Surviving Rome

Name: Surviving Rome
Price: 69.99 AUD
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ISBN: 9780691273334

The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent

Kim Bowes

$69.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Princeton University Pres
01 March 2026

History; Ancient history: to c 500 CE; Social & cultural history; Economic history

The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labour.

Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day labourers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children's toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans' most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status.

Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today's labourers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world.

By: Kim Bowes
Imprint: Princeton University Pres
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691273334
ISBN 10: 0691273332
Pages: 512
Publication Date: 01 March 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Kim Bowes is professor of archaeology and ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire and Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity.

Reviews for Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent

""Dispensing with marble-clad elites and imperial triumphs, this eye-opening study brings ancient Rome down to street level—into the fields, workshops, and crowded tenements where real economic life unfolded. . . . [Bowes] challenges long-held myths about Roman prosperity and instead reveals a gritty, improvisational economy that resonates uncannily with our own.""---Ghalib Dhalla, Indulge Magazine