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Anthropologist David Graeber put himself on the map after the release of Bullshit Jobs, a book about how a lot of the jobs we have today aren’t productive or useful, to put it mildly and oversimplify Graeber’s thesis.
As Graeber himself puts it in an interview with Vox, “A lot of bullshit jobs are just manufactured middle-management positions with no real utility in the world, but they exist anyway in order to justify the careers of the people performing them. But if they went away tomorrow, it would make no difference at all.”
Now you might think the bullshit job is a new phenomenon, but there were a lot of weird historical jobs in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome that will make you scratch your head and wonder, “Did they seriously pay people to do that?”
1. Funeral Clowns Would Make Fun of the Dead
Unless you’re watching a horror movie, clowns are the last thing you’d normally associate with death and funerals, but in the ancient world, a funeral clown was common enough there are records of clowns making fun of the dead at their own funerals. These mimus, sometimes called archimimes, would mimic the behavior of the deceased. It wasn’t just any behavior either, they specifically picked ones that made the deceased look bad. Of course, this was done in a funny way that wouldn’t offend the audience which was likely made up of friends and family who wouldn’t tolerate actual slander.
One amusing account from Suetonius, a Roman historian, tells of a funeral clown mocking Vespasian, the emperor famous for his role in building the Colosseum, for his frugality. The funeral clown was said to have asked the crowd, while still pretending to be Vespasian, how much the funeral would cost him.
Roelof van Wijngaarden wants to bring back the funeral clown in the form of a “ritual clown” who cheers people up at funerals. In one funeral, he shared that he had told the deceased, “So, now you are nicely laid out, looking all neat and proper.”
Dead Happy, a funeral clown service in Ireland, is also trying to repopularize the funeral clown in an effort to make funerals less sad and more about celebrations of the dearly departed with a lot of laughter.
Talk about gallows humor.
2. Vicarius Were the Middle Managers Between Their Masters and Their Fellow Slaves
You’ve probably joked before about how your manager was a slave driver but what if they literally were one? And no, we’re not talking about slave owners, we’re talking about real middle-manager slaves who managed other slaves.
According to Vicki León, author of ‘Working IX to V : orgy planners, funeral clowns, and other prized professions of the ancient world‘, slave owners would buy slaves to serve as their “body doubles” at work and do their work for them. These vicarius would then be lived through vicariously by their owners who would send them to do office work. It wasn’t so bad of a gig either since it turns out that some vicarious would be given access to part or all of their master’s assets. Some of them would be paid a portion of the profits made, allowing them to eventually buy their freedoms.
More enterprising slaves, however, would opt to buy their own vicarius and continue growing their master’s wealth so they could continue taking a cut. It created a chain of vicarius reporting up the chain to each other with the top dog being the one who answers only to the master.
3. Dream Incubators Got You in Touch With Your Divine Healthcare Provider
Doctor’s assistants are real jobs today and they were real jobs back in the days of Ancient Greece, too. The only difference was that the ancient Greek doctor’s assistants didn’t have a corporeal doctor to report to. They were instead servants of the god of medicine, Asclepius. Since you couldn’t exactly page a god, dream incubators would help patients get in touch with their divine care provider.
The process is surprisingly normal by today’s standards. You go to a sanctuary, like the temple of Asclepius in Epidaurus, and undergo a cleanse. You know how doctors will ask you to stop eating before an operation sometimes? It was a little like that, but the dream incubators would ask you to stop having certain food items and stop having sex.
You would then be given an intake interview before being taken to the abaton chamber where you would snooze and wait for Asclepius to see you. Seriously. You were expected to wait and dream of a sign from the god that told you your diagnosis and prescription. One blind soldier was told by the god to rub a mixture of rooster blood and honey on his eyes and keep applying it for three days. The soldier eventually left with his sight restored.
4. Armpit Hair Pluckers Filled Bathhouses With the Screams of Their Clients
Roman baths were hubs of public life and of public image. One of the many services offered at the baths was armpit plucking were employed by bathhouse guilds to manually pluck the armpit hairs of patrons with tweezers. Seneca, yes, the Seneca, notes that the armpit pluckers would shout in the bathhouses to get people to get their pits plucked and when the pit plucker wasn’t shouting, he was “forcing his customer to shriek instead of him”.
5. Orgy Planners Came up With Increasingly Debauched Delights for Wealthy Patrons
Now, for the most glamorous of ancient jobs, we have the orgy planner. Be honest, that’s part of why you clicked, right?
We may have event planners for parties and music festivals today, but that’s nothing on the Ancient Greek and Roman orgy planner who was tasked with making sure orgies were fun and safe. Well, for the elite patrons, that is. The Greco-Roman world shared party god Dionysus/Bacchus, lord of wine and ritual madness, and celebrated him with the Dionysiac mysteries/Bacchanalia. Attendants of these parties had a tendency to really tap into that divine crazy party energy and go around on a debauched, often violent, sex spree.
At one orgy, legendary bisexual Alcibiades, an Athenian statesman, and his homies stole the dicks of hundreds of statues throughout Athens.
Gaius Petronius, Nero’s orgy planner, had to walk the tightrope of satisfying Nero’s desires which wasn’t an easy task given the emperor’s volatile nature and violent tastes. Many of the orgies Gaius Petronius organized for Nero were snuff orgies where the, ahem, entertainment would die to wrap up the celebrations. An unsatisfied Nero later ordered him to commit suicide, allowing Tigellinus to take his office. Tigellinus had an even bigger appetite for debauchery and one that seemed to match Nero’s. The new orgy planner would add “maidenhead plucking”, courtesy of gladiators, and rose petal smotherings to his list of twisted delights.
6. The Stercorarius Took Everyone’s Shit, Literally
Ancient Rome was famous for its aqueducts and toilets, innovations that were so advanced it would take centuries to see them return after the fall of Rome. What a lot of people forget is that a lot of these advanced services were available only for important public buildings. Think of the noisy bathhouse where the armpit plucker is trying to pluck your pits or government buildings. Regular residential areas where most people lived? Not on the plumbing grid.
That’s why the stercorarius had to go from house to house and collect people’s shit from their cesspools, bucket by bucket and wagon by wagon. He then had to drag all everybody’s shit outside the city where he would sell it to farmers. For his troubles, the stercorarius got eleven copper coins.
7. The Pullarius Were Chicken Interpreters Who Told the Fortune of Military Campaigns Based on How Chickens Ate
Fortune telling isn’t an oddity in the ancient world. We still do them today under different names and more ‘scientific’ rationale like secular tarot reading. What makes the pullarius strange is the means through which they told fortunes and who for. Instead of being tasked with taking care of more regal birds, like eagles or owls, the pullarius had to take care of sacred military chickens.
Sacred. Military. Chickens. Chickens that were relied on to tell whether a battle would go well or not for the Roman army.
Before a battle, a pullarius would release the chickens and throw corn on the ground. If the chickens ate, all was well. If they ate so messily they dropped kernels, even better. If they didn’t eat, oh no. If they refused to come out of their cages, you may as well send everyone home.
Was the job taken seriously? Likely. One Roman fleet commander who served in the First Punic War was so impatient with the poor birds, who were understandably dizzy from sailing, not wanting to come out of their cage that he threw them overboard. He lost the battle and was scolded for drowning his fleet’s sacred war chickens.
