The Labor Market of the Early Roman Empire

In our last and final stop in Rome, we have visited just about every tourist attraction in only two days so far. Today, we took a “casual” bike ride along the Ancient Appian Way. I say it was casual only tentatively, because we spent about 75% of the ride trying to avoid being hit by any cars. Nonetheless, once we got to a point where cars were no longer allowed to drive, we took a look at some of the tombs and funerary monuments of early Roman slaves who had been freed and we got to see some really beautiful scenery while biking along an ancient road. I found it to be very interesting to get to take a look at how some of the monuments of slaves were positioned right by huge monuments of people who held really important positions in society.

Ancient Rome was a slave society – one of only five in recorded history. Some scholars like to argue that a proper labor market, in the modern sense, did not exist before the industrial revolution and that ancient economies were not necessarily market economies but rather an alternate form of organization. However, a functioning labor market can only exist if the following two conditions are fulfilled: 1) workers must be free to change their economic activities or location and, 2) they must be paid something with their labor productivity. Based on these conditions, slaves in the American South were not considered a part of the labor market because their activities and incomes were so restricted but slaves in the Roman Empire were not subject to the same conditions.

Roman slavery was very different from modern slavery because they were allowed to participate in the labor market at free laborers, and they were even given the opportunity to move locations or economic activities. In the Roman labor market, some work was done under slavery, some done for wages, and some workers even earned long-term salaries. Wage dispersion in the Roman Empire was very similar to that of pre-industrial Europe, which seems very interesting due to the fact that slavery was such a prevalent force in the labor market. One important thing to note is that members of the Roman army did not affect the trends of the labor market even though they participated in some smaller jobs such as construction because they were stationed at the frontiers. Also in a functioning labor market, wages increase as the number of workers decrease and studies have shown that in the early Roman Empire, this statement was certainly true when the plague hit and put many people out of work. In summation, there is plenty of evidence to suggest the presence of a functioning labor market in Ancient Rome and as students of an economics course, the Ancient Appian Way is a very fascinating tourist destination because it suggests the importance of slaves to the labor market of the early Roman Empire.