We might rely on regular sessions of retail therapy or morale-boosting injections of protestant work ethic to get us through the daily drudgery of our working lives, but it goes without saying that we’ve come a long way from antiquity. In the West, working nine-to-five hasn’t always been a way to make a living. Having a schedule, a salary, and—in some cases—security is actually a privilege (if we may call it that) of living in a modernised world of capital and infrastructure; one that takes us beyond our need to desperately hunt for where the next meal’s going to come from.
Had we been born in any other historical period, we would have learned this the hard way through an unhealthy concoction of blood, sweat, and tears. And there was no shortage of any of these in the ancient world, where endemic war, death, and violence might have been considered welcome reprieves from some of the more gruelling hardships of everyday life. This article contains a list of ancient jobs that make being a call-centre worker (sorry), a corporate lawyer (sorry again) or a White House PR agent (actually not sorry for this one) seem like a walk in the park.
“Praegustator” (Food Taster)
You might think that the quality of food on offer at a Roman imperial banquet would make people reluctant to share it. Poisoning had been a public concern in Rome since at least 331 BC. Problematically, however, early charges of poisoning came about at the same time as a wave of plagues and pestilences, and the inadequacy of Roman post-mortem examinations made it practically impossible to determine which has been the cause of death. By the time of the Roman Empire (after 31 BC), however, poisoning had become widespread.
People would resort to poison for any number of reasons: from removing political enemies to ensuring an inheritance to getting rid of a pesky family member. It was certainly a big concern in the imperial palace. But it probably also plagued the minds of cheating husbands and rough traders in households across the city and around the empire. The difference, of course, is that we have far more evidence the imperial household, and that the Caesars—unlike most “ordinary” families—could afford to take preventative measures.
One of these might be a potion. The Roman satirist Juvenal mentions a man who took an anti-venom to protect himself from his wife (though ultimately it failed to protect him from a swing of her axe). But the most common method taken by emperors in particular was to hire a professional food-taster: the praegustator. And more bizarrely still, there were enough of them during the early empire to form their own collegium (worker’s guild).
The job certainly had its upsides. Rather than receiving the normal chickenfeed rations reserved for slaves or freedmen (recently freed-slaves), praegustatores would have the privilege of wolfing down some delicious imperial delicacies. The downside, however, was that any one of these delicacies could spell agonising death. We have a fair few examples from antiquity. We know that before the Battle of Actium, Mark Antony had his praegustator hard at work, paranoid that one of his many enemies might be set on having him killed.
If there’s one thing that makes the job of the imperial poison-taster even more bizarre, it’s that, at least under the reign of Nero, there was also an imperial poisoner. Along with his mother Agrippina, Nero employed the services of the skilled poisoner Locusta to get rid of their enemies. Among her alleged victims was the emperor Claudius (the another account suggests he was poisoned by his own praegustator) and Nero’s half-brother, and Claudius’s son, Britannicus.