men whose activities were indicated earlier. Since it was usual for a craftsman to market his own products in a shop attached to the premises, there would be no need
to separate sharply the means of production and of exchange, though it might be necessary to distinguish those people who, like porters, teachers, entertainers, and
prostitutes, provided a service for a fee, and whose only asset might lie in physical strength or adroitness, intelligence, and the possession of an acquired skill. There
were also the free labourers, whose numbers, for long underestimated, are in more recent study attaining their correct proportions; builders and manual workers, who
ignored the contempt of Cicero for such occupations and worked for hire for any employer who would pay them. 'You must let me feed my people', said the
Emperor Vespasian to an inventor who offered him a labour-saving device for the transport of building materials.
We should no doubt consider separately the skilled workers, such as bakers, whose services to the community merited, and attracted, special attention. They and
analogous workers, such as masons, silversmiths, wool-workers, undertakers (to select just four examples) belonged to trade associations, or collegia, which
possessed social, religious, and sometimes quasi-political functions, as well as providing an organization for the businesses with which they were concerned. The
city of Ephesus offers cases of silversmiths organizing demonstrations in the theatre against the preachings of St Paul in order not to lose their trade in the
manufacture and sale of images of Ephesian Artemis and, in the second century, of the guild of bakers withholding their labour in pursuit of some aim of their own
and being called to order by the proconsul. Considerations of public order prevented Trajan from agreeing to the formation of a fire brigade at Nicomedia, against
the clearly implied advice of Pliny as governor of the province. Apart from the active political role implied by such episodes, the trade guilds were active in the
ceremonial and pageantry of their cities. When Constantine entered Autun in 311, he was received by the usual crowds, and by the 'statues of the gods, music, and
the emblems of the collegia'; the emblems were evidently not devised for this particular occasion, but indicate the regular part played by the trade guilds in their
cities' public lives.
The countryside would B.C. seen (from the socio-economic point of view here imagined) in far simpler terms, the more so because some of its most prominent
figures, the local gentry, would already have been classified as urban dwellers, with the consequent over-simplification of their actual way of life mentioned earlier,
and because the cities, the economic focus of the surrounding countryside, were also the centres for its administration. Yet here again we should not underestimate
the diversity in the conditions of life found in the countryside. The peasants themselves might own their land or rent it from local or absentee landlords; in the fourth
century Libanius (an influential professor of rhetoric at Antioch) draws the distinction for Syria between villages under 'one master' and those owned by 'many
masters', that is by free peasant proprietors. Some were lessees of public land taken under long leases with preferential terms to encourage the planting of
uncultivated or unsurveyed land, some -were tenants of temple lands or of the Emperor. Such farmers, like the tenants of absentee landlords other than the Emperor,
would normally be supervised (in some cases, which are documented for this reason, oppressed) by a land agent or bailiff or, in the case of imperial estates, the
procurator of the province. As in the towns, so too in the country there would be a numerous free labour force, sometimes recruited as need arose from the surplus
labour of nearby towns or from those local peasants who happened at a given time to be underemployed, sometimes migrant from region to region; and there were
pastoralists following the seasons between upland and valley, desert and steppe. This is the context of a famous episode of republican history, the calles siluaeque,
the 'tracks and forests' offered as a prospective command to the consuls of 59 in order to curb the ambitions of Julius Caesar. Calks are the droveways, in Italian
tratturi, of transhumant shepherds, as described in an informative inscription of the time of Marcus Aurelius, from Saepinum in old Samnite country.
The women of the community would generally be seen in terms of the socio-economic categories assigned to the men. Their rights at law were however much more
extensive than one might have expected, the institution of 'guardianship' of adult women, though it was not abolished, having by the late second century become a
formality. It is already clear in the late Republic that women of senatorial status could in practice manage their own business and financial affairs, and with the early
and almost universal acceptance of a form of marriage in which the woman retained her own legal identity rather than passing into the control of her husband,
women had rights to own, inherit, and dispose of property which in modern Britain were not matched until the Married Women's Property Act of 1870. The
marriage of Pudentilla of Tripolitanian Oea to the young philosopher Apuleius (above, pp.69.2ff.) in the mid second century was the occasion of a provincial cause
celebre from which Apuleius, accused before the proconsul by her first husband's relatives of having bewitched her by magic arts, was no doubt glad to escape.
Pudentilla had for her part gone against their expressed wishes in choosing to marry Apuleius, which she was perfectly able to do. The real issue was that of the
property, and Pudentilla's 'guardian' had to certify in court that a farm whose purchase he had formally authorized had been acquired not for Apuleius but for herself.
At less opulent social levels women are found frequently, in evidence that seriously under-represents their actual numbers, sharing in their husbands' work and its
organization, particularly in the finer crafts and luxury trades such as silver-working and perfumery; and there were of course those service occupations in which