been, at least in the works, in the Greek world. What they did was make it bigger and increase the size of everything, from all kinds of water-powered devices, which is mostly what we credit them with, to the expansion of the use of mortar and inventing mortar that’s set underwater, which is a huge innovation.
The Romans are not so much inventors as they are giganticizers. They make everything bigger, and they expand the scale. What I wish I could see more of, but still don’t see, is ordinary people having access to this technology. We still can’t see water wheels, for instance, being used on small farms. That would be a game-changer to my mind, but we don’t see that yet. I can only think of a handful of examples where we can see small farms with water power. Agriculture is the biggest industry.
They make their looms really big, so textile manufacturing is the biggest industry after agriculture. Their looms get bigger. Do they really change textile manufacturing? They don’t ever invent the spinning wheel, as far as we can tell. That was a game-changer. I’m a maximalist, if you like, on the matter of scale, but it still bothers me that there isn’t the trickle-down effect into ordinary people’s economic lives that we see, say, beginning in the 18th century in Northern Europe.
COWEN: When Romans go, say, to Ptolemaic Egypt, where science was quite advanced, did they have science envy, or they don’t care, or it’s ho-hum, or they already knew it? How do you interpret that?
BOWES: Of course, the Romans beat the Ptolemaic kings and take over Egypt for their own. They certainly regard themselves as the inheritor of Greek knowledge, but I don’t know that they would look at it in terms of envy, any more than they do any other Greek things. They understand that the Greeks are their superior in all kinds of branches of not only knowledge, but art, and the sort of the art of living. They acknowledge their debt to that. Given their seamless integration of many of these, if you like, technologies, I think they see it as their due.
COWEN: How much contact does Rome have with China back then? Do they know about China? Do they have China envy? Do they learn from China?
BOWES: Do they have China envy? Not that we can tell. They certainly have contact with China, but through lots of middlemen, if you like. Increasingly, we can see and understand the scale of the contact that they had with India and the Indian subcontinent. In fact, some of the real maximalist estimates for Roman trade look at some numbers that come out of trade with the Far East, with certain kinds of commodities like peppercorns, which the Romans were very fond of. In fact, we can now see ordinary people using peppercorns, at least occasionally, if they lived in a city. Those they had to get from the East.
Certain things that we imagine, like ivory and other kinds of commodities, can only be found in the East. The value of those is extremely high, even if the scale, quantities of that movement are probably pretty low. Today, it’s not only the monetary value, but the scale of our relationship with China that makes us think the Roman trade with the East, it certainly wasn’t around basic staple commodities in the way that it is today.
COWEN: Say I’m a well-to-do Roman, and I decide I want to walk to India. Other than my own common sense, is there anything that will stop me?
BOWES: No. You could walk to India if you wanted to.
COWEN: I could do it?
BOWES: Sure. You could do it. Why would you want to?
COWEN: Curiosity. Why did people cross the Atlantic? That was really insane, but they did it.
BOWES: Well, I think the real issue that I’m asking is about the walking rather than the sailing, which is certainly what they would have done rather than walk. Romans never walk anywhere if they can take a boat because it’s obviously much quicker and faster to sail.
COWEN: What would you most like to learn from the Vesuvius Challenge scrolls? They’re being deciphered using AI.
BOWES: Yes. Well, frankly, not very much, actually. I’m a little perplexed about this project, not least because it seems as though many of these works we have, some of them will doubtlessly be new—obviously, I’d prefer we spent more time on the millions and millions of papyri that exist in museum collections and libraries around the world that haven’t yet been published, which relate to the activities of ordinary Romans, rather than spending millions and hopefully not undertaking unnecessary excavations for a few admittedly very sexy, but ultimately, I think, not game-changing papyri in that villa. Sorry.
COWEN: Say there’s a lost book by Aristotle in there.
BOWES: A lost book by Aristotle?
COWEN: Which is entirely possible.
BOWES: It’s true, but you’re asking the wrong person. Do I think that we should be putting all of our limited amounts of academic treasure into a new book of Aristotle or revealing the lives of the 90 percent? I’ll back the 90 percent any day. We don’t have to do any more digging to find them because they’ve been excavated. We just have to study the stuff we have.
COWEN: Why don’t we know more about ancient Carthage than we do?
BOWES: Well, there is a rather large modern city sat on top of it.
COWEN: Same with Rome, right?
BOWES: That’s true. I was getting to the second part of my answer. There’s been a great work over the years done on Carthage. The Romans so successfully built on top of the Carthage I think you’re talking about, Punic Carthage, that they eradicated huge swaths of it. It’s very difficult to get at those really early pre-Roman levels. When the Romans claimed that they destroyed Carthage, they didn’t so much completely level it as they just built a massive Roman city, which was extremely wealthy and very big on top of it. Actually getting underneath to find Hannibal’s Carthage is a really tricky business, complicated by the modern city.
Of course, we didn’t care. We believed the Romans when they said they destroyed it. We believed the Romans when they said that they had eradicated those nasty Carthaginians, and we didn’t care. Now I think we’re realizing how important the Carthaginians were and how important the whole Punic-speaking world was. Now we’re going to go back and find them. It’s great.
COWEN: There’s very longstanding debates on why Rome declined. You look at Rome from a different perspective, that of the 90 percent using archaeological methods. Does that give you a different view on why Rome declined?
BOWES: I am writing a sequel to the book that you had in your hand a minute ago on exactly this question, or maybe not the question of why Rome declined, but what it was like to live through those years, those centuries of, if not decline, then complete transformation. I think that I will propose ultimately a really different answer than the one that’s been proposed before that is obviously an economic answer. It has to do with the state as well and its ability to collect taxes, but it also has to do with the synergy between ordinary people’s consumption and production and the ability of that state to survive. They both needed each other.
Ultimately, a whole series of thing happened that broke that feedback loop. This is what I’m puzzled by. You asked me about that previously. I said money. The second thing I’m really puzzled by is demographics. I’m not going to give you an answer to how many people lived in the Roman Empire, but I can tell you that an awful lot fewer people lived in, say, the fifth century. Population decline sets in Roman Italy almost certainly even by the late second century. Maybe even it’s already starting under the reign of Hadrian.
This isn’t true across the empire as a whole, and population numbers are radically different, say, in Britain versus Italy versus Egypt, but it’s clear that the population declines. In some cases, it declines precipitously and stays low. This has an enormous set of knock-on effects for the state and its ability to collect taxes, but also for that cycle of consumption and production that works at a local level. It just falls apart. It worked when population was high and dense, and then it failed to work when that population emptied. Particularly in the countryside.
COWEN: How does the plague hypothesis fit into your view?
BOWES: I don’t think it’s plague. I think plague is working on a population that’s already declining, or rather, it’s not the plague that we think. The Justinianic plague is too late. That ship is sailed by the early to mid-sixth century when the Justinianic plague gets going. Of course, remember, there’s at least two other major plagues that we know about and probably a whole bunch of ones that we don’t. Which, if you think about it, and I’m right, that the population is unusually high, are in an inevitability. In a world which—circling back to your earlier question about sanitation—in a world which is hyper-dense, hyper-urbanized, and yet still never really managed to solve the urban sanitation problem.
Endemic disease, obsidies, cholera, dysentery, all the real killers are really important and very high. The possibility for a bigger event to cause a demographic shock is high. Why those population numbers then would have stayed low is something that I still have to figure out. If you want my early forecast, inflation and population, those are the two culprits behind what happened to the Roman Empire.
COWEN: A few questions about method. Just tell us, what is landscape archaeology?
BOWES: Landscape archaeology is using mostly nonexcavation methods. Picking up ceramics on the surface of the ground, using new technologies like geophysics or aerial photography, or now drones, to examine whole landscapes rather than individual sites. Most often, in what we call noninvasive methods, that is to say, not digging. The goal of landscape archaeology is to actually understand large swaths of mostly the countryside and its changes over time, rather than cities on the one hand and individual sites on the other.
COWEN: Put aside your teaching, put aside your writing. If someone asks, like an eight-year-old asks, what do you do? You’re out there somewhere. You wake up in the morning. What is it you actually go out and do?
BOWES: Sometimes I’m being very flip, and I say I dig up dead people’s garbage, which isn’t untrue because that’s what we do. If you’re asking, what do you do on a dig?
COWEN: Yes.
BOWES: Is that what you’re asking?
COWEN: Do you hold the shovel? Do you give the orders to the people with the shovels? What is it you do?
BOWES: Yes. I try to hold the pick, my favorite instrument, as much as possible, although I very often don’t get to do that. Our excavation is a lot, I imagine, like going to war or making a movie, any of these activities that involve huge, disparate activities that all have to be choreographed in order for the thing to get pulled off. That means everything from organizing porta-potties to food to working with local landowners and local government to actually swinging the pick myself. My favorite piece is swinging the pick, but very often I have to do all those other things as well.
The projects that I do, my favorite part, even more than swinging the pick, is actually getting to work with local farmers and local landowners who are our partners in doing archaeology. It’s their land. They’re the inheritors, if you like, of the Romans who used to live on their land. They are oftentimes our greatest source of information about how that land was used and what they found. They’re fantastic to work with.
COWEN: How much is there still to discover, do you think, practically speaking?
BOWES: Oh, so much. Oh, it’s amazing how much there is to discover. I’ll give you an example. How in the world did they build Rome? Well, Rome is not only a city of marble, as Augustus claimed to have left it, but it is above all a city of brick. Where did those bricks come from? We used to think the bricks were made right there in the city of Rome. Some brilliant colleagues of mine figured out that, in fact, that’s not the case, that the Romans could never have made all the bricks that built Rome right in the city of Rome because they’d already cut down all the forests.
They had to keep moving farther and farther outside of Rome in order to actually make the very fabric that the city was made from. We didn’t know this until 20 years ago. Only recently have we actually found this massive industrial belt of brick factories going up and down the Tiber Valley, probably 80 to 100 kilometers away from Rome. That’s a big thing to have missed. That’s like having missed Pittsburgh. Twenty years ago, we figured this out. There’s so much to discover. Think about it. For Italy, the number of farms, this is the majority of the economy is smallholder farmers. How many farms have we excavated? Ten? Fifteen? That’s amazing. So much left to discover.
COWEN: You grew up in Big Moose, New York. How has that influenced how you approach the Roman Empire?
BOWES: I understand what it means to live in small communities, and most Romans lived in small communities. I didn’t grow up in a city. Most Romans, despite the fact that we now know a lot more than we thought lived in cities, most Romans still didn’t live in cities.
I think the thing that made the biggest difference to me, though, Tyler, is that I grew up in a small family business. Most businesses in the Roman world were small family businesses. That gave me an interest and experience in the multitude of things that have to happen for a small family business to work. The Roman world, as I keep emphasizing, is a world of friends and family. It’s a world that, while bigger in scale than most worlds before the 19th century, still operates very much at that level of friends and family. That was the small business, small world that I grew up in.
COWEN: A doctoral student comes to you and says, “I want to find something like those newly discovered brick factories. Where should I actually go and look?” Where do you send them?
BOWES: Increasingly, actually, I’ve been sending—since you asked about papyri—I send them to the papyri. These amazing efforts by colleagues who work on papyri have increasingly put huge swaths of what amount to the economic records of the ancient world online, papyri.info. Any of your listeners can go and look it up. There are thousands of papyri that have not been either published or analyzed or really made use of in the ways that we now can do, now that they’re so available to us. Those papyri, although they only relate to Roman Egypt, mostly, so a tiny corner of the Roman world—it was arguably the breadbasket of the Roman world, one of its most important economic regions—they have so much to teach us. In 20 years’ time, I think we’re going to think completely different things about the Roman economy, and that’s going to be because of the papyri.
The second place that’s going to change the way we think about the Roman world or the ancient economy generally is all of the new excavations that are going on in advance of modern construction. Once Italy, and Spain, and Southern Europe start to have the same rules and laws that basically make partners of development and archaeology, we’re going to have huge amounts of data from those places as well. It’s really modern construction and the archaeology that goes on around modern construction that’s transformed our knowledge about, say, Roman demographics or Roman farming or any of these other activities that make up the heart of the Roman economy. A lot of that material hasn’t been studied. It’s all out there. That’s where I send them.
COWEN: Is it much harder to do work outside the EU? Say someone wants to go to Tunisia, is that just as easy, or there’s additional obstacles—legal, regulatory, cultural?
BOWES: Excavation, it’s challenging everywhere, and for reasons that in many cases are correct. These are countries that have experience of foreign archaeologists coming in and taking stuff and leaving with it and leaving them with nothing. They’re quite keen, understandably, to prevent that from happening in the future. I don’t know that it’s harder to dig in Tunisia than it is in Greece. It’s really hard to dig in Greece.
COWEN: Because of the law?
BOWES: Because of the law, and because of the way in which, again, responses to foreign predation of Greek antiquities produced a set of structures which one has to work within. Those don’t exist necessarily in Tunisia. There’s amazing Tunisian colleagues with whom one can partner and develop projects that are of interest to both parties. As far as archaeology is concerned, there is no such thing as the EU. You really are operating at the level of the nation state, and inside some of those nations, like Spain, you’re really working at the level of the province, and that’s your partner. That’s the person or the entity with which it’s either difficult or easy to work. It really varies all over the place.
COWEN: Last question. Put aside Rome and assume there’s no monetary constraint. An educated person comes to you and says, “I have three weeks. I’d like to do a tour of the Roman Empire, but I’ve already seen everything in Rome.” What do you outline for the tour? Where should they go? Three weeks.
BOWES: Three weeks.
COWEN: Give or take. If you need another day, that’s fine.
BOWES: I think I would start them off at Hadrian’s Wall. Hadrian’s Wall is extraordinary for a whole bunch of reasons. As one of the few places the Romans actually built a border, it’s an extraordinary statement of empire. This amazing archaeological site at Vindolanda, which is actually run by family and excavated by family, is just such an eye-opener to see how ordinary people—soldiers, very often, most of whom, of course, are not Italian; they’re recruited from Gaul—they’re recruited from all over the place, are living up in, literally, for what was, for them, the end of the world. You can see everything from their shoes to pieces of their clothing to their very grubby daily lives. You go first, I think, to there. You’re going to skip the heart of the empire, are you? Your person is sick of Italy and sick of Rome.
COWEN: They’re not sick of Italy, but they’ve done Rome. Everyone knows to go there. You send them to Trier, to Segovia, to Split?
BOWES: Let’s stick with our theme of trying to understand empire as empire while also understanding ordinary people. Yes, sure. Let’s go to Split and see the great palace of Diocletian, which is now home to some beautiful cafes and restaurants and gift shops, right inside the great courtyard where Diocletian would have greeted you if you were lucky enough to obtain an audience. This is an amazing palace because it’s a testament to an emperor who said, “I am stepping down. I said I was in here for a limited amount of time. I now observe my term limits.”
It’s the first and only time in the history of the Roman Empire, and most empires, in which a leader has said this, and I am going to retire, and retire he did, and retire to this extraordinary palace/military garrison on the coast of Croatia.
Then, okay, let’s assume that your traveler is able to cross military lines and go to some places that maybe, let’s hope, within our lifetime will once again be safe. This is an aspirational trip.
COWEN: Sure.
BOWES: The last place that I would send them, again, on the theme of empire and ordinary life, is the extraordinary town of Dura-Europos, excavated by Yale University. In fact, your tourist could stop briefly at the Yale Art Museum to see some things: the mithraeum, the Christian church that were excavated by Yale University in Dura and brought back to New Haven.
Dura-Europos was another frontier garrison town on the Euphrates and preserved for us because it was sacked by Rome’s one of their greatest enemies, the Aparthians, in the late 3rd century, and preserved a whole town with all of its religious diversity and ethnic diversity, including the ordinary lives of merchants who penned their graffiti accounts on the wall to people’s daily meals, and this extraordinary succession of religious buildings with which we began this conversation, a Christian church, a Jewish synagogue, and a mithraeum.
COWEN: Awesome. Again, a plug for Kim’s great new book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent. Kim Bowes, thank you very much.
BOWES: Thanks so much, Tyler.