Rapacious and Chatty, Deceitful and Memorable: Finding Non-elite Stereotypes of Roman Merchants

Recent studies on ancient attitudes toward work and workers have repeatedly encountered a fundamental problem: our sources heavily favor elite perspectives and are consistently influenced by literary tropes dating back to centuries before our period of inquiry. The line between contemporary opinion and literary allusion is sufficiently blurry to make it difficult to say whether ancient authors personally meant what they said, let alone to divine whether their feelings were shared by the general public. This chapter examines the literary topos of the greedy merchant in Roman literature as an entry point for studying the origins and effects of elite and non-elite attitudes toward commercial and artisanal workers. The piece argues that while elite and non-elite opinions arrive in a similar place—distrust of merchants, artisans, and service providers—the evidence suggests that the feelings of the former grew out of anxiety around social mobility and Roman values, while those of the latter developed out of the challenges of close proximity and the frustrations of regular contact. Both manifested as stereotypes that had real impact on the social, legal, and economic standing of merchants.