Introduction

Working people constituted the vast majority of the population in the Roman world and as such they have largely been neglected by ancient writers and modern scholarship alike until quite recently. The relative invisibility of working groups is one of several biases in ancient sources, another is the lesser grade of visibility for women compared to that of men. The relative invisibility of Roman women was pointed out by Moses Finley in a paper already in 1965 (‘The Silent Women of Rome’). This is especially true for female workers where a gender discrepancy is clearly demonstrated in the documentation of male and female work. In spite of a rich body of evidence of Roman job titles, comprising thousands of epigraphic instances, relatively few female jobs occur there: the evidence more clearly documents male work and occupations. The sources, however, display some shades of female invisibility based on agents such as geography and social class.

Information about Roman jobs comes mostly from the epigraphy of urban contexts which in turn has formed the basis for several studies in modern scholarship concerning Roman occupations, work organisation, and professional identities in primarily urban centres.