{"text":[[{"start":4.68,"text":"So we're in the second century Roman Egypt. We're discussing how the economy at the time operated for the 90%. Not the elites, not the senators, not the emperors, just ordinary people. The plebs. Life sounds pretty hard, but there must have been some good life. I mean, what did they do for fun? For an enjoyment? What did they spend their tiny little bit of extra money on?"}],[{"start":27.44,"text":"We tend, when we think of rich and poor, we sort of sap the poor of everything. We imagine they had literally nothing. That defines poverty. When in fact, once you dig into all the new archaeology, you start looking at the financial records that we have, these are people who actually have quite nice clothing. They have quite a lot of clothing. They wear jewellery. They have perfume."}],[{"start":48.8,"text":"I excavated myself, in Italy, poor farmers who are wearing perfume. Just because people are poor doesn't mean that they're not spending their money on little luxuries. Rome is a world full of these kinds of consumer goods, and ordinary people - and even very, very poor people - also consume those goods, not just the super-rich people."}],[{"start":67.88,"text":"I think we also have to imagine people eating a whole range of foods that we imagine only rich people ate. We might conjure to mind rich people eating things like dormice and thrushes and all this stuff that appears in Roman literature. But we now know, thanks to some great archaeology, the extraordinary range of things that ordinary people ate."}],[{"start":86.36,"text":"So the new excavations in Pompeii have found ordinary people eating snails and citrus and 10 different kinds of cheeses and a whole range of goods, rather than just a very narrow, bread and water type diet. So life was difficult, precarious, but also, if you like, diverse and complex."}],[{"start":104.36,"text":"How well-fed were ordinary Romans, then, compared to somebody in the Victorian era, or even today, I guess, in some of the poorer countries? How do we compare this?"}],[{"start":112.04,"text":"So we've always assumed that poor Romans are basically eating at the caloric minimum, and we somehow imagine that amounts to what the United Nations today constitutes a caloric minimum. In my view, Romans are eating a lot more than this. Even the very poorest Romans, even enslaved people working on a farm, are eating a lot more in calories, not least because they're doing an awful lot of work."}],[{"start":134.72,"text":"So on the one hand, I would argue that they're much better nourished than we imagined. It's hard to compare them to your Victorian children, but I suspect in many instances they are better nourished, not least because they're partaking of the foodstuffs from what we might call a global empire. Now, if you live in the countryside, then just like today, there's far less different kinds of food available in the countryside than there are in a place like Pompeii or Rome. So the countryside - you're not going to get that citrus and peppercorns and all this imported stuff."}],[{"start":165.2,"text":"You said, like in Roman Britain, ordinary people drank wine, right? French wines. That they had a decent life."}],[{"start":172.44,"text":"About half of Roman farmers, from what we can tell, show signs of having drunk at least a little bit of wine. They're not mostly growing it themselves, and they're mostly importing it, which is kind of amazing. The farmers that I excavated in Italy... they're clearly making their own wine. Obviously, they're Italian farmers."}],[{"start":189.92,"text":"But they're also drinking wine from what's today Gaza. So they're importing wine because clearly they think it's better. It's better tasting, whatever, even as they're growing things themselves. And this was the thing that was most surprising to me. You always imagine, well, if I grow it, I don't need to buy it. Well, if you have a sophisticated palate and you prefer X over Y, then you're going to buy X. And they certainly did that."}],[{"start":216.51,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786273957_9913.mp3"}