Gladiator rebellions and bread strikes: ancient Rome’s labor unions revealed

Labor Day has come around again, and workers’ rights are now center stage in North America. Canadian railworkers nearly brought trade to a juddering halt in a dispute with rail firms. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are courting union members as they fight for the White House even as union leaders call the Republican nominee a union-busting “scab” .

These political efforts to appease, control and pacify the working class and labor movements span human history as a new book argues that it is the first book on the labor movement in the Roman empire.

Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire by Sarah Bond, an associate professor in the classics at the University of Iowa, reveals how groups of workers in ancient Rome organized and collectively resisted in favor of demands, and often faced political opposition and legislation to undermine their efforts by Roman leaders.

The Romans were terrified of any kind of group that were going to push back

Sarah Bond

Among the first groups of workers in the ancient world to organize and collectively demand wages and working conditions were the Technitai of Dionysus, who were official entertainers, as the demand for traveling performers grew after the death of Alexander the Great in 323BC. These entertainers leveraged their popularity with the public to meet their demands, similar to actors’ unions such as Sag-Aftra today that include celebrity actors, background actors and other performers.

“They needed assurances when they travel that they’re going to be able to have sanctuary, that they are protected from certain amounts of violence, that they get certain wages,” Bond said. “These unions are essential because they are vulnerable, because actors and actresses later in the Roman world are seen as very disreputable. Just like how you think about vaudeville in the early 20th century – it’s a good way to think about why people need protection. Constantly, entertainers are under threat of things like sexual violence, people attacking them and being in unknown places because they’re constantly traveling.”

Other examples Bond discusses in her book about groups comparable to modern labor unions include ship operators who threatened to withhold shipments of wheat if their working condition demands weren’t met, bakers withholding bread as leverage to have their demands met, ordinary Roman citizens boycotting being conscripted into the Roman military due to the negative economic impacts and debts they often accrued from being forced to do so, slave and gladiator rebellions including the war of Spartacus in 73BC and construction builders working under a union contract in Sardis, modern-day Turkey.

“We have an inscription from the area of Sardis that is from a late Roman association of builders. We know specifically that the group is trying to ensure that workers show up. They’re giving them a certain number of sick days. They get 20 days off, but could then be replaced on the work site by another association member as a substitute specialist,” explained Bond. “There are fines that are being paid for this contract from Sardis in Asia Minor from AD459, and it has all of the essential contract elements that we would call today a union contract; it tells you, if there is a breach of contract, we will get another artisan from our union to replace the sick artisan.”

While many groups of workers had some success in having their demands met, leaders in the Roman world, including Julius Caesar, often engaged in efforts to undermine and limit the collective organizing of working people, and even after he was killed, subsequent leaders of the Roman empire mirrored similar efforts.

“When Caesar made the move to draft legislation in either 47 or 46BC, to ban all but ancient associations, I think what was going on in his head is he did not want sedition, especially within the Italian peninsula and Rome,” said Bond.

“He knew that artisans and collegia [private associations] oftentimes took populist stances, and that he was going to be a ruler and dictator. So he pushes through a lot of legislation, and one part of it is extinguishing and squelching sedition and resistance, starting with freedom of assembly. We call it freedom of assembly today, and Romans had a lot of different terms for it. In the US or UK today, if you take away freedom of assembly, then you create legislation that gives you the power of police and military to wipe out anybody who are forming any kind of resistance to you. Back then, collegia were the easiest way to get groups of people together very quickly.”

After Caesar’s death, Augustus ruled what was now the Roman empire, and he carried out similar policies, banning all collegia other than those under his patronage, and any collegia had to apply for licenses to form. Nearly one hundred years later in AD59, during Nero’s reign, all associations in Pompeii were banned in response to riots, and gladiatorial combats were suspended for 10 years by the Roman Senate in retaliation for the unrest.

“The Romans were terrified of any kind of group that were going to push back against them, and the number one way to do that was to have occupational groups that are formulated already, because people’s jobs were so closely tied to their identity, just like today,” Bond explained.

Bond noted that many modern historians have avoided making comparisons between associations in ancient Rome and modern labor groups for fear of being anachronistic in their interpretation of the history of that time – a view she said needs challenging. She also noted that due to the limited historical documents and records from ancient Rome that are available today, and the biases of many of these authors towards the wealthy, labor organizing has been a subject widely overlooked in historical studies on the Roman empire.

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“If we are so scared of making parallels and anachronism that we separate labor into a primitive area and then a modern area, then we’re never going to have conversations between modern labor workers and historians and workers in antiquity,” said Bond. “If we say the ancient world is so different than the modern world, then we will never dig into the ancient world and really see how maybe these associations weren’t successful all the time, but that it gave them some kind of agency to overcome that we might be able to learn from today. More importantly, we can see that governments have reacted in a way that used the rhetoric of sedition and anti-patriotism to these groups. We saw that in America in the 1920s when labor unions were labeled anti-American.”

This rhetoric from political figures and the wealthy aimed at labor groups has continued in the modern-day era, she said, including from billionaires such as Trump and Elon Musk denigrating and attacking labor unions today.

“There have always been rich politicians who were doing this,” concluded Bond. “There has always been, but there doesn’t have to be.”

• Strike is published in the US by Yale University Press