The fifth chapter details an especially elite investment in the Subura’s residential fabric and the emergence of Christian communities in the fourth century CE, after Constantine passed the Edict of Milan in 313. Several churches are evident in the upper Subura on the Cispian hill, most notably a basilica built by the bishop Liberius. The general orientation of the Subura valley thus began to shift away from the lower portion closer to the Forum and toward its upper extents.

The sixth chapter details the sudden appearance of Mary in the Subura’s landscape during the fifth century with Sixtus III’s construction of S. Maria. It argues that Sixtus used the basilica to proclaim his support for the new orthodox belief in Mary as theotokos, to condemn the heretical beliefs against her, and to invalidate Jews and Judaism, which would have been present in the Subura itself, among other areas of the city. After its construction, the basilica of S. Maria sparked the emergence of a new local significance based on the ideal Christian woman.

The introduction sets out how to investigate precarity, defined as uncertainty emerging from structural inequalities. A qualitative approach is needed to capture not just inequality’s depth but people’s lived experiences. The introduction positions the book in relation to current macroeconomic approaches to the Roman world, and to prior attempts at writing bottom-up history. It shows the need to humanize and historicize inequality, addressing its human-scale impacts specifically in the Roman world, and it defines a conceptual toolbox derived from feminist studies, development economics, and the material turn.

Reviewing evidence from suburban workers’ cemeteries in Rome, tombstones of gladiators in Roman Gaul, and pottery from Roman York, this chapter asks what care for certain people and bodies reveals about what people living precariously cared about. Whereas most studies that chart non-elite social worlds in the Roman empire have highlighted the vertical relations of patronage or have reproduced the normative frameworks of family and work, this chapter traces alternative, horizontal social formations emerging from lives lived in precarity.

The eighth and final chapter focuses on the restoration of residential occupation to the Argiletum – absent since Domitian – and Paschal I’s investment in the area during the eighth and ninth centuries. Paschal explicitly tied S. Maria to the flanking sister churches of S. Praxedis and S. Potentiana, unifying them in a physical and conceptual hierarchy of virginity and virtue. Several welfare centers attest to renewed foot traffic along the valley, while the construction of several elite houses within Domitian’s old forum shows a desire among elites to be connected to the Subura’s processional thoroughfare.

Risk and uncertainty were structural to the Roman world, as was the case for other preindustrial empires. But their impact was not distributed equally. Social, economic, political, legal, military, and other inequalities pervaded Roman society and generated conditions of precarity. Precarity was experienced as a new relation to the Roman object world; as an impetus for experimentation but a brake on innovation; as a state of constant anticipation; as a troubled relation to place; and as a negotiation of horizontal and vertical relations of care.

The seventh chapter examines how, in the face of significant physical contraction in the sixth and seventh centuries, the entire Subura valley was reworked into a Christian processional landscape starting under Gregory I. Focusing on Mary as a civic intercessor, two ad hoc seven-form processions, which later became four annual processions, terminated at S. Maria (now Maior), spurring the foundation of several new churches along the Subura’s thoroughfares, all dedicated to virginal female saints. At this time, the Subura shows a marked concentration of female church dedications compared to the city at large.

The fourth chapter provides an impression of the rapid residential and commercial growth that took place in the Subura during the second and third centuries CE. The variety of evidence for domus, insulae, tabernae, and markets from across the valley is considered, as is the increased religious diversity outside state cults. Most importantly, a sizable Jewish community, with likely earlier origins, becomes apparent at this time.

Through three cases of short-lived terra sigillata ceramic production in Italy and Gaul, this chapter shows that experimentation was driven by those living precariously, in an attempt to make more from less, but was curbed by a lack of capital investment. This disjuncture between capital and human capital development helps explain both the presence of a wider skill spectrum than previously assumed for the Roman world and the structural limitations of Roman innovation, while putting into relief the plight of those without access to a capital asset portfolio.