The second
king, Numa, is a man of peace, and is occupied throughout his reign with
the social and religious organization of his people. It was Numa who
established guilds of carpenters, dyers, shoemakers, tanners, workers in
copper and gold, fluteplayers, and potters. The critical historian looks
with a sceptical eye on the story of the kings, and yet this list of
trades is just what we should expect to find in primitive Rome. There are
no bakers or weavers, for instance, in the list. We know that in our own
colonial days the baking, spinning, and weaving were done at home, as they
would naturally have been when Rome was a community of shepherds and
farmers. As Roman civilization became more complex, industrial
specialization developed, and the number of guilds grew, but during the
Republic we cannot trace their growth very successfully for lack of
information about them. Corporations, as we have seen, played an
important part in politics, and their doings are chronicled in the
literature, like oratory and history, which deals with public questions,
but the trades-guilds had little share in politics; they were made up of
the obscure and weak, and consequently are rarely mentioned in the
writings of a Cicero or a Livy.

It is only when the general passion for setting down records of all sorts
of enterprises and incidents on imperishable materials came in with the
Empire that the story of the Roman trades-union can be clearly followed.
It is a fortunate thing for us that this mania swept through the Roman
Empire, because it has given us some twenty-five hundred inscriptions
dealing with these organizations of workmen. These inscriptions disclose
the fact that there were more than eighty different trades organized into
guilds in the city of Rome alone. They included skilled and unskilled
laborers, from the porters, or _saccarii_, to the goldsmiths, or
_aurifices_. The names of some of them, like the _pastillarii_, or guild
of pastile-makers, and the _scabillarii_, or castanet-players, indicate a
high degree of industrial specialization. From one man's tombstone even
the conclusion seems to follow that he belonged to a union of what we may
perhaps call checker-board makers. The merchants formed trade associations
freely. Dealers in oil, in wine, in fish, and in grain are found organized
all over the Empire. Even the perfumers, hay-dealers, and ragmen had their
societies. No line of distinction seems to be drawn between the