Although the story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes, Kim Bowes, professor of Ancient History and archaeology at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania, in Surviving Rome, unearths history of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labour.

Bowes focuses on the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokies. 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 laborers 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 reveals 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 laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world. Trimalchio, a parvenu tycoon greets the piece de resistance of his legendary tasteless dinner party- solid skeleton in The Satyricon, a Roman comic novel written by Petronius in the first century AD. All the wealth and trappings of even the greatest empire in the world would succumb to the ravages of time and be lost to posterity for ever.

Until now our knowledge of the realities of daily life in the Roman empire relied heavily on literary sources –“Cicero & Co”,  focusing on the imperial elites.

It is used to be thought that the harsh living conditions of most ancient Romans must have taken a terrible toll on their health. But the skeletal signatures of childhood disease were twice as high in Victorian London than in Roman British cities. Dental records reveals an alarming deterioration in oral health coincident with Roman rule. But the Roman’s relative good health may probably had something to do with their diet. Bowes calculates even slaves enjoyed typically daily calorific intakes nearly twice the subsistence level. “The Coloseum was not built on 1, 900 calories per day” Bowes explains, Urban and rural diets were surprisingly rich and varied – according to bone analysis revealing a healthy mix of seafood, meat dairy and legumes even in the farthest flung corners of the empire.

The economic irrelevance of women and girls is another misconception. Textiles were a vast industry employing up to half of all the labour in the empire, and what women could earn from spinning rivalled some male monthly wages. Thus for an enormous number of Roman households, the female members were economically just as important as the males.

Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent by Kim Bowes, Princeton University Press £35, 512 pages.