Free Labour and Public Works at Rome

Abstract

Some years ago I maintained that the common people in the city of Rome had to earn much of their living in casual employment, partly for instance in the unloading and porterage of goods that arrived by sea, partly in the building trade. This hypothesis cannot be established by the accumulation of literary or epigraphic testimony, nor from archaeological material, though I shall argue later that none the less it must be accepted; however, I did adduce two texts which, I thought, did not so much confirm as illustrate the use of free labourers in building. Professor Lionel Casson, who seems to disbelieve the hypothesis altogether, has recently shown that my inference from one of these texts (Cicero, ad Atticum XIV, 3, 1) was novel and somewhat arbitrary; though I do not concede that it was necessarily incorrect, I therefore withdraw it from the debate. I might of course have cited certain other texts considered below (n. 89); there remains in any case, however, the famous passage in Suetonius, of which I took a conventional view and of which he now proposes a quite new interpretation. This seems to me impossible. Let us start by examining it, before coming to more general considerations.