‘Strike’ by Sarah E. Bond review

Were there strikes in the ancient world? The term, as Sarah Bond explains in this boundary-crossing new book, derives from a notorious act of resistance in April 1768 when British sailors lowered (or ‘struck’) the topsails of merchant ships to prevent them from leaving port, thus forcing wealthy ship owners to improve pay and conditions. How far (what today we would recognise as) strikes broke out in the Roman Empire is difficult to say because, as Bond acknowledges, the concept is primarily associated with the rise of modern capitalism, and the sources are frustratingly scant. Her solution – what she describes as ‘strategic anachronism’ – is the sort of thing that often makes historians nervous, but the book is nonetheless a strong argument for it.

Bond sets out to recover the elusive histories of the various kinds of labour organisations and mobilisation which existed (or must have existed) across the Roman Mediterranean from 509 BC (the foundation of the Roman republic) to AD 565 (the death of Justinian). She considers the different ways in which all manner of disadvantaged groups – from cooks to gladiators – became greater than the sum of their parts by banding together and, sometimes, by withholding labour. An association of businessmen working in the citrus-wood trade based in Rome during the Hadrianic era (AD 117-38), for example, had rules specifying membership dues to be paid, as well as establishing a clubhouse and a president. Among Bond’s sources is a fragmentary edict (probably also dating to Hadrian’s principate) in which a proconsular governor in Pergamon in Asia Minor, having inspected a building site where a project was being delayed by the artisans and contractors, expresses gratitude to those who had continued to work and threatens absentees with fines and repercussions. Bond sees here possible signs of a strike – although, as she concedes, the details remain murky.

The book exemplifies a burgeoning interest in ‘history from below’ across the field of Classics –Sam Gartland and David Tandy’s Voiceless, Invisible, and Countless in Ancient Greece: The Experience of Subordinates 700-300 BCE (2024) is another recent example. One of the great challenges in delivering such analyses is – as the one-sided example of the governor in Pergamon suggests – the status of the available evidence, which is often sparse, chronologically diverse, and tantalisingly partial. The chance survival of some graffiti from Pompeii might reveal that local fishermen enthusiastically supported a particular candidate for election as the new aedile, but it leaves unclear whether this was part of an orchestrated campaign and what, if any, benefits subsequently accrued to them.

What is more, our knowledge of the ancient world is often mediated through sophisticated historians who wrote complex narrative histories, and whose level of education in Greek and Latin reveals their privileged status. Bond is pessimistic – perhaps more than she needs to be – about the potential for writers such as Livy and Tacitus to shed any light on ‘history from below’. These authors do allow glimpses into the lives of the underprivileged, such as Tacitus’ mutiny-narratives in the Annals where he depicts a soldier pretending to kiss his commander’s hand before putting it into his toothless mouth in order to draw attention to his plight as an elderly soldier who has served too long.

Another source, equally challenging, is the legislation formulated by political elites in response to crises and perceived social problems of one sort or another. There is the lex Aquilia of the third century BC, the earliest known private law statute delivering measures designed to address unlawful damage to property (including slaves, seen in the ancient world as property rather than people). The status of such evidence inevitably sets up barriers for historians in getting access to marginalised communities, who in practice often needed to remain out of sight in order to achieve their aims. Yet records of reaction from above do reveal the existence of action from below. As Bond’s book shows, partial vision is better than no vision at all.

Bond’s ‘strategic anachronism’ includes applying the term ‘labour union’ to various ancient associations and looking at the ancient world through the lens of later eras where more comprehensive evidence is available. One such point of comparison considers the similarities between the ancient groups of performers known as ‘practitioners of Dionysus’, who started to emerge in the third century BC, and the American Guild of Variety Artists, founded in 1939 to protect touring performers in travelling variety shows. Bond clearly feels some unease about whether her readers are likely to buy into this analogising mode of viewing the ancient world and sometimes hedges her bets accordingly – these ancient itinerant acting troupes are thus referred to as ‘quasi-unions’. Yet even in instances where the labels do not quite seem to fit, the conceptual thinking about mobile communities moving from city to city and living precarious lives who required some kind of protection while dealing with local officials opens up a different vantage point on the ancient world.

It is certainly true that Bond’s broader category of ‘resistance’ (a phenomenon which clearly transcends time) will prove less controversial: the three Slave Wars which took place over 135-71 BC in Sicily and the Italian peninsula are clear instances of it. These large-scale revolts (culminating in the rebellion of Spartacus) saw the large influx of slaves who were taken to Italy in the first and second centuries bc drawing on their collective strength to resist their working conditions and grim lives. However, even if using the language of ‘labour unions’ and ‘strikes’ when considering the distant past might pose questions about terminology, it is still valuable to apply such concepts to the ancient world. We know that marginalised communities existed, just as we know about the powerful elites. The relationship between the two, and our attempts to better understand them, should not be compromised by the words we use. 

• Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire
  Sarah E. Bond
  Yale University Press, 272pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Rhiannon Ash is Professor of Roman Historiography at Merton College, Oxford.