Structuring Subjects: Weaving the Web of Work/Life

CHAPTER 1 Structuring Subjects: Weaving the Web of Work/Life Del A. Maticic and Jordan Rogers Studs Terkel opens his classic 1974 oral history of labor, Working, by remarking that “[t]his book, being about work, is, by its very nature, also about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body.”1 Work, along the lines sketched in the book, constitutes above all the soul-crushing drudgery of daily toil, the control exerted by employers over their laborers’ very lives, and the physical dangers posed by the work itself. This picture of labor is all too recognizable in the wake of the epoch-dening COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and worldwide, a moment in which pundits We extend our thanks to Kim Bowes and to the anonymous reviewers for their criticisms and suggestions in improving this piece. D. A. Maticic (*) Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Rogers (*) North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. A. Maticic, J. Rogers (eds.), Working Lives in Ancient Rome, The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61234-3_1 3 4 D. A. MATICIC AND J. ROGERS and bad-faith politicians have framed the decision to commute to work or to remain home as a binary one. According to this false dichotomy, one must either contribute virtuously to the economic machine or acquiesce lazily to the dissolution of the civilized world.2 This type of fallacious reasoning has only exacerbated how acutely many have come to feel the innate violence of labor, as Terkel remarked almost fty years ago.3 The condition of the laboring body in the system of capitalism has no less been a subject of Marxist criticism.4 But such a pessimistic take as this is not merely the product of a modern capitalist economic model; the notion that work is inherently violent in fact has deep roots in antiquity. There is perhaps no articulation of this sinister view of work more famous for scholars of the Greco-Roman world than Vergil’s rst Georgic. There, the poet’s ambivalent claim that “outrageous labor conquers all things” (labor omnia uincit/improbus, Geo. 1.145–6) is taken to be either a lament about how fallen man is doomed to toil to stay alive or a celebration of the power of human striving to dominate the natural world.5 In each interpretation, labor is considered a type of punishment, either for the one toiling or for the raw materials that such toil transforms. Labor, then, can only consist in either enduring or meting out a violence that is stitched into the very nature of things.6 This, in a sense, paradoxical connection of work to both violence against life and order within the universe is illustrated nowhere more succinctly than in the anonymous Moretum, which Tom Geue studies in depth in the opening chapter of this volume. Already in the 1990s, William Fitzgerald recognized in the short poem crucial evidence for labor and the low-status laborer in Latin verse.7 But what has been fully appreciated more recently is the extent to which the poem blends the banal morning toiling of an agricultural laborer with the lofty cosmological structures of popular Empedocleanism.8 Through an evocative comparison of the round bread and ball of pesto to the cosmos itself, the poet subtly compares the lowly peasant Simulus to a demiurge crafting the world, bearing marked similarities to the accounts of creationist cosmogony detailed from Plato to Ovid.9 By inviting us to conceive of the demiurgic activity of worldmaking not as a one-off event but as a daily routine or “grind,” the poem insists upon a point that is essential to this volume: work is not only a cosmological principle in an abstract, metaphorical sense. It is through our actions and labores that the world and its various forms keeps from falling apart.10 Nor is this just the realm of the literary imaginary. Among ancient historians no less than anonymous poets, the notion that work is bound up 1 STRUCTURING SUBJECTS: WEAVING THE WEB OF WORK/LIFE 5 in violence holds considerable sway in contemporary theorizations of the ancient Roman economy and of the contours of professional life in the ancient world. Examining work and labor in much of Roman Studies since Moses Finley’s seminal 1973 monograph, The Ancient Economy, has involved studying the powerful institutional and ideological forces, exerted from the top-down, that structure subjective experience and impose ranks and gradations among working people.11 Until relatively recently, for instance, the predominant interpretation of Roman professional identities took at face value Cicero’s infamous and oft-quoted aside in de Ofciis (1.150–1), in which the orator offers his thoughts concerning which occupations betted the honorable man’s life and which occupations were considered sordid.12 Unsurprisingly, trades occupied by the lower classes in this Ciceronian picture—the butcher, the shmonger, the carpenter— rank lowest; teachers and doctors, given their more useful knowledge, are accounted a measure of respect; and atop the hierarchy are the individuals whose prots from Mediterranean trade are funneled into the ownership and cultivation of land.13 To this we might compare a similar scholarly impulse in the past decades to focus on institutions and impersonal forces governing the Roman economy, under the ever-widening umbrella of New Institutional Economics.14 In doing so, such efforts, rather than focusing on the cultural consequences of a dominant ideology as Finley did, have tended toward an elaboration of systems and their effects, prompting some historians of the ancient world to attempt to quantify the economic productivity of those systems and to interpret such results in broad comparative analyses with other historical economies.15 The goal of such analyses has been, by and large, to identify the existence (or not) of economic growth in the ancient economy and the institutional frameworks which fostered such growth. While certainly helpful for revealing how institutions—understood broadly—shaped macro-economic behaviors, these studies nevertheless have almost entirely effaced the individual and the sub-elite in their desire to fully explicate an abstract concept of the economy and to rationalize economic behavior in a way unfamiliar to many of those whose lives they aim to illuminate.16 As one criticism of such approaches to the study of ancient labor and work contends, these models not only misconstrue the complexity of ancient valuations of labor, but in many instances ignore them in favor of quantifying per capita economic growth or, in the more measured instances, at least the possibility for growth and the institutions that made it possible.17 6 D. A. MATICIC AND J. ROGERS In light of this overwhelming emphasis on how the lives of individual Roman subjects were structured by institutional, ideological, or even cosmic forces, this volume aims instead to contribute to the growing literature seeking to illuminate other facets of ancient economic life, in particular by considering the many ways in which individual agency and subjectivity exerted their own forces on the economic, ideological, or cosmic structures within which individuals lived and worked. The title of this chapter, “Structuring Subjects,” is a purposely ambiguous reference to this dialectical process, in which individuals appear as both subjects and as the subjected, as both structuring agents themselves and passive adherents to, or victims of, the overarching structures of society (be they economic institutions, cosmic orderings, status hierarchies, etc.). Research undertaken by both anthropologists and sociologists has long acknowledged the fundamental importance of the individual agent in contributing to, manipulating, or outright resisting social structures, and the consequential alterations to these structures such individual reactions produce.18 In the study of the ancient Mediterranean, the direct application of similar approaches to the agency of the individual has yielded simultaneously complex and analytically bountiful interpretations of subjects ranging from the dynamic nature of communal life in rural settlements in Late Antiquity to the social negotiation of ideas of violence in the Egyptian legal papyri.19 Alongside the present volume, there is currently also a concerted attempt to bring similar frameworks of analysis to bear on work, labor, and the ancient economy more generally.20 These studies are most welcome, as scholarly output concerning labor and work from the perspective of the individual or the communal group has been vastly outpaced in the past two decades by the studies of economic institutions or quantication of the economy already mentioned. One means by which the individual’s relationship to both self and labor is evoked throughout this volume is through the familiar modern phrase “work/life,” which is reformulated in the title of this volume as “Working Lives.” This collocation should raise for many the specter of the surely countless correspondences from Human Resources departments encouraging, for example, a healthy “work/life” balance for their employees, often for not entirely altruistic reasons. Or perhaps some will be reminded of the burgeoning industry of self-help publications, digital and analogue, that promise to unlock the secret to the perfect “work/life” balance and, therefore, to a blissful state of existence. Yet while the modern understanding of such a phrase encourages an easy separation of these two 1 STRUCTURING SUBJECTS: WEAVING THE WEB OF WORK/LIFE 7 spheres of existence in our own thinking—where “work” becomes time commoditized, “life” time wasted; “work” something performed in particular spaces, “life” lived in those domestic—we would do well to remind ourselves that such lines are not easily demarcated or even for that matter essential. What division between work and life, we might ask, did the Pompeiian tabernarius actually experience in their daily existence, where the spaces of both were in fact the same? In the case of occupational inscriptions, in which individuals identify themselves both in life and death by the labor they performed, can any division of work and life truly be discerned for those memorializing themselves as pistor, faber, or tonsor? To what extent is the ctional peasant Simulus’ life anything but work, or his work anything but life? How are Claire Holleran’s itinerant doctors entirely subsumed by their medicinal working identity? Or, as Del Maticic explores in his chapter, how do we separate the “work” and “life” of a poet like Vergil, whose biographies in the ancient world were shaped by the reception of his works?21 In one sense, such questions are entirely unanswerable given the evidence available to us; yet they still are valuable in demonstrating that the relationship between work and life, then as now, is a historically contingent one that merits investigation on its own terms and within its immediate context. The phrase “working lives,” then, is intended to denote two discrete modes of inquiry found within this volume. On the one hand, we intend this volume to make new inroads into the study of the practical realities of many different jobs and careers from across the spatiotemporal span of Roman history. We are, like many others, concerned also with the typologies of professional identities and the way they, sometimes stable and sometimes uid and hybridized, constellate and organize individuals.22 But this volume’s focus on working lives and the life of work, above all, moves past the limiting focus on forms of work and forms of meaning that derive from it and considers what is lively and lifelike about labor in the rst instance: its exibility, its contingency, and its constant oscillation between the mundane and the sublime, between the individual and the cosmic. Ultimately, this volume claims that the laboring subject, in this way, can and did exert structuring power over their conditions of life. It is fortunate, then, that recent engagements with how Romans constructed and responded to ideologies of labor have become not only more disciplined in critically interpreting Roman sources but have also begun questioning the analytical value of typical twentieth-century 8 D. A. MATICIC AND J. ROGERS reconstruction of ancient notions of work, workers, and working. For instance, many of the essays in Verboven and Laes’ 2017 edited volume, Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World, build on the work of Sandra Joshel and Paul Veyne to offer convincing revisions to the statusbased model of the Roman economy described in Finley’s The Ancient Economy without veering into the territory of measuring economic growth or, for that matter, the nature of economic institutions.23 Recent elaborations of the ancient agricultural economy, for instance, have jettisoned this tendency toward construing all economic change in terms of growth, opting instead to view the Greco-Roman economy as both a dynamic system and one interdependent on other economies of the Mediterranean basin.24 Considerations of the economics of individuals, as well—from pay rates in Roman Egypt to individual rates of consumption in Pompeii—have shed light on the small-scale realities of participating in broader economic systems.25 Several monographs and volumes published in the past decade have also begun reframing the discussion of Roman labor entirely, placing less emphasis on its quantitative economic value and, in many cases, overlooking the dismissive attitude toward labor found in many of our literary sources. They do so in favor of exploring how the cultural discourse of work,26 the identication, denition, and articulation of skill and professional duty in both literature and art,27 and the organization of labor practices and workshops, both rural and urban, indelibly affected other aspects of Roman society,28 including the cultural, aesthetic, and social realms of Roman life. Our own Tom Geue’s damning study of the slaver’s ideology of the Georgics, for instance, has reminded us that plenty of Romans were not conquered by labor themselves but instead leached happily off that of others.29 Similar examinations of the “work that work-words do”30 in shaping hierarchies of labor and producing work in their own right have shed signicant light, for example, on the texts of the Roman agronomists.31 What many of these studies share is a simple shift in perspective; it may have been the case that the literature-producing aristocracy of the Roman empire disparaged labor and those performing it, but that was clearly not an opinion shared by the lower or even perpetually difcult, if impossible (or unhelpful), to dene “middle-class,” who, it is apparent, identied with and took pride in their occupations, to say nothing of the vastly complex economic lives of the lower classes and the impoverished.32 Such a shift in perspective is a reminder that the diverse forms that labor assumed in Rome must be studied together not as disparate ranks in a 1 STRUCTURING SUBJECTS: WEAVING THE WEB OF WORK/LIFE 9 status hierarchy, as Cicero contends, but as scattered nodes caught in a dense web of interrelation. This volume, then, is concerned less with how powerful external forces imposed structures of labor upon living than in how life itself, in all its messy contingencies, inconsistencies, and contradictions, shaped forms and structures of work on its own terms. In other words, our approach to the ancient evidence is to toggle dialectically between the macro and micro to capture more faithfully the variegated experiences of working lives in the Roman world, following the example of other labor historians and practitioners of “bottom up” history.33 Doing so requires the acknowledgment of the complex interplay between agency and structure—a methodological stance that Magalhães de Oliveira and Courier, in a recent collected volume, have described as requiring historians to recognize the “limitations imposed on the choices and actions of the sub-altern” as they reconstruct the motivations and behaviors of the sub-elite in navigating whatever choices were afforded or available to them.34 The introductory chapter to that volume, “Ancient History from Below,” is an especially useful overview of how “bottom-up” history has developed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-rst centuries, in both ancient and non-ancient contexts. While the authors persuasively connect those occupying the “below” status within Roman society to Spivak’s notion of the “subaltern,” it is important nevertheless to identify and reconstruct the gradations of difference within such broad categories, both in terms of agency and experience, and in regard to how various relationships of domination manifested even within so-called sub-altern groups. This latter point is especially apparent in E.P. Thompson’s Customs in Common, where the popular culture of rural villages—as adduced, for example, in the public shaming of individuals for perceived domestic misbehavior— while certainly produced by the non-elite, nevertheless in turn created striations of experience as a result of such localized structures of power and control.35 Many of the case studies in this project, from the diachronic development of the responsibilities of the praeca in the lived experience of Roman dying (Bodel), to the mundane activities of an imagined farmer’s morning routine (Geue), testify to the variegated reality of Roman working lives across the status spectrum. Essays by Rogers, Kuttner, and Sancinito consider how the individual relationships within and shared priorities of communities of craftsmen and professionals both shaped the 10 D. A. MATICIC AND J. ROGERS forms work could take and asserted novel ideals related to the laboring body, in spite of the powerful ideological structures of labor that persisted. Itinerancy and mobility are also key themes, as different chapters follow skilled craftsmen (Cheung, Holleran), doctors (Sausville, Holleran), and writers (Maticic) across the Mediterranean world in search of opportunities for new work and new lives. In doing so, these professionals both participated in existing networks of labor mobility and (re)shaped those networks through their own participation. Finally, by exploring Ciceronian dramas of re-enslavement, Giannella explores the means by which economic systems of power and control in the Roman world often attempted but failed to contain and erase individual wills and agencies. To illustrate the power of this hermeneutic shift, it is informative to compare for a moment two different animals used to very different purposes in Roman analogies of labor: the bee and the spider. For an emblem of structured subjectivity, we may look no further than Vergil’s famous bees in Georgics 4 and Aeneid 1, who stand as exemplary models for so much of Roman professional life. The entirety of the hive is organized around the seemingly teleological toil of the warrior class. Here, work does not conquer all but rather unites all in a common purpose: among the hive, Vergil writes in Georgics 4, there is “one labor for all” (labor omnibus unus, Geo. 4.184). The bee is goal-directed and knows its place. There are, of course, the freeloading drones—but they are at best foils for the orderliness and industry of the rest. The top-down organization of the hive keeps in line the Cicero-style gradus dignitatis into which its members are arranged. The individual bee is either an extension of functionally the same agency, or will, in contradistinction to that common impulse. As an alternative to the established notion of the Roman worker as bustling bee, we offer the model of the industrious spider, considered at length in Marco Formisano’s study of Arachne in this volume. Individual and not part of a collective, the spider deals in webs rather than hierarchies. The web-like nature of the spider’s work extends to function and not just form, as it must take into account the agency of non-spiders and (literally) enmesh them within the product of the spider’s labor. Thus, the world of the spider is, like the violent cosmos represented on Arachne’s tapestry in Book 6 of the Metamorphoses (Met. 6.103–128), a chaotic one in which the antagonisms inherent in the very relationalities organizing the relationships between different groups of agents are reied by the webs made from raw materials that emanate entirely from the spider’s body. 1 STRUCTURING SUBJECTS: WEAVING THE WEB OF WORK/LIFE 11 While these creatures emphasize two discrete notions of the relationship between an individual, their labor, and society, they are nevertheless both evocative of a similar stance toward the subject-position of the laborer as marginalized. The gure of the vilicus, for example, provides a non-ctional accounting of the hierarchies of status and labor implied by the productive organization of the beehive and the autonomous (if unconscious) laboring of the spider. As both a slave and an overseer of slaves, the uilicus has posed a category problem in traditional understandings of the Roman world, the likes of which contradicts the convenient categories proposed by Cicero in de Ofciis. Butting up against what Joseph Howley calls the “epistemic rewall” of Roman agronomic knowledge, the uilicus embodied the contradictions and compromises necessary to maintain the web of relations that constituted the world of Roman work.36 Giannella’s consideration in this volume of Tiro, whose (coerced) literary work on behalf of his former dominus is mentioned in a number of Cicero’s letters, raises a number of similar questions about the nature of subjectivity and agency in the work of literary production among the elite. Structuring StudieS This volume is the product of a workshop series and conference, both titled Work/Life: Institutions, Subjectivities, and Human Resources in the Roman World and held over the course of a year, from Oct. 2020 to Oct. 2021.37 Like the workshops and conference that preceded it, the present volume explores the “work/life” of Romans of every stripe, from agricultural laborers to merchants, from craftsmen to poets, and from the enslaved to emperors. The papers in the study are eclectic in their source material, covering Latin poetry (Geue, Formisano, Maticic), legal and rhetorical prose (Sancinito, Giannella), Imperial literature and epigraphy in the Greek East (Sausville) and across the Roman world (Holleran), visual art (Kuttner, Rogers), antiquarian musings (Bodel), and archaeology (Cheung). They are also chronologically expansive in scope, ranging from mid-Republican cultural history through the art and literature of the late empire and to medieval and early modern receptions. This range of methodology, evidence, and chronology is purposeful; from its outset, the project has sought not only to claim interdisciplinarity in outlook but also to embody it in practice, in order to provide genuine opportunities for productive discussions not typically found in studies of Greco-Roman labor. Relatedly, we do not purport to offer a singular model for interpreting 12 D. A. MATICIC AND J. ROGERS ancient labor, nor do we presume that superstructures of labor either prompted a unied experience of work among the non-elite. Nor do we imagine that they were consistently applied in the rst instance. Again, this approach—the acknowledgment that a “bottom-up” approach to historical reconstruction must also engage with abstracting frameworks of analysis, as uneven as their results might be—locates analytical value in the toggling between web (structure) and spider (individual). The following chapters, therefore, explore the nature of “work” in numerous interconnected forms. In both Latin and English, the words for “work” mostly have a similar double meaning as either a verbal action or the tangible product of that action. Our volume takes this semantic fact seriously and accepts the invitation implicit in it to critically consider the relationship between workings and works in the ancient world and more generally—including our own intellectual work as Romanists. As such, the “subjects” of our title refer not just to Roman workers who were construed as laborers in their contemporary contexts but also to the subject matter of the collective research program contained in this volume. Such scope has enabled the contributors to this volume to interrogate what is common, for instance, between handicraft, agricultural administration, funerary service, and poetic production in a more expansively interdisciplinary manner. It has also fostered an intellectual space in which the contributors have been capable of reecting meaningfully on the nature of their own work, research methods, and positionalities in the different forms that structure our work. As a result, we invited participants during the conference proceedings to consider how studying the concept of work/life in the Roman world could possibly lead to new understandings of congurations of labor and the self in the contemporary academy. Rather than being simply an exercise in self-reection, these meditations were both highly provocative and, in some instances, subversive. Inspired by a number of contemporary theoretical reections on the nature of scholarly work in the humanities, this volume promises to invite readers to think not only about ancient labor but also about how it impinges upon our own conceptions of work in the academy. It also promises to bridge conversations present in a wide array of subdisciplines of Roman Studies with current theoretical and philosophical debates about the forms and formlessness of knowledge.38 One way in which we have grappled with such conversations in the humanities is to contemplate critically how the very form of the edited volume in Roman Studies can be exercised and innovated upon. Taking 1 STRUCTURING SUBJECTS: WEAVING THE WEB OF WORK/LIFE 13 our cue from the different studies conducted here, the arrangement of the chapters in this book endeavors to be more arachnoid than apiary. Rather than adopt a more typical organizational structure, in which chapters are arranged into sections based on the methodologies they employ, the types of evidence analyzed or the nature of their subject matter, our organization is instead intended loosely to evoke the narrative of a “normal” workday. As in our own work/lives, so typied by the 9-to-5 structure of the work-day, positing the notion of a normal working day would seem to exert a unied form of labor upon those experiencing it. In reality, beyond a general subjection to the ontology of capitalist time39—what might be protably compared to the realities of Roman imperial/institutional power and its inuence in the ancient world—those whose working lives take place within the 9-to-5 structure experience radically different working environments, relationships to power and authority, and even the amount of social satisfaction derived from their labor. Such a choice to employ a similar metaphor of daily, laboring time in the ancient world is borne not only of a desire to create more informative and productive connections between the contributions within this volume; it is also meant to raise a modest critique of those typical organizational structures employed by historians of ancient laboring and of the ancient economy. What might appear at rst blush as a merely descriptive organizational schema, for example, in the 2020 volume Capital, Investment, and Innovation in the Roman World—“Investment and Innovation,” “Capital and Investment in the Rural Economy,” and “Human Capital, Financial Capital, and Credit Markets”—in fact reveals an argument regarding the nature of the ancient economy in itself, one that the editors defend at lengths as appropriate in their introduction.40 A glance at the organization of The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, published in 2007 and now largely considered to reect communis opinio, reveals a similar understanding of the economy, as various “Determinants of Economic Performance” precede sections arranged geographically, where those determinants are explored in further depth.41 Similar exercises in the organization of knowledge undertaken by editors of other volumes are also revealing, even when their analytical approaches to the evidence differ drastically.42 Such categorizations as these, based on an acknowledgment of the fundamental importance of institutions, structures, or forms, are increasingly the norm. The point here is not to claim that the examples cited above are methodologically similar in their reconstruction of the ancient economy—and this is certainly not the case—or even to discount 14 D. A. MATICIC AND J. ROGERS their conclusions but to demonstrate how the manner in which we structure our presentation of historical data about the ancient economy must be confronted as an analytical argument in itself. Acknowledging this reality, our examination of work is categorized as an individual laborer might have experienced it—waking up, getting ready, going in, doing work, and coming home. In some senses, then, the organization of this volume is an experiment and a provocation, one that seeks to ask whether the structuring of our own academic subjects can be approached with both more sensitivity and more creativity, and whether this approach, as a result, can reveal novel avenues of investigation in the future. Here we draw from James Ker’s exploration of the “ordered day,” which he has explored in its chronological and socio-cultural dimensions.43 Daily time, as Ker demonstrates, acted as the interface between both individual and community, and nature and culture—as such, the Roman day “shapes and is shaped by the social order” of Roman society. A day’s work, therefore, is a unifying form within which individual experience—whether through the repair of a dolium, the making of furniture, or the performance of funeral rites—could vary wildly. Still, it must be admitted that the conceit of the “working day” to some extent attens what were essential discrepancies in status and obligation. The working day of the enslaved agricultural laborer, for instance, was categorically different from Cicero’s, especially as regards the level of coercion involved. These realities are explored to some extent in each of the contributions to this volume. Even so, our use of the metaphor of the working day is by no means meant to signal an exhaustive treatment of the subject; rather, it leaves open the possibility of further analyses of the ancient economy through the lens of those whose work kept it running. The remaining chapters in Part I, “Getting Up, Going In, and Brushing Up,” each consider different preparatory and educational activities that precede and underlie acts of laboring, whether those be rising from bed, learning the tricks (and metaphors) of a trade, or relocating for work. In the rst chapter, we awaken with the literary peasant Simulus in Tom Geue’s reading of power imbalances inherent in the metaphors of work peppering the poem Moretum. Claire Holleran then reconsiders different kinds of evidence for and the practical and social consequences of itinerant labor in the Roman world, focusing in particular on the networks of migrant doctors and construction workers that stretched across the Mediterranean. Chapter 3 considers education in relation to agronomic regimes, with Caroline Cheung drawing from pottery remains new insights 1 STRUCTURING SUBJECTS: WEAVING THE WEB OF WORK/LIFE 15 into the contexts and practices of learning how to repair and maintain the cargo containers of the ancient world, dolia. The chapters in Part II, “Showing Up,” explore different aspects of the relationship between work and representation, both in word and image. In a sweeping survey of the iconography of labor and laboring from across the Roman empire, Ann Kuttner documents the emergence and embrace of what she calls “cultures of competency”; both workers and those for whom they labored participated in this visual discourse, as demonstrated competencies—both of the processes and products of laboring—served to assert social legitimacy. Jane Sancinito and Rebecca Sausville then consider the different ways in which Roman workers themselves rst articulate and then express their own and others’ professional identities. Through a focus on merchants and their stereotypes, Sancinito explores how both individual traders and groups of merchants responded to such stereotypes through concerted efforts of positive self-representation. With Sausville, our narrative travels to the cities of Roman Anatolia, where public intellectuals similarly engaged in acts of self-representation to assert their importance to their community and, in the best cases, to receive special dispensations from the State. Rounding out the work-day, Jordan Rogers closely examines one image in particular, the so-called fabri tignarii relief, and considers the individual and communal agencies that underlie its representation of laboring as a sacred act performed for the benet of both the Gods and society at large. Finally, Part III collectively considers what comes after work and the work that comes after. Nicole Giannella explores the dramatic Ciceronian accounts of the fugitive freedman, Chrysippus, and the famous Tiro, and examines the relationship between how these literary servants navigated their legal and professional duties as literary experts and their personal responsibilities and obligations to their master. Marco Formisano then turns us from history to myth through his consideration of a different laborious encounter across power hierarchies—that of Ovid’s tale of Arachne in the Metamorphoses. By drawing on Hannah Arendt’s contrast between work and labor, Formisano reveals the contours of the poet’s own attitudes toward labor through the metaphorical “death” of the laboring Arachne and transformation into the working spider. He argues that Minerva’s punishment of Arachne collapses the metaphor of work and labor, forcing her against her will to identify with her work. Chapters 11 and 12 then turn to the work of death and the afterlife of Roman works. John Bodel rewrites the history of the Roman funerary worker and 16 D. A. MATICIC AND J. ROGERS hired mourner, known as the praeca, accounting for the position’s slow but steady transition from a hired professional responsible for giving public praise and leading funeral dirges, to its relegation to managing the mourning of enslaved household members. As Bodel argues, this transition is reective of broader changes in gender roles and the private-public interface in Roman funerary rites. Finally, Del Maticic considers how Vergil’s Eclogues and their reception in ancient lives of the poet draw on the growth of plants to bring life to bucolic and biographical forms, retooling a tradition of reception and imitation as a living literary lineage. As we escape from the pandemic and emerge like Arachne into metamorphosized worlds of work and life, we hope this volume sparks new discussions about the interrelation between different elements of Roman culture across the wide spans of space and time covered by its individual chapters. We also are hopeful that the critical examination of our own working processes, during a time of general societal reckoning as regards the relationship between work and life, and the impacts those processes have on our understanding of what we do as scholars of the past will, if nothing else, be a breath of clean, fresh air for those of us who have found it so difcult to catch our breath these past few years. In short, however readers engage with the chapters, whether read sequentially or cherrypicked to suit particular research needs, we hope that the volume’s patterning will evoke the effect of an enmeshed interrelation of peoples, places, and things, at once chaotically arranged and governed by forces and orders, like Darwin’s tangled bank or the web engineered to catch ies in the tangled understories of Roman Studies. noteS 1. Terkel 1974: xiii. 2. See, for example, Harold Pollack’s Washington Post article from March 27, 2020, entitled “Who lives, who dies, who decides.” 3. Or, alternatively, to feel like our jobs are, in the words of Graeber 2018, “bullshit” no matter the environments in which they are performed. Such a condition is rendered admirably by the recent HBO series Severance, which toys with the thought experiment of what would happen if our work-lives were completely severed cognitively from our non-work selves. While we do not engage substantively with Graeber’s category of the bullshit job here, it is nevertheless a useful concept with which to think, especially in connection with the mechanisms of control that we see, for 1 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. STRUCTURING SUBJECTS: WEAVING THE WEB OF WORK/LIFE 17 instance, prescribed by agronomic writers in connection to managing the vilicus. See, for instance, Jameson 2013 on the realist novel and Geue 2018 on the Georgics. On labor in the Georgics, see Gale 2000: 143–195. The concept is one of the most intensively studied in Vergil’s works. See esp. Allen 2010, Goins 1992–3, Jenkyns 1993, and Stachniw 1973–4. We see this phenomenon alive today in the use of the word “work” in physics to denote the exertion of energy systems. Fitzgerald 1996. See Farrell 2014. Henderson 2004 reads a similar cosmic tendency in Columella, Virgil, Pliny, and Palladius. On Ovidian receptions of Platonic creationism, see Kelly 2020. On ancient creationism more broadly, see Sedley 2008. Cf. also the notion of the text as cosmos, as in Gee 2001. This notion, entangled in literature and lived experience, is explored poignantly in the HBO Max series Station Eleven and the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel of the same name on which it is based. In the imaginary world of these works, a traveling troupe of actors uses Shakespearean works to cope with and reorganize, mentally and in their own social structures, the world that was destroyed by an almost worldending plague. Finley 1973. See Laes 2011; Verboven and Laes 2017 for bibliography. Both advocate for a more nuanced and complex understanding of work, labor, and status as understood by those living in the ancient Mediterranean basin, one that focuses in particular on laborers and their own conceptions of work. While the Aristotelian pedigree of Cicero’s denigration of banausic labor is evident (see, e.g., Arist. Pol. 1260b1: ὁ γὰρ βάναυσος τεχνίτης ἀφωρισμένην τινὰ ἔχει δουλείαν, “For the Baunasic artisan endures a sort of delimited slavery”), it must be remarked that several other competing discourses of work/labor can be adduced. The embrace of work as being what’s “better for you” (τὸ ἐργάζεσθαι ἄμεινον), no matter one’s lot, can be found as early as Hesiod’s Works and Days (here 314). A similar notion of the importance of agricultural laboring, especially, can be found in Xen. Oec. 11, as espoused by Socrates’ interlocutor, Ischomachus—though it should be noted that the gure of Ischomachus likely mocks the faux “laboring” done by the Athenian καλοὶ κάγαθοί, cf. Kronenberg 2010. An entirely different notion of work as futile or meaningless is also evident in Ecclesiastes 1.3–4 and in the numerous inscriptions that idolize the hedonistic pleasures of Roman life, for example, CIL VI 15258. 18 D. A. MATICIC AND J. ROGERS 14. Scheidel et al. 2007; Frier and Kehoe 2007; Harris 2008; Bang 2009; Temin 2012; Erdkamp et al. 2015, 2020; Erdkamp and Verboven 2015; Droß-Krüpe et al. 2016; Wilson and Bowman 2018. 15. See Noreña 2022: 530, for remarks on how this “mildly developmental” interpretation of the Roman economy, found both in New Institutional Economics (NIE) oriented studies of the economy as well as the Oxford Roman Economy Project, can be traced to the quantitative modeling of Keith Hopkins. Cf. Bowman and Wilson 2009: 11–12: “The overarching aim here, then, is a series of studies which will suggest how we might identify major structural features, behaviour, and performance of the Mediterranean economy over 450 years of Roman domination, which can be compared with other periods and areas, by collecting and analysing quantiable documentary and archaeological evidence for key areas and economic activities.” While the authors pronounce their skepticism of the NIE approaches prominent in CEHGRW, they nevertheless share the general acceptance of quantication and analysis of large datasets as their preferred method of inquiry. It is striking that in Wilson and Bowman 2018, their focus is principally on the State institutions that set the parameters for long-distance trade in the Roman empire. 16. See Bowes 2021a for an extensive bibliography. 17. Bowes 2021a. 18. Bourdieu 1977; De Certeau 1984; Raud 2016; Lundgreen 2017. 19. Grey 2011; Bryen 2013. 20. Hawkins 2016; Venticinque 2016; Bowes 2021b; Courrier and Magalhães de Oliveira 2022; Sancinito 2024. 21. See also Kearey 2018 on this problem. 22. Here we have been inspired by theories of the job description as articulated in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. On this, see Brannick et al. 2007. Recent attempts, for example, Stewart et al. 2020, to identify and label “professions” as opposed to “occupations” have encountered the same issues of denition that have long plagued historians of ancient labor. We do not deign to assume that such neat distinctions are either possible to make or heuristically valuable. 23. Joshel 1992; Veyne 2000; Verboven and Laes 2017. 24. Lerouxel and Zurbach 2020. 25. On wage labor in Roman Egypt, see most recently Freu 2022 and Bernard 2023. See Bowes 2021c for a discussion of ve grafti lists from Pompeii, with relevant bibliography. 26. Verboven and Laes 2017; Hochscheid and Russell 2021; Flohr and Bowes 2024. 27. Rufng 2008; Stewart et al. 2020; Monteix and Tran 2020. 1 STRUCTURING SUBJECTS: WEAVING THE WEB OF WORK/LIFE 19 28. Droß-Krüpe 2011; Flohr 2013; Bond 2016; Wilson and Flohr 2016; Flohr and Wilson 2017; Wagner-Hasel and Nosch 2019; Flohr 2020; GroenVallinga 2022; Murphy Forthcoming. 29. Geue 2018. 30. Vanhaegendoren 2007; Marcone 2016. 31. Reay 2005; Howley Forthcoming. 32. Mayer 2014. Collins et al. 2009 demonstrates the complexity of the economic lives of the “poor” in modern India, Bangladesh, and Africa. 33. Esp. Thompson 1963: 9, referencing Marx’s dialectic of historical materialism as rst articulated in The German Ideology and the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Cf. Hobsbawm 1998. 34. Courrier and Magalhães de Oliveira 2022: 15. 35. Thompson 1993: 467–538. 36. Howley Forthcoming. 37. We are grateful for the contributions of Astrid Van Oyen, who spoke during the workshop and moderated a panel at the conference. 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