By Minyi Jiang
Migrant workers have been filling gaps in the economy and industries as far back as in the fifth century B.C. in ancient Rome, said UCLA ancient history professor Greg Woolf at a recent event hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Classics and History departments and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
The lecture, titled “The Ripening Cities,” was the second in the sequence of Woolf’s Sather lecture series on The Rhythms of Rome. A city of 3,000 to 5,000 people – which we think of as a village or town - was considered a huge megalopolis in the ancient world, he said.
UCLA Professor Greg Woolf giving a lecture on migrant workers and seasonal labor in ancient Roman cities at a recent UCSB Classics department event.
“Seasonal workers constituted a very special group of migrants, because they were moving back and forth between two or more locations over the course of a year,” Woolf said. By contrast, enslaved people, who constituted a high proportion of the population of large river cities, rarely traveled. “They moved once in their lives, from the point of origin to the point where they were used,” he said.
“The kind of jobs done by seasonal workers are the jobs that don’t exist throughout the year, and the kind of jobs done by enslaved people are jobs that are always there,” he said. “And by large, that logic drives the way the ancient economy mobilizes its labor.”
When seasonal workers arrived in the city, they worked in various industries. “There was a high seasonal demand for unskilled labor in the city,” Woolf said, adding that the construction industry was very profitable and demanded massive labor.
“In the fifth century, the scale of the work needed to build monuments and ensure other things in Rome was quite different,” he said. “Public building took place most in the summer months, maybe until October, where longer days and dry conditions made it easier to most materials.”
In the meantime, seasonal workers arrived in the city because of the additional demand for labor from April to October when cargo arrived from overseas, and this was likely a result of ancient people following the sailing season, Woolf said.
In fact, ancient city activities were linked to the agricultural cycle and other natural cycles of the year, he said. “So you farm, you build, you farm, you build.” Other natural cycles, such as the sailing season, also had great impact on people’s activities.
“The sailing season, for example, begins long before the grain is harvested, and ends before new wine is processed,” he said. “So you can’t simply produce your stuff, put it on boats, send it off. There are long stoppages, so it’s a bumpy production system where stuff has to be stored, waiting months before it’s safe to be shipped.”
That supply chain gap was unlikely to have been solved by slave labor, because employing enough slaves for the periods of maximum demand meant many would be idle for the rest of the year, Woolf said. “Free casual laborers – many of them seasonal migrants – took up the slack, in the city and in the countryside.”
Minyi Jiang is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Middle East Studies and pursuing a minor in Professional Writing. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.