What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
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What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
The worst jobs?
Jobs in Rome were a funny thing. There were as many as there are today so there were certainly options.
That being said there were never anywhere near enough jobs. Rome had slaves by the millions and they worked the mines, the plantations, and did most manual labor. Basically you were a craftsman, tradesmen, a warrior, or unemployed. This is a bit of an oversimplification but not by much.
#1: Being unemployed
This may not seem like a bad gig but it was. I want to focus on this because it is a great vehicle for understanding Roman society.
The first thing to note is the client-patron
- Delator - means snitch, their job was to quite literally snitch on their neighbors if they committed a crime.
- Praegustator - means food taster, the job sounds nice but the reality is that many emperors were assasinated through food poisoning which proved lethal to Praegustators.
- Gladiators - warriors who fought to the death in the Colosseum.
- Slaves - worked on plantations, mines etc.
Everyone knows that ancient cities were filled with human and animal excrement. There was poop everywhere, despite ultra advanced Roman cities that had public toilets. Human poo is the worst in terms of stench and pathogens compared to most of the animal waste, and I suppose one would get used to the smell if it was one’s lot in life to collect it for disposal.
But I think it would be far worse to work in an ancien tannery. They used among other things, vast quantities of urine to treat the raw animal hides, and that had to be worked into the hides by people stomping on the wet skins in big vat
ROMAN DAILY LIFE
From the early days of the Roman Republic through the volatile reigns of such ignoble emperors as Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, the Roman empire continued to expand, stretching its borders to encompass the entire Mediterranean Sea as well as expanding northward to Gaul and then even farther north to Britian. History records the exploits of the heroes as well as the tirades of the e
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