Why were the economic conditions and chief occupations in Rome diuring the Early Empire?

Answer 1

There were the patricians who was the aristocracy and and the owners of most of the large landed estates. The equities were the entrepreneurial class of merchants, bankers, moneylenders and investors in shipping and mining. There were civil servants, engineers and architects. At the bottom of the ladder there were the artists (except for the celebrated ones) the artisans and the peasants and the masses of the unemployed or underemployed poor. Actors, dancers and other performers and prostitutes and pimps were also at the bottom of the ladder and were infames. Their status was infamia which was the loss of legal and social status and an exclusion from the protection the law gave to Roman citizens.

The above refers to the social ladder of Roman citizens. The slaves were below them. Most of them worked in the fields of the large landed estates. MAny of them were domestic servants in the houses of the rich. Some worked in the mines and some worked for the state.

Most Romans lived on the upper floors of the insulae (apartment blocks four to seven floors high) which had small and overcrowded rooms with no running water, cooking facilities or toilets. People went there only to sleep and lived outdoors. They went to outdoors public toilets and to the public baths and eat outdoors. Bread and other grain based foods were all that the poor could afford. Therefore, the bakeries were the places where the food they ate was made and sold. The bakeries were extremely busy and, due to the masses of customers, people ate sitting on outdoors benches. They were scorned by the upper classes who had a kitchen in their domus (detached house)