Could you have survived in ancient Rome? (Probably not for very long, according to our expert)

Life in ancient Rome was far more financially precarious than its popular image suggests, says Kim Bowes, with survival requiring the same economic juggling act familiar to many people today

A mosaic showing a person driving a two‑ox cart loaded with goods against a red, vine‑patterned background.

Published: August 30, 2026 at 3:30 PM

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When we think of ancient Rome, perhaps we imagine strolling through well-ordered cities or lounging in a brightly-coloured house, sipping fine Italian wine – a kind of ancient dolce vita.

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What we tend not to imagine is working from dawn to dusk, carefully counting every penny, juggling three jobs while trying to keep the debt collectors at bay.

These may seem like modern worries, but these problems kept ordinary Romans up at night as well. Getting by under the Roman empire was more complicated than we have assumed.

So, if you found yourself transported back to ancient Rome, here are some hacks to get by.

A mosaic of a person driving a two‑ox cart filled with produce, framed by red vine motifs.

A mosaic from the fourth century AD shows a worker driving an ox cart filled with harvested grapes. Many farmers sold surpluses of wine to get by | Credit: Alamy

Be a farmer

Farming was the most common occupation – and the most prestigious. Today, farming is a minority occupation in most industrialised worlds, but not so in ancient Rome.

Estimates suggest 70-80 per cent of the population were farmers, and most of those were small farmers working modest plots.

But if you were a Roman farmer, even with a small amount of land, you were not a stereotypical peasant. Roman farmers survived by selling small surpluses of wine, hay, pork, even apples or dates, to their neighbours or to their comrades in cities.

Farming meant tracking fluctuating prices; it meant borrowing during the winter to (hopefully) pay it back in the autumn; and it meant figuring out how to squeeze every last sestertius out of every inch of land.

So while you would definitely want to be a farmer, you should set aside any dreams of living happily farm-to-table. Just like small farmers today, you would have to be a savvy operator, worrying over crop prices, juggling your debts against your sales, and weighing the risks of growing something you could sell for a high price – wine, peaches, even mustard – with something you could eat.

An ancient Roman bronze abacus with vertical slots and movable counting beads.

A 3D reconstruction of an ancient Roman abacus – an invaluable piece of equipment in a world where maths was essential to everyday survival | Credit: Getty Images

Study maths

Surviving in the Roman world, even for farmers, meant doing sums. Thousands of ordinary Romans’ accounts, including tax bills, expenses and land leases, are preserved on wooden tablets, papyri, even scratched on walls.

They describe a world where all kinds of people had to do maths regularly. Unlike the Middle Ages the Roman world was awash with coins; everything had a price in money and true barter was probably pretty rare. But that meant you needed to do maths all the time.

So if your taxes were based on a percentage of your crop yields, and an estimate of the quality and quantity of your land, you had to run the maths.

If you had to decide whether it made better financial sense to rent a plot of land and farm or work for wages on someone else’s land, you had to run the maths. Keeping track of expenses, hours worked, taxes owed, loans made and taken, all these required constant maths.

Luckily for you, that maths wasn’t terribly complicated, nor did it necessarily mean you could read and write. Romans had a sophisticated finger-counting system that allowed them to do sums, even calculate interest, on their hands. They had a basic abacus that did the same.

And even if you couldn’t read Virgil, you might know your letters and your numbers and so keep some basic accounts – full of misspelled words, but precise to the quarter of a sestertius.

A mosaic showing robed figures carrying baskets and containers against a geometric patterned border.

A mosaic from the ancient city of Sepphoris depicts people carrying various wares and produce. For many, the only way to survive was to have several income streams | Credit: Getty Images

Do five jobs

In ancient Rome, it was almost impossible to make ends meet with wages alone. Just like in many countries today unskilled wages were not enough to live on, either for an individual and definitely not for a family. Potters, miners, shipbuilders, even farmers, often struggled to earn enough to make it to the end of the month.

So if you wanted to get by on wages, you needed to hustle. For example, a butcher might have a side gig selling hay; you might work as a potter in one season and a farmer in another; women would spin wool by the ounce and sell animal feed while lending money to their neighbours.

Families would also put their children to work to earn a few coins, such as sweeping leaves or hauling water. Pooling all these sources of income allowed Roman families to buy enough to eat, pay down their debts and sometimes set some money aside.

A Roman mosaic of three figures in a grooming scene, with a seated woman attended by two standing helpers.

A noblewoman gets ready for the day, richly dressed with several accessories. In the Roman empire, everyone – from the richest to the poorest – was expected to have a multitude of goods | Credit: Getty Images

Spend to play

Romans loved things. Anyone who has been to an archaeological museum holding Roman-era discoveries will no doubt have been amazed by the number of things even ordinary Romans owned. Things like perfume and earrings, children’s toys, and shoes and clothes in every conceivable cut and colour.

But like us, Romans didn’t just love things, they lived in a world where you had to have the right things in order to fit in, to participate in society. For us, being able to function in society requires several sets of clothes and shoes, a bag to carry your things, pictures on your walls, a mobile phone.

Romans, even poor and working Romans, also needed to have a surprising range of things in order to fit into their world – multiple tunics, several pairs of shoes, some basic jewellery, a range of plates and glasses, metal tools and glass lamps.

Even farmers bought a whole range of goods, while city dwellers, in order to fit into their complicated, bustling society, needed even more. In other words, Romans need to spend to play: consumer goods were not a luxury, but a necessity.

The result was an expensive world, where the cost of living didn’t just include enough bread to eat and a roof over your head, but a whole range of other things that meant the difference between having friends and a job or being a social outcast.

So, if you arrived in the Roman world, be prepared to shop. And to watch your meagre earnings get eaten up by a world of things.

A Roman mosaic of a barefoot youth holding fish and fruit, surrounded by baskets and a patterned border.

A young, enslaved boy works in a Pompeii kitchen. One particularly cruel way for poorer families to get by was to lease out their own children to work for richer citizens – resulting in one extra wage, and one less mouth to feed at home | Credit: Getty Images

Be prepared to sell anything

But don’t despair if you’ve spent all your income on shoes and perfume. All that stuff you own didn’t so much as use up your money as change its form. And when times get particularly tough, you could sell or pawn your stuff for cash.

The used clothing and goods market was huge in the Roman world and everything had a price. Pawnbrokers’ accounts reveal women, who were the custodians of a household’s things, pawning everything from their jewellery to kitchen pots for a bit of cash, often at month’s end or during the hungry months before the harvest.

And if you ran out of things to sell, you could always sell your body – or those of your family members. If you’d just given birth, you could rent out your body as a wet nurse. If you had younger brothers or sisters, you might lease them out to work for others, both pocketing their wages and saving on feeding them. One particularly harsh set of accounts find a father leasing out his six-year-old daughter to work in a mill for many years, just to pay the interest on a loan.

While some surviving letters from the army camps describe a family of army suppliers who bought and resold small amounts of fish, vegetables, and perhaps their female family members, to the army garrisons. Selling out your daughters as prostitutes was one particularly brutal solution in a world where wages were low and everything had a price.

A worn stone relief showing three figures in a childbirth or care scene, with one seated and two assisting.

A tomb relief depicts a woman giving birth – a painful, dangerous experience that lessened the life expectancy of women at a time when it was already very low | Credit: Getty Images

Have a high tolerance for pain

Finally, if you were an ordinary Roman doing manual labour you had better be prepared to do a lot of it. Skeletons from Roman-period cemeteries show signs of unremitting, body-breaking work, far more than people who lived in other societies.

These remains have signs of osteoarthritis, inflammation around the joints, herniated discs, and lots and lots of broken bones. Growing surplus crops to sell on the market and working multiple other jobs on the side took a huge toll on the body.

Working in the now-huge craft industries, such as dyeing clothes, making bricks and shaping metal, were particularly punishing on the bones as well as your muscles thanks to the repeated actions of washing, pounding and hammering.

Now, your life wouldn’t have been very long if you lived in ancient Rome, with an average life expectancy of around 25-30 years old, even less for women who had to do the most dangerous job of all – childbirth.

But even as a 20-year-old, your hard-working body would start to resemble the body of a 60-or 70-year-old today with arthritis in your hands, swollen joints in your knees, and an ever-aching back.

So if you think that life in ancient Rome was easy, think again. Most people, probably a good 90 per cent, had hard, complicated and above all short lives. They juggled, hustled and worked their bodies to the bone. Surviving in their brutal, complex world meant hard choices – about what to buy, when to sell, and how to deploy all your resources, even your children.

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Kim Bowes is professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton University Press, 2026)

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