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

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“That's a great question. More silver has argued that we can see Roman people essentially doing futures trading, mostly around agricultural surplus. And I argued in that book that we all can almost see the poorest of the poor. These are some mine workers in Egypt who are basically using their wages or not even their wages, their rations in a way that almost looks like futures. People could absolutely disagree with me about this and I would probably accept it. Future thinking doesn't quite look like what we would imagine it to be. Let me give you an example. We have a case of an Egyptian shepherd. He's too poor to own any sheep, but he leases his sheep. And then he sells his sheep's future wool before he sheared it, right, at a rate that's quite profitable to him.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bringing people together, which is some of the most important things that banks do, but we wouldn't quite call them a bank. I think it's another way, Tyler, in which trying to translate our modern terms on into an ancient world that doesn't quite operate the same way, but nonetheless manages to do the same things and get those things done, causes a little bit of disconnect.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my colleague Ed Cohen is really going to disagree with me about this. He's the person who's thought most carefully about banking, more in the Athenian Greek world than in the Roman world, for which, to be honest, we have quite a bit less evidence. It's very hard to find the ordinary person using banks. Now I would say it's not quite so easy to see ordinary people using Florentine banks either, right? Florentine banks we mostly find larger merchants using. And certainly we can see merchants using banks. We also see merchants using things like auction dealers and kind of entities that are functioning a little bit like banks. The important records that we have from Pompeii from the auctioneer man of affairs, Caecillius Yucundus, is a nice example of someone who isn't quite a banker in the way that you are imagining, but is facilitating monetary exchange by both lending money at mostly short term.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not such a huge distinction in a world, right, in which there's no FDIC, in which the bank isn't guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends is much less clear.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. Roman big state is really a kind of mask for an empire of friends and family. So you borrow money from friends and family and banks such as they exist are really nothing more than friends and family. So even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family. So the difference that you're making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear cut in a world in which the bank is your family or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It's not that Romans don't use banks. They do use banks. And we can see them most often wealthier Romans using banks. It's a lot harder to see the 90% using banks and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it's”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a little bit of a pun, right? The actual silver content of that coin. And so people are willing to just sort of suck it up and deal. And they keep using it. There is inflation. And inflation, we can now tell, thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the first century, the second century, the third century. But nothing like the amount, it's not proportional to the amount of silver that's being pulled out of the coins. So people basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, right, simply by supporting ordinary people's coin use that, you know, that the coins work and that they're going to back their coins, even though they're slightly pulling the silver out.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It's just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely people know that they're doing this. And what I think is most interesting and what we're all still sort of wrestling with is I mean, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognize the advantage to the Fisk to basically producing coins with less silver. And then they start to have silver problems and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins and nobody cares. That is to say, people care and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the Denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs the”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We used to think that it was a sort of ceremonial coin or a collecting coin, or it was a wealth saving coin. The amazing new work that's been done on Pompeii where we can see gold coins actually in cash boxes and collections of coins that are being used for day-to-day use, we can see gold as a coin of day-to-day use. And some colleagues of mine are doing new work statistically trying to recreate how many gold coins were circulating in the Roman Empire. And it's a lot. So gold turns out to be, I think, probably more important than we've given it credit for.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's correct. That doesn't mean that they don't have economic thinking. They just have economic thinking that doesn't look like our economic thinking. They absolutely make planning around the assumption of supply and demand. They're clearly interested in profit. But what they don't have, and I think this is wirely what you're getting at, is that they don't have an organized systematized way of thinking about economic activity that is discrete and separate from other kinds of activity and laid out as a kind of formal branch of reasoning. And this is, I think, what's thrown us for a long time. We thought, because there's no obvious Adam Smith, that they had no economic thinking at all, which isn't true, but it requires that we accept a kind of and a whole spectrum of economic thinking that looks different from our own.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have absolutely an idea of supply and demand. They understand, and you see this never laid out in those terms, but they absolutely understand that at the harvest, when there's a large supply of whatever's been harvested, the prices go down, right? They know this for sure and they respond and they make planning on the basis of this basic understanding. I think, though, what you're asking Tyler is what we don't see, what we have a harder time seeing is them making future planning around profit in a quantified way that we would understand as part and parcel of an economic thinking that involves supply and demand.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and we can identify them through the presence of some of these insignia or, you know, sarcophagi and other things that have Christian stories on them. So yes, there are. Very often if you're in the catacombs, right, right next to tombs of pagans or Jews.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definition of private, they are right because they're not an officially approved religion. And I think the thing that we ought to be asking is in this world in which Christians And yet, when we can see them archaeologically, which admittedly is rare, they are not hiding, right? Everyone knows what they're doing. All the new evidence and work on the catacombs is also suggested that the catacombs are filled with people buried, right? That people are buried in the catacombs of all different religious persuasions, and they're all buried one right next to each other. So no one is hiding their religious persuasion from one another. To the extent that these folks are practicing private religion, I think it just makes us ask what we think private means.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, right, early Christianity is entirely private because it can't be public in the sense that it is not officially approved by the Roman state. That being said, at least by the time we get to the third century, if you traveled out to the borders of the empire in Syria and went to the town of Dury Europus, you would find a thriving Christian meeting group of probably who knows, 20, 30 people who are meeting in a private house, and their rituals, from what we can tell, they are practicing baptism because they've built themselves a little baptistry. They almost certainly are reading the scriptures with each other because they have a long space seemingly for doing that and praying together. But if you walked by on the street outside, on your way to the Mithraum, which was next door, or to the Jewish synagogue, which was further down the street, all these buildings right in the same street, you would know exactly what was going on in there. So are they private? I mean, not by our definition of private, but by the Roman state.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cross is a latecomer to Christian identity. They have other ways of expressing their religious belonging. And remember the earliest cross in the Christian world isn't a cross like we think of it as a cross like this, right? It's the initials of Christ, which is a Greek chi in a row, Christos, that are set in a kind of emblem that looks like an X and a P superimposed. And that's the earliest, if you like, symbolic representation of Christianity, not the cross.”
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 altars in their homes? So a vexed and interesting question. In the beginning, I suspect not, but because they live in a world in which all religion, if it's practiced correctly, has some sort of material form, right? You don't just sit and do religion in your head in the Greco-Roman world because the Greco-Roman world, as we were just talking about a minute ago, is full of stuff. And so the second that there start to be enough Christians and they are really integrated into their communities because they are, they start to have a material piece of their religion. They might not have an altar, but they might have a lamp that has a Christian symbol on it. They have something, right, that is a direction of their worship and that is a kind of thing that expresses their religious identity. And they start to have them pretty early as far as we can tell.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are lots of questions about what kind of powers these people have, people who can levitate, people who can live for years without eating. And these weren't just Christians who claimed these powers or Jewish holy men. There were all kinds of holy men out there in the sort of marketplace of religion who claimed to have these powers. And so from a world in which mostly you would be asking, what do I need to do? I think increasingly people were starting to ask, what do I believe?”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we know that people in the Greco-Roman world who believed in the traditional pantheon of deities above all were less interested in belief and more interested in what you did, right? They were practicers. They insisted and thought it was really important to behave towards the gods in specific ways so that the gods would in turn, this is a quid pro quo backscratching world, the gods would do to them unto what they had done to the gods, right? So they would ask, I think, much less, what did you believe? That being said, by the time we get to the end of our period, right, say the third century or the fourth century, pagans live in a world in which lots of people are asking questions about belief. And they are starting to wrestle with questions about belief. And they are particularly interested in people, holy men, if you like, who seem to have special powers.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Christians to believe versus what Christian ordinary people actually believe, or two very different things. And I think that Christians for many centuries afterwards wore many hats. And when they went to church and when they picked up the pieces of the scriptures that they could read or have read to them, they would avow a belief or a set of practices probably more likely that we would identify as Christian. And then the other six days of the week, they might do things that were entirely different. And this really worried Christian bishops, that Christians weren't behaving in ways that looked sort of differently Christian. Because I think, you know, people kept on doing what they had always done.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think if you had asked that question 20, 30 years ago, we could have given you a really clear answer. They believed in supporting members of their community. They believed in the Trinity. They believed above all, and this is, I think, probably still we think this, they believed that their God had special powers vis- ⁇-vis what would happen to them after they died, that they would experience a bodily resurrection. And that was new in the world, right? The idea that you would actually come back after you died, your actual physical body. This is something that Christian God believed and had proven, right, through miracles like the raising of Lazarus in ways that were very, and really quite unfamiliar in a Greco-Roman world and even in a Jewish world. But, you know, Tyler, I think one of the big changes that we've realized as we've looked more critically at the sources over the last 20, 30, 40 years is that what bishops wanted”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what would surprise me most and many of my scholarly colleagues is how few Christians there are. We somehow think that Constantine declares his support for this religion and then boom, everyone's Christian, when in fact, of course, they're, you know, most people aren't Christian for a really long time. And since you were asking about rich people, you know, it takes a good fifty years, if not longer, for Christian rich people or for rich people to really say, okay, we're going to go along with this new religion. So I think that's one of the biggest things that would have surprised us in a post-Constantinian world is how few Christians there really are, especially when you went to the countryside. You went to the countryside. You find very few Christians at all for at least 200 years. It takes a long time for people to be convinced of what's still a new religion”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jewish homes. So, the first question you ask is how do you identify Jewish home? Not easily. And the best way you're probably going to do it is excavate houses in places that we know are majority Jewish populations. Now, there is one thing that you might use in such But there's a lot of controversy about how you differentiate one of these ritual baths versus, say, a bath in general or some sort of foot pool or whatever. Jewish houses, I would say, are distinguished mostly by the presence or absence of one of those ritual baths. And again, if you're a poor working Jewish family, you probably don't have one of those anyway. Other than that, they're pretty much indistinguishable, as far as we can tell.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bit of a controversy, really. For the most part, no, they don't have zoning. And elite houses and the houses of the 90% all rub, keep cheek by jowl up against one another in these cities. What there are are places that have more public type buildings than private type buildings. You have to remember, too, Tyler, that the only city that we've excavated enough of to even remotely begin to answer these questions is Pompeii and to a lesser extent Herculaneum and maybe a handful of other places. I'm trying to answer your questions on the basis of not very good data. But in general, from what we can tell, not a lot of zoning.”
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, I just don't get it though. I mean, there's so much protein, they're little, you can stick them in a small space. Anyway, Romans are amazing under eaters of chicken in ways we don't understand. Strangely, not so much in the cat universe, more dogs than cats. In fact, very few cats do we find.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they kept animals in, if we're talking about elite homes in the city, this is something that we're starting to learn about, how much urban agriculture there is. So people might keep small animals. Pigs are good. Chickens, strangely, they don't eat chickens as much as you think they would.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, they have dogs. And, of course, famously, both from actual images and from the famous story of the visit to this Friedman Tromalkio and his dinner party, you might even be greeted by an image of a dog instead of an actual dog that says, literally in Latin kawikanem, beware of the dog. So you would have dogs and you would have fake dogs.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, of course, Indian cities are moving very quickly to clean up their hygiene. You're absolutely holding your noses. And this is, I think, what's really interesting about the Roman world. On the one hand, it has some of the most advanced, and they put so much energy and treasure into things like public infrastructure, like sewers and drains. At the same time, right, these are incredibly dense, unprecedentedly dense spaces. And so getting on top of the poop problem is a kind of insurmountable problem. So a visitor, any of your listeners goes to Pompeii, you will notice that there are stepping stones to get across the street. And this is to keep you out of all of the refuse in the street. And this is a city that has really good public sanitation. It's just not quite good enough.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in a city that has a robust public water work system, like we now know Pompeii had, you can go out and check that stuff in the drain. But those cities that didn't have them, and I think were amazingly ill informed about this really critical question, then it just winds up in the street.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So pots, Romans are great users of pots for that sort of activity. Of course, there are public latrines that you could go out and use. But even those are not present in an awful lot of cities as far as we can tell. And, you know, of course, they call these public latrines after the Roman Emperor who started to charge for using them, if you can imagine naming public latrines after any of our American presidents.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just have to get there somehow. And you know what? People use, they use other humans, right? That's how you navigate your way around an ancient city is you ask people. And of course, ancient cities are a lot smaller than our own city. So the chances are moving around in a city, you know people. Rome is the largest city potentially on the planet at the time at a million people. And most Roman cities, right, are probably 2,000, 3,000 people. nothing for us more than a large village. So you find your way around by using other humans.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what they're built for. They're built for business. I think that's another thing that would surprise us most about this world is the idea of going off to work is entirely a, you know, probably a 19th century idea. And prior to that, for all of human history, work was in the space of the home. And the Roman house, particularly the Roman elite house, is a machine for the production of social status. And that status meant a space to do deals, to meet your clients, to show off things that we would never dream of showing off, right? Members of our family, the most intimate aspects of our daily lives, all of that is literally built into the fabric of a Roman house.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's another thing that might surprise us, right? We would see that decoration as somehow being special and fenced off because that's the way we manage decoration in our own spaces, but not in that world because everything is sort of encrusted with some sort of decoration. Everything is used in ways that I think would really surprise us too.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you would find surprising the extraordinary amount of color and decoration that surrounds you. I mean, every single surface of that house would have been covered in some sort of decoration in ways I think we would have found garish. We would be astounded by how kitschy those houses were to our modern eye.”
2026-04-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source