Wandering Workers: Mobility and Skills in the Roman World

Skilled workers have a long history of mobility, moving to take account of when and where their skills might be in the highest demand, or where they could gain the greatest profit and prestige. Construction workers and medical practitioners were among the most mobile in the Roman world, although the nature of that mobility varied, ranging from more-or-less constant itinerancy over a limited geographic area to movement over great distances to work on specific projects or in particularly prestigious cities. Taking medicine and the construction industry as case studies, this chapter asks three fundamental questions about the structural underpinnings of skilled mobility within these two economic sectors, focusing principally on the Roman imperial period. It asks who moved (“The Movers”), how this movement was structured and organized (“The Organization”), and how skilled workers established their competence and professional ability (“Getting Established”). It reinforces the importance to the Roman economy of the movement of goods, information, and people, supported by a network of connectivity across the provinces.