Lower Class Women in the Roman Economy

The subject of this paper is the female of the species opifiaes and tabemarii, "craftsmen and shopkeepers and all that scum of the cities," as Cicero once indiscreetly called them. We need not believe him when he claims that they were always and everywhere ready for riot or revolution because they were so wretchedly poor, but for many of these workers it may have been hard to make ends meet, so that we should not be surprised to find wives or children gainfully employed. However, the range of jobs and the range of prosperity is wide, for we shall deal with a broad stratum of urban workers which includes importers of manufactured articles or raw materials, skilled craftsmen producing and selling luxury goods, humbler dealers, shopkeepers and pedlars of cheap objects, people who offered services.