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Strikes and unions may seem like modern inventions, but they've existed for much longer than many of us realise.
In this episode of the History Extra podcast, historian Sarah E Bond talks to John Borkham about how people in ancient Rome challenged authority and withheld their labour from disgruntled mint workers to rebellious charioteers.
We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Strike – Labour Unions and Resistance in the Roman Empire, and it came out earlier this year.
Now, Sarah, firstly, let's focus on some of those words in the title.
So we've got strike, we've got unions, we've got resistance.
Some people might say that those feel a little anachronistic when we're talking about ancient Rome.
But that's a strategic decision, isn't it?
It was, and certainly it was something that we debated and thought a lot about beforehand.
We just didn't do it idly.
But as I say in the first page of the book, we recognised that in 1768 is really when the word strike begins to develop out of the UK and that there is a huge striking down of the top sails on ships within the port of Sunderland and that when the sailors there get what they ask for,
After they strike down the topsails and keep the ships from leaving, that this action spreads throughout England at the time and that sailors on the Thames also begin to do it.
But it represents an action that, as this book argues, goes on all the way back to the second millennium BCE.
And so, even if these words were not familiar to those within the ancient world and were not used, that they are still methodologies within labor disputes that have been happening for thousands of years.
And so I think one thing that can trip people up about history in general is they may not know Latin, and they may not know Greek, or they may not know many of the languages that they are reading about.
But using a unifying vocabulary where people understand the method is important in comparative history whether or not this word actually existed in Latin.
And so yes, there are a lot of cross comparisons within the book, even though we recognize that strike is something that was not coined as a word until the 18th century.
That's a brilliant summary.
Thanks, Sarah.
And yeah, as you mentioned there, you actually start the book in ancient Egypt in the second millennium BC, during the reign of Ramesses III.
Is that right?
That's right.
That's right.
And at this time, we don't have any coinage.
That has yet been invented as a technology that's not going to come until around Asia Minor in the sixth century, although China does have precursors to coinage as well.
But they are paying workers within ancient Egypt in trade and kind.
And so we have. barley, emmer, wheat that is being used as the payment to these workers.
And Ramesses III is extremely behind on the things that he has promised to the necropolis workers at a site called Dier al-Medina.
And these are artisans and craftspeople who decide that they are going to go on strike until they get the rations and the payment that they've been promised from the pharaoh.
Yeah.
So to me, that does sound like Right.
They decide that they are going to go and sit in the back of a temple and that they are just going to refuse to work until they are given the back payments.
And Going and sitting in peaceable protest at the back of a temple or just outside of a temple is something that will become extremely common within Pharaonic Egypt, but also well into the period of the Ptolemies and beyond.
And so there begins to become a...
Knowledge that peaceably removing yourself from the workplace and going to sit in a temple which is generally protected as a sacred space where violence cannot happen,
It's something called a cilia which will later turn into what we call sanctuary or asylum that they are protecting themselves by being in the confines of the temple and simply refusing to work as a way of collectively bargaining with a higher power, that is to say the pharaoh.
So that to me very much is what we would today call a strike, even if within that time period that's not what they're referring to it as.
So Sarah, let's move on then to the early Roman Republic.
The Roman Republic traditionally, is founded in 509 BC, and we have the story of the plebeians.
Can you just explain who the plebeians are in this context?
Sure.
I think that we use at least in the United States we use the word plebeian to mean somebody that is poor, somebody that's impoverished, or we will shorten it to plebs oftentimes.
And we think of these as just impoverished people that are living within the Roman Empire.
But in reality, the plebeians are simply everybody who is not a patrician.
So it is a unifying category only in that all of these people are not the original families of Rome that settled when Romulus decided to start the Roman Senate.
They were all patricians, patres, which is where we get the word from.
And these were all the early families of Rome and the men served within the Senate that was established within Rome.
And they also very much dominated the magistracies, the pontifical college, which is to say all of the priests that are serving
They have the power within society, but all the plebeians are just non-patricians.
And so that means some of them become wealthy and Some of them are impoverished.
Some of them are middling artisans and people that we would today call part of the middle class.
But plebeians are not unified as a class in the same way.
We would think of it in a Marxist manner today.
They're just simply not patricians.
But the plebeians are the majority of the population and they are heavily relied upon to serve in the increasing numbers of battles and wars that Rome is fighting in order to expand from the city into the region and eventually into the Italic Peninsula.
So the plebeians are also the majority of the army that is being called upon as a citizen army to serve every single summer, increasingly.
And this means that the plebeians are oftentimes having to leave their fields, leaving the workshop, leaving the places that they are either employed or that they own, like an agricultural field, and serving in the military, as the patricians oftentimes serve as officers, kind of the officer corps and above.
And that means that the plebeians are very much the engine that drives Roman expansion today, in this early republican period.
So they're hugely important to Rome.
But how do they use their collective action to challenge elite power then?
This is a very interesting kind of development and we are told about it by a historian named Livy as well as another one named Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and we're told that a lot of this disfavor with the patricians and this dissatisfaction with this ruling group of patricians within Roman society comes because constantly, when they go off to serve in wars, they are going into debt because they are not there to bring in the crops from the field or to sell ceramics or to sell their wares.
And so they're constantly going into debt and having to pay off their debts by taking out loans.
And when they can't pay those loans back, they go into something that is called debt bondage.
And the prevalency of debt bondage is increasingly making many farmers and artisans very upset with the patricians.
And so we're told in a very evocative way, seen from around 495 BCE, that a farmer comes into the Roman Forum and he has lashes all over his back and he has been struck by his debt bonders and he is through with it.
This is the breaking point.
This is the Franz Ferdinand moment that we have the breakout of what we would call the struggle of the orders or the secessions of the plebs.
And so the first secession is a large group of plebeians.
It's probably not every single plebeian within the entirety of Rome at that time.
But they decide that collectively they are going to secede from the city and not participate in the military levy.
And so they are taking their labor, their service within the army, and they are revoking it.
And they go sit peaceably a few miles outside of the city of Rome.
And they simply use that as a bargaining chip in order to get more magistracies and representation within the Roman Republic at the time.
So that's the first secession.
And then we are told that there are between three and five of them thereafter for about the next 200 years.
Yeah.
And you mentioned there, Sarah.
You mentioned Livy, and he's writing about these events hundreds of years later.
What was significant about those events to, say, him and his contemporaries?
Well, Livy is writing at a time where the Republic is crashing down into the period of the early reign of Augustus, who is considered to be the first emperor.
He calls himself a princeps, which is where we get the word prince from.
But Livy is talking about a rise of populism in his own day, because I think that the idea that all history and really all translations that we write have a lot to do with who we are and the choices and the time periods that we're living in.
There's a lot of truth to that.
And Livy is retelling the story of early Rome with an eye to the fact that Populism and individuals who are dissatisfied with the government are an extreme constant in the past 50 years of his existence.
And so he's really grafting, I think, some of the first century BCE Rome and this discord that is, including a lot of upheaval within the forum and within Rome itself from people like Clodius, that he's grafting some of the popular upheaval that has turned violent onto the earlier Republicans saying look, they're doing it much more peaceably.
They're doing it in a way that is nonviolent.
And so he's using this literature that he's writing to be a bit didactic.
Which is what Roman historians tend to do is that they moralize and they use exempla from earlier Roman history to as a morality story for those people that are living in the present.
And so part of what Livy is doing, to my mind, is simply trying to say look, these plebeians were for the most part not always, but most times very nonviolent and seceded from the city altogether.
Whereas there is a lot of, we are told, rioting and mob violence within the streets that I think that he's trying to critique without critiquing it directly.
And if we stay within the turmoil of the late Roman Republic, then so the first century BC or BCE.
Many listeners will have heard the story of Spartacus and the Third Servile War, possibly through Hollywood.
How does that story fit into your book?
Well, I think it's important to say that Spartacus is certainly the most famous of all the leaders, but there had been three servile wars.
Two of them were in Sicily and had been started predominantly by shepherds.
Shepherds are pretty fierce people because they are constantly fighting off wolves and predators to your flock and they also have a lot of experience with weapons.
And so the first two servile wars is taking place in Sicily.
And it's very much because there is a rise of slavery that comes in the wake of Roman expansion, especially into the East.
So we have an influx of enslaved persons that are not used to being enslaved.
And the Third Servile War really is something that has captured the imagination of the modern world because of Spartacus and because he had been trained as a gladiator.
But Spartacus is really, to my mind, is drawing on a lot of the collective behaviors that Romans, Greeks and many people within the Mediterranean had been using for hundreds of years prior.
And that is, he looks to the internal structure of the gladiatorial camp, that he is within this training camp where they all bunk together, together.
And they also are separated into gladiatorial groups called familiae, where we get the word family from.
And he is saying let's take the cohesion of the familiae within this gladiatorial school and use it as a basic structure for starting a revolt and a rebellion.
And in the book, I absolutely recognize that a rebellion is very different than a strike.
Because we have a work stoppage, but there's never a desire for Spartacus and all of these thousands of his soldiers to go back and to be part of the gladiatorial arena anymore.
They're not collectively bargaining for better terms.
They want to be free and they want to have freedom.
I think it's important to see that Spartacus is using the imposed internal organization of the gladiatorial arena and the school as a way of holding together his new army.
And so a lot of people have thought of this as like, oh, it's just a militaristic structure.
And to my mind, it's simply replicating what a lot of Romans had been doing for a long time, which is banding together in small groups as a way of growing their power in larger and larger fora.
So Spartacus breaks out of his gladiatorial school.
They use kitchen knives, we're told.
They have kitchen utensils and they are able to escape in a way similar to the very famous Spartacus movie that came out in 1960, I believe.
And so that too, was a metaphor in Hollywood at the time for those people that were blacklisted from communism.
But Spartacus is also just one of the only figures that most modern people can see as someone that pushed back against Rome as a regular person, somebody who had been enslaved as a Thracian and brought back to Rome and actually was victorious.
So I think Spartacus is a wonderful story, but I think he's also drawing on a lot of collective behaviors and ideas that had preceded him within the Mediterranean.
So you mentioned the gladiator schools there.
Are there any other pre-existing organisations of that nature?
I know in the book you talk a lot about acting troops, for instance.
Right.
Well, there is not one word for all of these collectives that begin to grow after the death of Alexander the Great.
But Alexander the Great dies in 323 BCE, and we have increasing evidence that Afterwards, within the Hellenistic Mediterranean, that is to say the Eastern Mediterranean, and then increasingly within the Western Mediterranean, for people starting to come together in groups that in Latin we oftentimes call a collegium in the singular or collegia in the plural.
And this is where we get the modern word college from.
And it simply just means a collective.
And by Roman law, three or more people can form a collegium, as long as it is not against the civil law and against the public law that rules over the Mediterranean and Romans in general.
So we have a growth of collegia, but within the Eastern Mediterranean they're also called things like synodoi, where we get synod from, or ecclesiae, which we will get for churches right.
Or synagogue that are synagogues, right?
So a lot of these terms are simply describing groups of people that are coming together for religious purposes, for trade and occupational purposes.
So carpenters, people who are artisans and ceramicists and people who are cooks even in the service industry.
Increasingly, they're all forming smaller subunits.
These collegia that allow for them not only to perhaps set their prices within a local market or to come together and give each other burial insurance, but also these collegia are providing them an identity for something that is a part of their personality that they may do every day, like a job, or that they may believe in like say, mercury and commerce.
But These groups are expanding at the same time that Rome is expanding.
So, while you have a gigantic empire that's forming, we also need to remember that eventually, the Roman Mediterranean will be about 60 million people strong.
Those people are not simply identifying as Roman citizens or inhabitants of the Roman Empire.
Many of them have many other identities like we do.
They belong to clubs.
They belong to associations.
They belong to political units that also help them to define their everyday identity and their everyday life and community.
And those are really the collegia that I look at in the book and that I think Spartacus in part is very cognizant that There is power in a union.
There is power in smaller community groups that can work with force and exactitude and organization that groups of people don't just rebel.
They have to plan and they have to organize beforehand.
And the Spartacan Rebellion was extremely organized.
This is just a general question Sarah, but if the voices of the most marginalized in society are largely absent from a lot of these official histories, what kinds of sources are you using then to resurrect them?
Oh, this is a great question.
We have about 3,200 inscriptions and papyri that refer to Caligula.
And so a lot of the book is taking inspiration from a 1970s TV show called.
That is called Upstairs Downstairs, which I am sure that people in the UK are very familiar with.
It's this idea that you can look at the lives of regular, everyday people and then also have a camera on the very aristocratic, rich people and what they're doing at the same time.
And so telling only a people's history of Calagia is very difficult because we have a lot of patchwork sources that are here and there.
They're kind of the Swiss cheese of sources.
We have a lot.
A lot of lacunae, a lot of holes.
And so how do you fill in the gaps?
How do you address the fact that there are huge changes happening at the upper echelon of the Roman imperial government at the same time as you have these collegia forming from below?
And so the approach of the book is to say that, just like with HBO Rome, for instance, that you can look at the regular hoi polloi, the regular people alongside the, the people who are ruling over them in dialogue.
And so using inscriptions and papyri I'm a Roman epigrapher, which means that that's what I do is read a lot of stones, a lot of epitaphs, a lot of Roman legal contracts and a lot of things that had been put onto hard surfaces or graffiti, for instance from Pompeii, and use that to try and inform a new story that allows us to see these collegia as entities and people with identities, rather than simply just little one-off memos or vestiges that are devoid of context.
So, yeah, it's an upstairs-downstairs conversation. kind of book.
Downton Abbey is a good example of the same kind of approach as well.
I didn't expect that in this interview.
I know.
I know.
I mean, if people watch Bravo, as I do, then you've watched Below Deck, and Below Deck is the same conceit.
You've got the rich people up on the top deck and you've got the staff and regular workers below deck.
And that's what makes it so interesting is it's not just a story of the great man.
It's also a story of labor and people who are protesting that labor and then how the people from above are passing legislation to try and hinder that.
And Sarah.
That leads me on to my next question, which is I mean, let's not just talk about great men.
Let's also talk about women specifically.
And there's a really fantastic story about Hermopolis in Roman Egypt.
And something interesting happens there around AD 116, 117.
Right.
So we have a papyrus that is very brief and you have to kind of try and understand the context and fill it out.
But it's essentially a letter from a grandmother and she is writing to her daughter-in-law.
She's about to become a grandmother and because her daughter-in-law is pregnant and she's gone away from the textile family business, which is to own textile workshops.
And she's writing to her daughter-in-law, as well as her son, who they are about to welcome a baby, but she's panicking because she's been left in charge of the textile workshop.
And the young enslaved women that are working within it appear to have just left the workshop completely, in kind of a walkout to get better wages, because there are a number of textile workshops within that same street and area in Hermopolis.
And they have choices.
They have places that they can go.
And the grandmother is writing a letter freaking out because she doesn't know what to do now that these young women have walked off the job.
And they apparently are going into the streets because their wages aren't high enough.
And this is something I think that all regular people that are wage employees, as I myself am I'm on salary, but I get paid by an employer that when we feel like we are being underpaid, that there's dissatisfaction.
And these women know their worth.
And even if they aren't in a formal collegium, they're in a workshop where they talk and they discuss their own wages and their own treatment, and that they collectively decide to just leave.
And so it's not just men that are part of collectives, just like today.
It's not just men that are part of unions, that men represent a little bit more of the union percentage today, but there's almost gender parity in the modern world.
In the ancient world there's probably far more men in occupational collegiate, But women are included as well.
And they also form their own groups that may not be a formal collegium but that they still see as cohesive just like a book club or a group at your church that would come together, or at your local synagogue or mosque, that there are lots of small collectives that may not call themselves anything but still feel very cohesive.
And a story such as these, do they survive in greater numbers in places like Egypt?
Yes, the survival rate in Egypt is extremely high.
And so you have sites like Vendolanda Long Hadrian's Wall.
That has a very high preservation rate because of how wet it is.
And so anything that's like a bog or very wet is going to increase the amount of survival.
So we have hundreds, if not thousands, of shoes that come out of Vendolanda because the leather is preserved in a very kind of wet, bog-like soil of northern England, right on the edge of Scotland right.
And in Egypt it's the reverse, because their arid climate means that they have a high abundance of papyrus that they can use, but they also have preservation in the actual sand and soil in Egypt, because it's so dry that there's no breakdown of these very ephemeral surfaces.
So stone surfaces survive for sure in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean.
But papyrus is oftentimes where we find a lot of the emotion and feeling of everyday life.
Not just people dying and not just people sending letters that are important to the emperor.
But papyri really are telling us a lot of everyday life in Egypt today.
But a lot of people have said and written at this very moment.
Irene Sotomayor, who is a professor at Harvard, has a book about to come out that is talking about the fact that just because we have higher preservation in Egypt doesn't mean it's not representative of the rest of the Roman Empire.
So I am that team that believes that.
A lot of these writings and actions and activities were going on in the rest of the Mediterranean.
It's just that the preservation of the papyri that tell us about them are highest in one province, and that is Egypt.
Fantastic.
And if we do move back to Rome itself, I want to ask you about the mint workers' revolt in 271.
Why is that significant?
Well, I think it's important that there are a lot of different types of labor actions and disputes, right.
That you can have an economic strike, a general strike, you can have a lockout, you can have a boycott, you can have industrial actions.
And all of these are very technical terms that I try and not use without defining them.
And there's certainly a way of classifying labor actions today.
But a lockout is very important because you can have an employer lockout.
So Romans, for instance, constantly in Asia Minor appear to be dealing with bakers who are the owners of their own businesses, and they lock people out.
That is to say, they lock out people buying bread in order to try and get better prices, in order to be more powerful as a union in places like Asia Minor.
But for the mint workers in 271 in the city of Rome, it appears that what they're doing is a lock-in.
They are employees. to the Roman mint.
Most of them are likely enslaved, according to inscriptions that we have from the reign of Trajan, a little over 150 years earlier.
They tell us that these are enslaved persons and predominantly freed persons that have been manumitted from slavery, and they decide to lock themselves within the Roman mint.
And we're not told A ton about their demands.
But it seems that they are engaging in a rebellion in order to get perhaps, higher wages, in order to mutiny and overthrow the overseers that that are trying to control the head of the mint, who's named Philokissimus and who leads these mint workers in their rebellion.
But it eventually spills out into the city of Rome itself and leads to a lot of rioting and soldiers being brought in to fight and thousands of mint workers being slaughtered and then fired, and then new mint workers then being reorganized later by the Roman Emperor Aurelian, and those, to my mind, are simply scabs.
They've been brought in now to mobilements that are kept near to the emperor and follow him around wherever he goes, because it's too dangerous to have an extremely powerful and potent production of coinage that is happening in the city of Rome itself.
And so the emperor now begins to travel with mint workers, who are under lock and key oversight by soldiers, because the minting of coins is an incredibly important product.
And so when you see the labor disputes in the ancient world, it mirrors a lot of the successful and unsuccessful labor disputes today, and that it is oftentimes attached to things that we put a high premium on.
And in the ancient world, that is bread, and coinage and textiles oftentimes.
But today we might say that that is education, that it might be products, say that aren't exactly tangible.
But we see so many professor strikes and education strikes going on in the US and the UK right now.
And that is because these are incredibly important things to the American and English populace.
Fascinating.
And Sarah, let's move on to, I think, the 6th century.
This is during the reign of Justinian.
This was interesting to me reading this.
I wasn't really familiar with them, but you talk about the Nica riots.
Just give us a little sense of what those were and how it all unfolded.
Well, by the time that we get into the 6th century, gladiatorial competition that we talked about with Spartacus is no longer being allowed by the Christian emperors.
We are past the time period of the Edict of Thessalonica, which is in 380 CE.
And it essentially mandates everybody to become Christian.
There are loopholes and exceptions, of course, for the Jewish population.
But it is a Christian Roman Empire after 380.
And so gladiatorial combat is fully stopped in the 5th century.
And so by the time we get to the 6th century, the hottest sport is charioteering.
And it's not that the hippodrome hadn't been extremely popular before, but now it is one of the only regularized sports that people are going to about every five to six days.
They are going probably to a match within the hippodrome if they wish to.
And so within Constantinople, this is certainly the most popular sport, but it's also organized into groups that put on these entertainment displays.
Because when you go to a charioteer race, you're also going to see dancers, you're going to see pantomimes, you're going to see bear trainers, you're going to see animals.
And so the people that put on these spectacles, are the factions.
And we have the blues and the greens and the reds and the whites.
And these are the factions that race oftentimes against each other.
They're highly competitive, but they may have thousands of people within them that are also veterinarians, that are doctors, that are entertainers and actresses, and not just people who are the charioteers themselves, but certainly the charioteers are the most famous.
And most people like the blues and the greens.
And with the Nika riots, these two factions are coming to Justinian because they have had members of their faction.
So, if we think of the faction as akin to a labor union, they are going to try and free their members from being held by the imperial soldiers that Justinian oversees because there had been an execution that was botched.
And so they're trying to get their members back.
And Justinian says that he's not going to free these charioteers that have been arrested from the Blues and the Greens.
And we are told at least that violence then breaks out in Constantinople and that thousands take to the streets in order to support the Blues and Greens.
But also, pivotably, there's no racing going on at this time.
Right.
So if you think of the factions as withholding their labor, athletes are laborers.
We know this from many strikes that have happened, especially in the US with baseball.
The most famous strikes that we have in the United States are the Major League Baseball in 1992 refuses to play.
And so the factions.
When they're rioting and when they are mobilizing their members in the streets, they are not in the hippodrome, doing what they are normally supposed to do.
And many of these charioteers come from enslaved backgrounds or are people that yes, they have become more popular and perhaps more wealthy, but they come from very low class backgrounds and they're leading their factions.
So Justinian says, okay, this has been going on for a long time.
We have over 10 days of rioting.
And so a collective bargaining meeting is brought together in the Hippodrome.
And I think that the blues and the greens think that they're going to hash this out and that they're going to get better terms for their treatment and perhaps the freedom of their members.
And instead Justinian, at least we are told, under the direction of Theodora, who is his wife, who had been tied to the factions through her father, especially that she orders the doors to be locked and for everybody, all 30000 within the Hippodrome, to be slaughtered.
So the Nica riots, as Tacitus said, Romans make a desert and call it peace.
And that's exactly what Justinian does.
He allegedly kills the members of the factions and their fans that are gathered in the Hippodrome in Constantinople.
And he just puts an end to the Nika riots by killing them all.
I mean, extreme is a bit of an understatement, isn't it?
That's horrendous.
Well, I said I'd tell you about labor disputes.
I didn't say if those labor disputes were always successful.
I think that One thing about the book in general is that it's showing us methodologies that are not always successful in the ancient world, but also showing us how there are options and approaches that differ today as well, that might be much more successful in the modern economy than in the ancient one.
To conclude then, Sarah, we've talked about lots of different examples.
We've talked about the Nika riots.
We've talked about mint workers.
We've talked about women in Roman Egypt.
Why do you think overall, it is important that we look at these ancient examples now, in the 21st century?
And I don't mean in a romanticised kind of way, but in a useful, practical way.
I think comparative history allows us to understand the lives and the alterity of people from the past in ways that we might see as familiar today, when we feel as though we are impotent within our jobs whether it is as an electrician, or whether we are pipe fitters, plumbers that we can find empathy with the past.
That helps us feel better and more understood today.
And that's certainly one core reason for history in general.
But reading about labor disputes, I think that you can see that methods over time and space are something that can oftentimes be very useful to applying to our own lives.
Moving forward into the future,
And so if we think all the way back to those necropolis workers at DRL Medina and they're going and using their collective power to sit in the back of temples or just outside of them in order to bargain, we can think about our own worth as workers and the fact that Unions, and certainly states and regions that have higher rates of unionization, have also, on average, higher median incomes, as well as lower rates of inequality.
And we have to ask ourselves whether unionization and coming together as collectives gives us the power to to lower inequality and to fight for the recognition and the wages that we deserve.
And part of this book was simply saying that labor disputes are nothing new.
They are not something that are only modern.
And that understanding how power works from above to smother unions and to smother collective activity is because power has always sought A higher amount of wealth and money, and unions and communities that fight for their worth tend to take money away from the upper classes and to threaten their power.
And that's something that is timeless.
That was Sarah E. Bond speaking to John Borkham.
Sarah is currently the Erling B Jack Holtzmark Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa.
Her latest book is Strike, Labour Unions and Resistance in the Roman Empire, and four taxpaying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud.
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