Life on Debt in Ancient Rome. Ordinary people dreamed of the same thing: money. More precisely, credits

Credit is not a modern invention. His traces can be found in the dreams of the poor, in the receipts of the pawnshops and in the books of a notary in Egypt two thousand years ago.

Artemidorus, the Roman interpreter of dreams, had an unusual clientele for someone in his line of work: shoemakers, farmers, merchants, slaves and freedmen. Not aristocrats worried about legacies or generals who dreamed of military victories. Ordinary people. And what they dreamed of, again and again, was the same thing: money. Specifically, loans, writes journalist Kim Bowes in the book “Surviving Rome. The Economic Life of the 90%”

His interpretation was unambiguous. To dream that you borrow money portends death. Not just any death, but a double death—that of working endlessly, only to see the money disappear into the moneylender's pockets.

What does this say about Rome? That 90% of the population of the empire – farmers, artisans, small traders, workers – lived not only with debt, but with the consciousness of debt. Debts invaded their sleep. And yet, despite all this, the credit system they used was not, as we might imagine, a primitive or simply oppressive one. It was surprisingly sophisticated, flexible and, in most cases, indispensable for survival.

By the way, in the prayer “Our Father” there is a translation that uses “and forgive us debts ours”, and the semantic field is indeed very close to “our sins”.

Original text: In the Gospel of Matthew (koiné Greek), the verse uses “debita” (ὀφειλήματα, opheilēmata), which literally means “debts” or “something owed”. Luke's version speaks of “hamartias” (sins), but both versions are accepted in Christian tradition, reflecting the idea of ​​a “moral debt” to God.

Romanian translations vary: the classical Orthodox form is “and forgive us our sins”, but older or literalist versions use “our debts” (eg in the Latin Vulgate: “dimytte nobis debita nostra”). Examples include Bible editions or theological commentaries that preserve the meaning of the double interpretation

The world without a bank

Banks, in the modern sense of the word, were not the favorite tool of ordinary Romanians. There were bankers – argentari – who accepted deposits, but they mainly served wealthy clients. The 90% did not keep their savings in a safe. They kept them in wheat, land, animals, wife's jewelry, bronze bathtubs.

And when they needed cash—to pay the rent on a pasture, to buy a donkey, to pay back taxes—they turned these things into money. Sometimes by sale, but most often by pawning.

The most common loan was basically a verbal understanding between people who knew each other. But even in small communities, people insisted on paper. From a village in Roman Egypt we have been preserved hundreds of applications for advances on rations written by illiterate workers in the imperial quarries. People who couldn't read but knew a receipt was worth more than a promise.

Rations as currency

At Mons Claudianus, a granite quarry in Egypt's eastern desert, workers – family members – were paid rations of food and clothing and a small cash salary, the published studies show. Rations arrived at the end of the month. I mean always too late.

Inevitably, some ran out of food before payday. They were asking for advances. But these advances did not remain simple bilateral transactions. Workers also borrowed from their colleagues—overseers, soldiers, camp merchants—and used future rations as collateral. Sometimes Saturninus' rations went directly to Ision, the creditor, while the intendant served as an intermediary. Triangular credit relationships, in the middle of a desert, between people who earned a few drachmas a month.

What were they doing with the borrowed money? Apparently they didn't survive. The average amount of the loans was higher than the monthly salary – which means that these people were not borrowing to keep from starving, but to buy something. The quarry was full of imported goods: various food, clothes, equipment. Rome's world of things had also reached the desert, and people wanted to participate in it.

Thermouthis and her plates

Nowhere does the pawnshop system appear more vividly than in the documents of a pawnbroker in Fayum—a village in Egypt—who kept the accounts of several clients for over a year. They are all women. One of them was called Thermouthis.

Over the course of thirteen months, Thermouthis pawned a red tunic, plates, bowls, a bronze bathtub. He received a total of about 125 drachmas. He refunded 32. The rest of the stuff – he probably lost it.

It's easy to read this as a story of poverty and despair. But the timing of the pledges complicates the picture. The vast majority of transactions did not take place in the months before the harvest, when starvation was the greatest danger. They took place in the fall, during the planning and planting season. People did not pawn their belongings to eat. They were pawning them to invest – in leases, in seeds, maybe in animals.

Thermouthis was probably not a passive victim of poverty. There was someone trying to turn buffet plates into working capital.

The Register of Tebtunis

The most extraordinary surviving document from the financial world of ordinary Romans is the register of a notary office in an Egyptian village, Tebtunis, from the 40s-50s of our era. A notary named Kronion and his partner Eutuchas recorded, day by day, all the financial transactions of the inhabitants: leases, wills, cash and grain loans. Over 1,200 separate trades in twenty months.

About a third were loans. Not survival covers, for the most part. The average sums – around 160 drachmas – were too high for that. At two to four times a family's monthly expenses, these sums suggest investment, not starvation.

The moment confirms them. Loans were concentrated in August, September and October – the planting season. When decisions were made for the new agricultural year. When pastures were rented, donkeys were bought, seeds were procured. Farmers and artisans in Tebtunis used credit exactly as we use it: as leverage to invest more than they had on hand.

Not all of them, of course. A minority of small loans appeared during the famine months in the spring. Amounts of 45 drachmas – just enough to keep a family alive for a month. Exactly as much as the annual tax bill for a man with no arrears. These loans also existed. But they did not define the system.

Children as collateral

The most painful transactions in the Tebtunis ledger are service contracts – paramons. A man would borrow money and pay the interest with the labor of himself or a child. The debtor – or the child – could not leave for a day. Absence was punished.

Harthotes was a tenant farmer, village priest and apparently a multi-talented swindler, always in debt. At 24, he and his mother agreed to send 16-year-old brother Marsisouchos to work for four years for an interest-free loan of 48 drachmas. Years later, after his wife's death, he sent his six-year-old daughter, Tahaunes, to an oil mill for four and a half years.

The value of a child's work, calculated as interest or wages, far exceeded the amount borrowed.

But Harthotes does not make a pure financial calculation. Take a hungry mouthful out of family expenses and get immediate cash in hand—perhaps the only way he could survive a bad year. And the children, surprisingly, do not disappear. Marsisouchos appears in documents, twenty years later, as lessee of six and a half hectares of land. Tahaunes returned, married, had a son, also sent him to the service of duty, and saw him return as a farmer and labor organizer. Same family, same strategy, a generation later.

It is not a story about liberation. It's a story about the transmission of a survival mechanism from parents to children.

What does all this mean?

Histories of the Roman economy tend to be about wealth and power: about patricians and landowners, about the wheat trade and the luxury of the atriums. The 90% appear, if they do, as victims of an avant la lettre feudal system.

The register of Tebtunis, the receipts from the desert quarries, the accounts of Polion, and the dreams of Artemidorus' customers tell a different story. Not one of triumph – the poverty was real, the debts crippling, the child service contracts a cruelty with its own logic. But the people behind these documents were not passive. They juggled their rations and wages, turned plates into cash, used owners' accounts as instruments of credit, negotiated late payments, sent petitions, arbitrated disputes.

The average amount of a loan at Tebtunis was 160 drachmas – two to four times a family's monthly expenses. Managed for one year, at 12% interest (the capped legal rate in Rome), it meant about 18 drachmas more per month. For a family living on the edge of sustainability, a debt-to-income ratio of 30%. Scary, but not impossible.

What they didn't have was security. Neither a bad harvest, nor a flood of the Nile too strong, nor an illness of the wife left room. The savings were there—Thaisas managed to raise nearly 1,400 drachmas in twelve years to pay off her dead husband's debts—but they offered no real protection against catastrophe.

They lived essentially without a safety net, using credit as a daily tool to convert labor into cash, wheat into investment, children into capital. And they dreamed, in the long nights, of loans that heralded death.

Artemidor had been right. But not because the loans were necessarily a condemnation. But because, for the 90%, life and credit were the same thing.