Jane Sancinito, PhD

The Reputation of the Roman Merchant

Entrepreneur is a dirty word, at least if you are an ancient Roman. A broad brush, wielded by slave-owning elites, was used to paint freed and freeborn artisans, retailers, and service providers as a grubby, greedy underclass who threatened the moral fabric of Roman society. Without state or public support, merchants struggled to run their businesses under these conditions and found themselves marginalized, often through no fault of their own. This presentation will explore the strategies that ancient workers developed to get by and get ahead in the Roman world, and argues that the methods they employed to build and maintain personal reputations were among the most useful, not only for themselves, but also to make the Roman economy more legible and functional over time.