Princeton UP Ideas Podcast · New Books Network

Kim Bowes, "Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent" (Princeton UP, 2025)

·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

Roman economic life was familiar, but slavery and brutal labor aged bodies decades early.

Poor Romans ate more variously than expected. The conversation follows Kim Bowes's account of ordinary economic life in Rome, with food doing a lot of the work. Pompeii matters here, along with sewer evidence the guest attributes to Erica. That material evidence has changed what scholars think city people could eat. Still, variety was not equality. Black pepper and citrus come up as expensive imported or newly cultivated foods, the sort poorer people rarely had, if they had them at all. The interesting part is the gap between everyday range and real status. Poorer city dwellers might have access to an immense spread of foods, including seafood, while richer households still ate differently. Place changes the picture too. Countryside diets seem narrower for rich and poor alike, because rural access limits what people can buy or prepare. The guest keeps the analogy plain: growing up in a town of 30 people in upstate New York meant far fewer food options than New York City. Roman cities worked a bit like that. They widened possibility. The method is grounded and, thankfully, not tidy for its own sake. Instead of treating poverty as one fixed condition, the episode follows residues, places, food, and access. The result is a more textured picture of ordinary Roman life: less uniform, more dependent on location, and still cautious about what the evidence can prove.

As heard by us

Ancient Rome comes into focus through food, inequality, and the ordinary lives usually left at the margins.

This episode puts Kim Bowes on solid ground when she shifts attention in ancient Rome away from emperors and elites and toward ordinary lives.

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Why you'd press play

See Roman inequality through the food rich and poor people could, and could not, easily eat.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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