This chapter asks how and when people living precariously put down roots in a Roman empire characterized by high degrees of movement and connectivity. Considering cases of forced displacement (of mining communities and towns), forced immobilization (of the enslaved), and migrant labour, it concludes that precarity was marked not by either staying or moving, but by dissonant relations to place, whether staying in a place but not truly living there, trying to remain at home in a place despite radical change wrought by a conqueror, or refusing to take root in a place that was inescapable in practice.

This chapter uses differences in building techniques as a springboard for considering the ways in which people in positions of, respectively, privilege and precarity imagined the future. It resists the in-built tendency of archaeological typologies to place supposedly poor material culture outside of history and instead shows how the experience of people living precariously was marked by the chronic stress of anticipating a future that demanded reaction.

On January 9, 2013, Cesare Esposito was not happy. The sixty-five-year-old artist, a longtime resident of Rome’s Monti district, had just been evicted from his residence. The heart of Monti essentially covers Rome’s eastern hills (Quirinal, Viminal, Cispian, Esquiline, and Oppian) and the valleys formed between them as the landscape stretches downhill and westward toward the ancient Forum (Plate 0.1; Map 0.1). Esposito’s family had lived here for generations, and he had thrived in the neighborhood that had been one of the areas of Rome most associated with artists and artisans of all sorts for centuries. But Esposito’s connection to Monti has meaning beyond his family history there. He is the artist in charge of one of the highest-profile ceremonies in Monti’s annual calendar: the celebration of the Miracle of Madonna della Neve at the papal basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, which looms over the central part of Monti from the top of the Cispian hill. Every year on August 4, the ceremony recalled the miraculous snowfall that occurred on that same date in 352 CE, when a rich patrician was directed by the Virgin Mary in his dream to construct a basilica where fresh snow fell that morning. The bishop Liberius, upon being informed of this dream, said that he had had the same one, so he marked out a floor plan for the basilica on the ground of the Cispian where snow – somehow in the heat of the late summer – had indeed fallen. Esposito directs the annual reenactment of this snowfall, which entails blasting artificial snowflakes from the roof of the basilica, and he has devoted his artistic efforts from time to time to numerous other church or civic celebrations across the city for decades. But now, Esposito said, he sleeps in the archaeological ruins of the ancient imperial fora that enclosed the lowest part of Monti, forced to look upon Monti and his former residence from the street. Esposito had been fighting the city to keep his apartment and studio since 2006, but he had now suffered the final defeat. Only by selling all of his belongings could he afford to get it back.

The first chapter examines the Subura’s early urbanization from the Iron Age through the Middle Republic. It shows a mixed occupation of plebeians and patricians from the start. Most importantly, it emphasizes the creation of a sacred landscape composed of multiple shrines dedicated to female deities throughout the valley. Each one evoked the city’s mythological origins to highlight the important role that women played in constructing and uniting Rome’s contemporary social fabric.

The second chapter focuses on the residential boom in and around the Subura and the building campaigns of Augustus, which betray the emperor’s consternation with the bustling commercial and residential district. A reputation for prostitution began to emerge, so close to the monumental center, and this is considered in the context of Augustus’ building program in the neighborhood, namely the Basilica Aemilia and the Porticus Liviae, which together bookended the lower Subura valley.

From the Republic through the early medieval period, the local residents and Rome’s institutional power-holders together shaped both the physical and the ideological landscape of the Subura. Defined by the sloping, narrow valleys that fed into the Forum – the functional and symbolic heart of the city – the Subura and Argiletum thrived on the movement compelled by the thoroughfares that lined these valleys and the connection to the Forum that they provided. The valley was understood and perceived in antiquity as an integral topographical unit in Rome’s natural landscape stretching from the Forum to the Campus Esquilinus outside the Porta Esquilina, and it is only by considering the valley as a whole that both the physical and the ideological development of the area can be fully understood. Similar to a landscape archaeology exploring issues of connectivity between different nodes or settlements within a broader terrain, this work has attempted to show how the development of the Subura valley and Cispian hill was very much a function of its nature as a path connecting center and periphery. Its development was directly affected by the ways in which connections with major nodes were manipulated and altered within various historical and cultural circumstances.

The third chapter examines the interventions of Domitian in the lower Subura. Domitian, who was even more socially conservative than Augustus, took a more aggressive approach to the Subura’s intensifying activity with the construction of his own imperial forum, severing the Subura’s connection with the city center. The complex highlighted Minerva and allowed Domitian to insert himself into the earlier discourse on female morality that had already been established in the Subura.

Through the case of a single intaglio found at a site in Northumberland, just north of the Roman frontier, this chapter challenges the view that consumption by the poor is about use: the imperative that the poor need to use, put to use, and use up the little they have. Combined with a reading of curse tablets from Roman Britain, a case is made for seeing possession instead as a capability in and of itself: something to be sought, valued, and treasured, even for those living precariously.