Hacker News Reader

Comment by htag | Hacker News Reader

One thing, it's ambiguous if they are speaking of only jobs inside the city, or any job in the republic/empire. It's also ambiguous if this is limited to jobs only performed by free individuals. Some things that didn't make the list.

* Free individuals sometimes became Gladiators

* While very clean for ancient standards, their sewage system required a lot of manual maintenance.

* We know sailors we subject to scurvy, which suggests they spent most of their time on ship and had very poor diets.

* Prostitution was legal.

* Without an understanding of germ theory, anyone dealing with very sick or dead individuals could be subject to poor health outcomes.

* Lots of work would have been extremely physically taxing by today's standards. Lifting heavy things. Farming with hand tools. Blacksmithing.

View on HN

Mining was among the worst types of work with very little chance of doing it for longer. Which is why it was allmost only slaves doing it, like most of the other hard work, which is why there allways needed to be new wars to get new slaves to keep the system running.

I think mines switching to free labor to some degree in the imperial period since slaves became more scarce and expensive

I do think this is the actual answer. Brutally backbreaking work (literally breaking rocks with simple tools for 12+ hours per day every day), in poor conditions, and constantly inhaling dust that destroys your lungs to the point that you're constantly coughing up black mucus.

Being a rower on a ship was a terrible job too, but at least you had fresh air to breathe.

Didn't Rome still use the "eat, shit, and sleep on your seat" system used by the Greeks before them? I don't think rowers had anything that could reasonably be described as "fresh" air.

Honestly don't know. I suspect it entirely hinges on whether we're talking about slaves or not.

I think compared to deep mining shafts, before proper ventilation and smokefree lighting was invented - it definitely can be described as fresh air in comparison, however disgusting the rows were - on the sea is always wind blowing most of it away. But of course it mattered, whether you were on the top row or the lower rows - and where you would sit was also used as further punishment/reward.

You've omitted the mines, which were a pretty notorious place to work, and I'd personally rank it the worst job of the lot. My understanding is that the miners were almost all slaves because of the poor working conditions.

People convicted of certain egregious crimes would commonly be sentenced to hard labor in the mines.

This was the punishment that astrologers received for violating certain regulations around astrology. (Their clients were executed.)

People are still working in mines like that today and for a long time, I'm guessing.

One particularly unpleasant job (I believe often performed by slaves) was making charcoal. More man-hours went into making charcoal than went into the actual blacksmithing, as it was so coal-intensive. Entire regions were denuded of trees. And then of course you had lumberjacks.

Honestly, following around some rich person in Rome sounds easier than the hardest manual labor jobs.

> * Prostitution was legal.

As it is in Aotearoa New Zealand, where lately we also have constant news about shortages of workers in hospitality, tourism, agriculture, etc.

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/06-08-2018/its-as-legal-as-...

Farming is the big one - if your job sucked too hard you’d just go back to being a subsistence farmer like most everyone else.

Was arable land easy to come by for a poor Roman or would you be more likely to have a landlord requiring some cut?

In general no, it wasn't easy for poor folks to get their own farm land, and it became harder as time went on.

A plot of land was a common millitary pension; soldiers would retire there and work the land after putting in enough service time. This worked well while there was plenty of decent land in Italy, but became a worse deal over time. Once the prime land was taken up soldiers had to settle for plots of varying quality far from their homeland, which was much less pleasant as you'd expect.

The poorest would likely “sign on” to an existing farm as a farmhand - the story of the Prodigal Son implies that concept was known in antiquity.

The problem was the big farms relied virtually exclusively on slave labor for labor. There were numerous attempted reforms to require landowners to hire free citizens, but I don't recall about any systemic change being achieved before the fall.

> soldiers had to settle for plots of varying quality far from their homeland

So .. Mesopotamian soldiers might have to settle for land in Italy after serving at Arbeia [1], the Roman fort in England rather than return to their homeland?

Or are you perhaps thinking that the Roman Army was mostly made up of soldiers from provinces of what is now modern day Italy?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeia

Things changed after the transition from Republic to an Empire. One of the factors in that transition was the shortage of land to provide to soldiers, who at that time were mostly Roman citizens.

Not at all. It was so hard to get land that “land reform” was a constant political point.

Working with the sewage system is what first came to my mind.

As far as germs that is so modern. Ignaz Semmelweis was considered a moron for suggesting that doctors wash their hands between handling dead bodies and delivering babies.

He died in 1865 with the establishment believing he was basically spreading misinformation.

Also, are we talking about jobs, or work?

Subsistence farmers worked, but didn't have 'jobs'. A blacksmith worked, but might have had a 'job', or, depending on how many people were working under him might have been more of business operator.

Being in any army sucks, so soldiering wasn't exactly a great 'job', either - although it often provided opportunities to rob and enslave other people.

Regarding gladiators, one of the most crazy statistics I ever read was that about 500K people died in the Colosseum while it was in use. That was probably in the span of a couple of centuries, but that's still a steady stream of dead folks.

Legionnaire :)

The correct term for a member of a Roman legion is legionary. A "legionnaire" is a member of the French Foreign Legion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com