Frank Frost Abbott’s The Common People of Ancient Rome turns away from the senatorial elite to focus on the city’s laborers, traders, and soldiers. The book’s prefatory note frames this shift explicitly: the common people “made the Roman Empire what it was.” Abbott draws on inscriptions, legal texts, and price edicts to recover their voices and conditions. One striking example is the Edict of Diocletian, reproduced in part, which lists maximum prices for everything from wine and pork to a barber’s shave and a teacher’s monthly fee. Such documents reveal not only economic structures but also the texture of daily life—what a pound of butter cost, how much a sewer-cleaner earned, and what a pair of pigeons sold for.

Diction and the Language of the Street

Abbott pays close attention to the Latin spoken by ordinary Romans, distinguishing it from the polished literary language of Cicero or Virgil. He notes that inscriptions on walls and tombstones preserve colloquial forms, misspellings, and nonstandard grammar—evidence of how people actually talked. For instance, the use of denarius symbols in the price edicts shows a practical, transactional vocabulary. Abbott argues that this “vulgar Latin” was not a corruption but a living dialect, and its traces help modern readers hear the voices of bakers, masons, and shepherds. The author’s method is philological: he compares literary and epigraphic sources to map linguistic change, showing how the common people’s speech gradually diverged from the classical standard.

Dialogue in the Inscriptions

Because the common people left few literary works, Abbott turns to inscriptions—gravestones, dedications, and graffiti—to find their own words. He quotes a tombstone that addresses the passerby directly: “Stop, traveler, and read.” Such epitaphs often include the deceased’s occupation, age, and a plea for remembrance. Abbott reads these as fragments of dialogue, a conversation between the dead and the living. He also examines the Acta Diurna, a daily gazette posted in public, which reported births, deaths, and market prices. By analyzing the formulaic language of these texts, Abbott reconstructs the bureaucratic and commercial exchanges that structured Roman life. The inscriptions, he suggests, are the closest we can get to the unmediated voice of the plebs.

Description of Work and Wages

The Edict of Diocletian provides a detailed snapshot of labor and prices around 301 CE. Abbott reproduces tables listing wages for bricklayers, carpenters, wall-painters, and shepherds, often with a note that the worker also received “keep.” A manual laborer earned 10.8 cents a day; a figure-painter, 64.8 cents. The disparity is telling: skilled artists commanded six times the wage of an unskilled worker. Abbott uses these figures to discuss the cost of living, noting that a quart of oil cost 30.3 cents and a pound of pork 7.3 cents. He does not claim the edict was perfectly enforced, but treats it as a window into the relative value of goods and labor. The tables also list prices for education: a teacher of Greek or rhetoric charged 87 cents per pupil per month, while an elementary teacher charged only 21.6 cents—a hierarchy of knowledge reflected in coin.

Structure and the Comparative Lens

Abbott organizes his chapters thematically, not chronologically, and each essay draws explicit parallels between Roman and modern conditions. The prefatory note lists questions that “the Roman attacked”: corporate policy, cost of living, private benefactions, language policy. This comparative structure is deliberate—Abbott wants readers to see ancient problems as “perhaps equally illuminating” for contemporary debates. The book’s tone is academic but accessible, with footnotes citing sources like the Digest and Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Yet Abbott avoids dry cataloging; he weaves the price lists and epitaphs into arguments about social mobility, urbanization, and the role of the state. The structure itself mirrors his method: each chapter takes a specific document or practice and unpacks its implications for understanding the common people’s world.

Abbott’s study is best approached as a series of linked essays rather than a continuous narrative. Readers may wish to start with the chapter on the Edict of Diocletian, where the raw data of prices and wages brings the ancient economy into sharp focus. The footnotes and references to inscriptions reward careful attention, as they ground Abbott’s claims in primary evidence. This is a work that invites the reader to consider how much—and how little—has changed in the lives of working people across two millennia.