YouSaid · the spoken record

Kim Bowes

lines on the record: 82
first: 2026-04-15
most recent: 2026-04-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Our lifetime will once again be safe. So, this is an aspirational trip. Last place that I would send them, again, on the theme of empire and ordinary life is the extraordinary town of Duriopus, excavated by Yale University. In fact, your tourist could stop briefly at the Yale Art Museum to see some things the Mithraum, the Christian Church that were excavated by Yale University in Durham and brought back to New Haven. Duri Europus was another frontier garrison town on the Euphrates and preserved for us because it was sacked by Rome's greatest, one of their greatest enemies, the Parthians, in the late 3rd century, and preserved a whole town with all of its religious diversity and ethnic diversity, including the ordinary lives of merchants who penned their graffiti accounts on the wall to people's daily meals and this extraordinary succession of religious buildings with which we began this conversation, a Christian church, a Jewish.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's stick with our theme of trying to understand empire as empire while also understanding ordinary people. Yeah, sure. Let's go to split and see the great palace of Diocletian, which is now home to some beautiful cafes and restaurants and gift shops right inside the great courtyard where Diocletian would have greeted you if you were lucky enough to obtain an audience. And this is an amazing palace, right? Because it's a testament to an emperor who said, I am stepping down, right? I said I was in here for a limited amount of time. I observe my term limits. First and only time in the history of the Roman Empire and most empires in which a leader has said this, and I am going to retire and retire, he did, and retired to this extraordinary palace slash military garrison on the coast of Croatia. And then, okay, let's assume that your traveler is able to cross military lines and go to some places that maybe, let's hope within a”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think I would start them off at Hadrian's Hadrian's wall is extraordinary for a whole bunch of reasons, as one of the few places the Romans actually built a border. It's a kind of extraordinary statement of empire. And this amazing archaeological site at Vindalanda, which is actually run by a family and excavated by a family, is just such an eye-opener to see how ordinary people, soldiers, very often most of whom of course are not Italian, right? They're recruited from Gaul, they're recruited from all over the place, right? are living up at literally for what was for them the end of the world and you can see everything from their shoes to their pieces of their clothing to their very grubby daily lives so you go first i think to there you're going to skip the heart of the empire are you your person is sick of italy and sick of rome so i guess”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of the law and because of the way in which, again, responses to sort of foreign predation of Greek antiquities produced a set of structures which one has to work within. And those don't exist necessarily in Tunisia. And there's amazing Tunisian colleagues with whom one can partner and develop projects that are of interest to both parties. As far as archaeology is concerned, there is no such thing as the EU. You really are operating at the level of the nation-state. And inside some of those nations like Spain, you're really working at the level of the province, and that's your partner, right? That's the person or the entity with which it's either difficult or easy to work. So it really varies all over the place.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excavation is challenging everywhere, right? And for reasons that in many cases are correct, right? These are countries that have experience of foreign archaeologists coming in and taking stuff and leaving with it and leaving them with nothing. And they're quite keen, understandably, to prevent that from happening in the future. I don't know that it's harder to dig in Tunisia than it is in Greece. It's really hard to dig in Greece.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be because of the papyri. The second place that's going to change the way we think about the Roman world or the ancient economy generally is all of the new excavations that are going on in advance of modern construction. And once Italy and Spain and Southern Europe start to have the same rules and laws that basically make partners of development and archaeology, we're going to have huge amounts of data from those places as well. And so it's really modern construction and the archaeology that goes on around modern construction that's transformed our knowledge about, say, Roman demographics or Roman farming or any of these other activities that make up the heart of the Roman economy. A lot of that material hasn't been studied. It's all out there. So that's where I send them.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasingly, actually, I've been sending since you asked about papyri, I send them to the papyri. So these amazing efforts by colleagues who work on papyri have increasingly put huge swaths of what amount to the economic records of the ancient world online, papyri.info. Any of your listeners can go and look it up. There are thousands of papyri that have not been either published or analyzed or really made use of in the ways that we now can do now that they're so available to us. And those papyri, although they only relate to Roman Egypt, or mostly, so a tiny corner of the Roman world, it was, arguably, right, the breadbasket of the Roman world, one of its most important economic regions, and they have so much to teach us. And 20 years' time, I think we're going to think completely different things about the Roman economy. And that's going to”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a world that while bigger in scale than most worlds before the 19th century still operates very much at that level of friends and family. And that was, yeah, that was the small business small world that I grew up in.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think I understand what it means to live in small communities, and most Romans lived in small communities. I didn't grow up in a city. Most Romans, despite the fact that we now know a lot more than we thought lived in cities, most Romans still didn't live in cities. I think the thing that made the biggest difference to me, though, Tyler, is that I grew up in a small family business. And most businesses in the Roman world were small family businesses. And that gave me an interest and experience in the multitude of things that have to happen for a small family business to work. The Roman world, as I keep emphasizing, right, is a world of friends and family.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having missed Pittsburgh, and you know, 20 years ago, we figured this out. So there's so much to discover. Think about it. For Italy, the number of farms. This is the majority of the economy is smallholder farmers. How many farms are we excavated? Ten, fifteen? That's amazing. So much left to discover”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so much Oh, it's amazing how much there is to discover. I'll give you an example So how in the world did they build Rome? Well Rome is not only a city of marble as Augustus claimed to have left it, but it is above all a city of brick Where did those bricks come from? We used to think the bricks were made right there in the city of Rome and some brilliant colleagues of mine figured out that in fact that's not the case that the Romans could never have made all the bricks that built Rome right in the city of Rome because they'd already cut down all the forests. So they had to keep moving farther and farther outside of Rome in order to actually make the very fabric that the city was made from and we didn't know this until 20 years ago and only recently have we actually found this massive industrial belt of brick factories going up and down the Tiber Valley probably eighty to one hundred kilometers away from Rome. That's a kind of big thing to have missed.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to hold the pick, my favorite instrument as much as possible, although I am very often don't get to do that. Our excavation is a lot, I imagine, like going to war or making a movie. Any of these activities that involve huge disparate activities that all have to be choreographed in order for the thing to get pulled off. And so that means everything from organizing porta potties to food, to working with local landowners and local government to actually swinging the pick myself. And my favorite piece is swinging the pick, but very often I have to do all those other things as well. And the projects that I do, my favorite part, even more than swinging the pick, is actually getting to work with local farmers and local landowners who are our partners in doing archaeology. It's their land. They're the inheritors, if you like, of the Romans who used to live on their land. And they are oftentimes our greatest source of information about how that land.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes I'm being very flip, and I say, I dig up dead people's garbage, which isn't untrue, but because that's what we do. But if you're asking, what do you do on a dig?”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Landscape archaeology is using mostly non-excavation methods, so picking up ceramics on the surface of the ground, using new technologies like geophysics or aerial photography are now drones to examine whole landscapes rather than individual sites, most often in what we call non-invasive methods, that is to say not digging. And so the goal of landscape archaeology is to actually understand large swaths of mostly the countryside and its changes over time, rather than cities on the one hand and individual sites on the other.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is high, why those population numbers then would have stayed low is something that I still have to figure out. But if you want my early forecast inflation and population, those are the two culprits behind what happened to the Roman Empire.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think it's plague. I think plague is working on a population that's already declining. Or rather, it's not the plague that we think. The just Indianic plague is too late. That ship is sailed by the mid sixth century to mid-6th century when the Justinianic plague gets going. But of course, remember, there's at least two other major plagues that we know about and probably a whole bunch of ones that we don't, which if you think about it, and I'm right that the population is unusually high, are in an inevitability, right? In a world which, circling bacteria question about sanitation, in a world which is hyper dense, hyper-urbanized, and yet still never really managed to solve the urban sanitation problem, endemic disease of cities, cholera, dysentery, all the real killers are really important and very high. The possibility for a bigger event to cause a demographic shock.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this has an enormous set of knock on effects for the state and its ability to collect taxes, but also for that cycle of consumption and production that works at a kind of local level. It just, it falls apart. It worked when population was high and dense, and then it failed to work when that population emptied out, particularly in the countryside.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to give you an answer to how many people lived in the Roman Empire, but I can tell you that an awful lot fewer people lived in, say, the 5th century. And population decline sets in in Roman Italy almost certainly even by the late 2nd century. So maybe even, you know, it's already starting under the reign of Hadrian. And this isn't true across the empire as a whole and population numbers are radically different, say, in Britain versus Italy versus Egypt. But it's clear that the population declines. And in some cases it declines precipitously and stays low.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I am writing a sequel to the book that you had in your hand a minute ago on exactly this question, or maybe not the question of why Rome declined, but what it was like to live through those years, those centuries of, if not decline, then complete transformation. I think that I will propose ultimately a really different answer than the one that's been proposed before that is obviously an economic answer. And it has to do with the state as well and its ability to collect taxes, but it also has to do with the synergy between ordinary people's consumption and production and the ability of that state to survive. They both needed each other. And ultimately, a whole series of things happened that broke that feedback loop. One of those things, I think, has to be, this is what I'm puzzled by you ask me about that previously. So I said money. The second thing I'm really puzzled by is demographics.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. I was getting to the second part of my answer. There's been a great work, right, over the years done on Carthage. We believed the Romans when they said they destroyed it. And we believe the Romans when they said that they had eradicated those nasty Carthaginians. And we didn't care. And now I think we're realizing how important the Carthaginians were and how important the sort of whole Punic-speaking world was. And now we're going to go back and find them. It's great.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true, but you're asking the wrong person do I think that we should be putting all of our limited amounts of academic treasure into a new book of Aristotle or revealing the lives of the 90%? I'll back the 90% any day. And we don't have to do any more digging to find them, right? Because they've been excavated. We just have to study the stuff we have.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, frankly, not very much, actually. I'm a little perplexed about this project, not least because it seems as though many of these works we have, some of them will doubtlessly be new. But obviously I'd prefer we spent more time on the millions and millions of papyri that exist in museum collections and libraries around the world that haven't yet been published, which relate to the activities of ordinary Romans rather than spending millions and hopefully not undertaking unnecessary excavations for a few admittedly very sexy, but ultimately I think not game-changing papyri in that villa.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the real issue that I'm asking is about the walking rather than the sailing, which is certainly what they would have done rather than walk. Romans never walk anywhere unless they, if they can take a boat because it's obviously much quicker and faster to sail.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, it's not only the monetary value, but the scale of our relationship with China that makes us think. I think the Roman trade with the East, it certainly wasn't around basic staple commodities in the way that it is today.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do they have China envy? Not that we can tell. They certainly have contact with China, but through lots of middlemen, if you like, and increasingly we can see and understand the scale of the contact that they had with India and the Indian subcontinent. In fact, some of the real maximalist estimates for Roman trade look at some numbers that come out of trade with the Far East, with certain kinds of commodities like peppercorns, which the Romans were very fond of. And in fact, we can now see ordinary people using peppercorns, at least occasionally, if they lived in a city. Those they had to get from the east, certain things like that we imagine like ivory and other kinds of commodities that can only be found in the east. And the value of those is extremely high, even if the scale quantities of that movement are probably pretty low. So today,”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, of course, the Romans beat the Ptolemaic kings and take over Egypt for their own. And they certainly regard themselves as the inheritor of Greek knowledge. But I don't know that they would look at it in terms of envy any more than they do any other Greek things, right? They understand that the Greeks are their superior and all branches, all kinds of branches of not only knowledge, but art and the sort of, if you like, the art of living. And they acknowledge their debt to that. Given their sort of seamless integration of many of these, if you like, technologies, I think they see it as their due.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we don't see that yet. I can only think of a handful of examples where we can see small farms with water power. At agriculture is the biggest industry. They make their looms really big. So textile manufacturing is the biggest industry after agriculture. Their looms get bigger. Do they really change textile manufacturing? They don't have or invent the spinning wheel, as far as we can tell. That was a game changer. I'm a maximalist, if you like, on the matter of scale, but it still bothers me that there isn't the trickle-down effect into ordinary people's economic lives that we see, say, beginning in the 18th century in Northern Europe.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think what the sort of maximalists of Roman technology would argue is that the Romans didn't invent too much that hadn't already been, at least in the works, in the Greek world. What they did was make it bigger and increase the size of everything from all kinds of water-powered devices, which is mostly what we credit them with, to the expansion of the use of mortar and inventing mortar that set underwater, which is a huge innovation, so that the Romans are not so much inventors as they are giganticizers. They make everything bigger and they expand the scale. Now, what I wish I could see more of, but still don't see, is ordinary people having access to this technology. We still can't see water wheels, for instance, being used on sort of small farms. That would be a game changer to my mind.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I come from a part of the world where we long had ice houses. So this is not an insurmountable problem. But if you want to know what I think they did, so first of all, this has got to be a seasonal dish that is not made in August. But the other, the whole point of including the snow is to show you could pull it off, right? That you could somehow roll up in lowland Italy with some snow and astonish your guests. Even if that meant sending your slaves, since you asked about them, right, off to the nearest snow and make them bring it back in almost certainly they are using clay and other kinds of ceramics as insulation, actually there's some from Pompeii, there's some wonderful preserved eggs, which they've figured out how to preserve by encasing them all in clay. It's kind of refrigeration device.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Presumably, these are recipes that are designed to be made in various elite households that are actually bringing in snow from the Alps, the nearest mountains, and somehow preserving it.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some medieval cooking is the same exactly. Yeah. And continues to be some North African cooking is the same. So there are culinary traditions that continue that mix these two things. But yeah, I mean, of course, then the Romans famously included ingredients that we do mice and things like this that we don't eat today.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's okay to me. That's really okay. So go dig out the book, the recipe book of Apicius, and you can go make his various mixed dishes, which really contain some of the most astonishing variety of ingredients. In particular, this mixture of the savory and the super sweet, which I think we would find hard to take.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was just looking at some TikTok videos of someone who's done exactly that and really done a brilliant job, actually. They don't taste like what we think of as tasting good because, again, this is the leitmotif of this conversation, Tyler. It's a completely different culinary world. It combines flavors that we just don't think belong together, like oysters and eggs and honey.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If by standards of living you mean access to consumer goods, yes. And you can run some math on, you know, this is quite fun thing to do, actually. How many different kinds of dishes did an ordinary person in say 17th century England have versus how many different kinds of dishes did the same sort of ordinary person, Roman person have? And the Roman person had more different kinds of dishes of more different shapes and sizes and materials than the English person.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or three tunics and two or three cloaks, and a whole range of undergarments and socks, and a whole bunch of other things. And they were colorful, even poor people had clothes that were, you know, purple stripes and yellow stripes and all kinds of different patterns. So I think we would be surprised, actually, at how colorful and well-dressed and variegated people's clothing were and their shoes. They had the most extraordinarily elaborate shoes anyone of your listeners who has a trip to England planned go to Vindalanda on Hadrian's wallop in the north and look at the collection of Roman shoes. Extraordinary, different styles for men, women, and children. This is the frontier of the consuming society.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we used to think that everyone just made their own clothes, sort of little house in the prairie style. And now we know that's not true from some new archaeology. We can see standardized weaving. We can see people, even really poor people getting clothes from actually quite a long distance away. So you would probably get your clothes if you lived in a rural village from whoever the local weaver is. If you lived in a city, you might get your clothes. If you lived in Rome, I bet your clothes might even come from sheep in Gaul, which are then woven either in Gaul or somewhere in between and shipped to the capital. So you're probably not making your own clothes, which was a surprise to all of us, I think. And you're wearing and keeping and having a lot more clothes than we ever thought. We have some great since you asked before about Jewish households. We have some great Jewish evidence for what constitutes the absolute bare minimum of clothes that anyone needs to have. And we used to think it was a tunic, and that was it. It turns out to be at least two.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is largely a privatized affair, and it depends on the web of commerce that is happening more generally, rather than the other way around, although there's a kind of reciprocity of, if you like, private commerce and state commerce. And so insofar as the Roman state really needs people to be exchanging goods in order for it to do the work of collecting its taxes, this consuming world actually helps float the whole boat up. So that's one of the things that I think held it together.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are paying taxes. So taxation is one of the things that holds the whole thing together. If only as the stick and not the carrot. I think the carrot that holds it altogether strangely is consumption. That it's a consumer economy there's massive amounts of consumption, and on the one hand that binds people together because people are participating in a shared consumer universe. But economically, it produces a whole set of knock-on effects that begin locally and expand out it to a much broader extent, that raise consumption levels really high, which allows this tax apparatus to keep chugging along, and when they both collapse, they collapse together. In other words, when we can't see people consuming anymore, we suspect they're no longer paying their taxes. It's an interesting world from that perspective. And the state and its ability to collect taxes also relies, going back to a previous question you asked me, on these non-state networks of friends, of family, of business networks, you know, the Romans.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't think they cared about the Empire. I don't think they paid attention at all. I think there's a set of glues that held the whole thing together. And some of them are the ones we knew about, and some of them are ones that I happen to think were glue.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have no idea what it was in the 19th century. So you're not going to get to me, you're not going to get me to commit to a number. I'm just going to say that it was high”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It used to be that we thought that I don't know, 20 million was high. I don't think that's high. I think it's as high. I'm not going to give you a number. It's as high as it was in most parts of the Mediterranean until the 19th century, maybe in some places a little bit earlier than that. population really gets higher than that. But basically we're looking at potentially early 19th century population levels. In that kind of a world, if the majority of that population is free, awfully, that's an awful lot of cheap labor. That's an awful lot of cheap child labor.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to give you an unsatisfactory answer to this question, which I haven't thought about enough. Of the things that intrigued me most is the population of the Roman Empire, the free population, or just the population generally, if you like. It's crazy high. It's way higher than I think we thought.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other places we used to think that slavery was profitable were in industries that were too dangerous or too unpleasant to be able to recruit free labor. But we now know, and those are the mines, right, we now know the mines were worked, oh, we don't have the numbers, but we know that there are free people and slaves working side by side in the mines, and that recruiting people to work in the mines seemingly, I'm not going to say it wasn't difficult because the wages that are being paid to free workers and the mines are much higher than wages that are being paid in sort of unskilled agriculture right nearby. But they can. They're doing it. They're going quite far afield, though, to get those people, right? If you look at the mines in Egypt, they're getting people from Syria, from all parts of the east, not just from Egypt, in order to work in those mines. But they are able to do that.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some industries, it's clearly profitable. And Romans, I think what's interesting, they debate what those industries are. Some of them would say certain kinds of agriculture only are profitable using slaves and otherwise don't bother because the rate of return, either the rate of return is too low, or, and this is what really matters, agriculture is seasonal, a slave is not seasonal, right? You have to feed and clothe and support a slave for 24-7. And so those two things combined are the equation around whether slavery is profitable or not.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, that's right. It's true. And there are a lot of historical examples with which I should familiarize myself more of people really sticking with coinage even in the face of its great inconvenience because barter is even more inconvenient. Now that being said, Tyler, in early medieval Europe, we have a really hard time finding daily use of coins. So they probably do abandon most coin use on a day-to-day basis except for really high value exchanges. probably does happen. In the Eastern Empire, they continue to use now a gold and a bronze currency, you know, for a thousand years. And I suppose it's for the reasons you describe because the alternative is simply too awkward.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carry around in huge sack loads in order to buy anything, but they still use it. Ordinary people still use it. In other words, there's a lingering faith in the state's ability to produce money. And ordinary people, despite the inconvenience, still find it more convenient to carry around these sacked coins than to be like the hell with this. We're just going to go for barter, which they probably do in increasing quantities, but they still stick with coins. And those coins remain the basis of what will become the Byzantine economy for a thousand years. I don't get it. Why aren't they just bail on coins altogether? Why didn't coins just go away? They don't know.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I said that Romans basically trusted the state to produce money that had value, even in the demonstrable face of its opposite, namely that the Roman state was also pulling silver out of their coinage. And at some point, after the period that I talk about in my book in the later third century, they seemed to stop trusting the state. And there is massive inflation. And that inflation comes in waves over a period of a century through the fourth century. This is inflation like, you know, real inflation, right? A thousand percent inflation. And somehow, they continue to use money throughout this period. They shift to a gold coinage, right? The silver coinage is ultimately abandoned, in part because the state can't support it because it doesn't have enough silver. But ordinary people continue to use money and they even continue to use bronze, which has really lost all its value and is you really have to.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, that's a really good question. I'm currently really puzzled about how Roman money worked. If I can go back to an earlier question to ask.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. They can. That's true. In a way, the debate about these issues is, I think, probably ancient historians' discomfort with the idea of the modern notion of futures as applied to an ancient world.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this person really thinking in a future sort of way? Or do they just not have the money to pay the lease on their sheep? And so they're selling the sheep's wool in anticipation to get the money in advance, which is simply basically a loan. It's hard to know which of these is really.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source