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societies that underemployment is endemic; these fears of unemployment mean that there were many men out of work or with tenuous or part-time work among ordinary Romans, and they feared the prospect. Although one might be a fine artisan or even a shipowner, this was no guarantee that work would be available. So the potential for unemployment was constantly on men’s minds.
    And in business there was always the possibility of a falling-out with business partners and associates. The Carmen focuses on these worries, as well as on concerns about dealing with local officials, especially the market supervisors who had the power to harass a businessman. Artemidorus notes:
    And even if a man conducts his business well and goes so far as to take on unprofitable expenditures, he is still always censured by the market supervisor. For it is impossible to be a supervisor without constantly doing this. (Dreams 2.30)
    Petty harassments were a fact of life and could go beyond this to outright corruption, as in the Satyricon 15 episode in which local officials attempt to seize stolen property, scare off its owners with the threat of prosecution, then sell the articles for their own profit.
    The only thing that takes up more space in the Carmen than business and travel is family matters of various sorts. Men had intense concernsabout marriage and about children and relatives. Dorotheus goes into great elaboration about what the charts have to say on prospects and the future of marriages. What kind of a husband will he be? What kind of a wife? What status differences will be involved? That is, will the man marry ‘low,’ for example to a slave or a prostitute, or will he marry well? Will a relative be married? Will the person charted marry multiple times? What is little mentioned is romantic love. On the contrary, when women are involved, strong emphasis is put on sexual control. In the magical papyri an overwhelming number of charms and incantations deal with securing the (apparently unwilling) sexual subservience of a woman to a man. In only one case is it explicitly a husband-and-wife issue; the impression in all others is that either an undefined relationship exists, or an adulterous one. Thus sexual drive was very much on the minds of ordinary men. Given the fact that in the magical papyri there are so many charms, incantations designed to compel a woman’s affections, it is somewhat surprising that sexual attraction does not seem to be on the worry list for men seeking astrological and dream-interpretation advice. Success in love (whatever that might mean in a variety of contexts) is missing from the Carmen. In Artemidorus, some dreams do interpret a man or a woman’s love life – ‘If a young man or woman is wounded in the breast by someone s/he knows, it indicates love’ (Dreams 1.41) – but this is quite rare. There is reference to wifely love, to mistresses, to whores and debauchery, but there is no preoccupation with what we would think of as the emotion of love per se. It seems that thinking about ‘romantic love’ is a luxury men cannot afford – their concerns are much more concrete. If ‘love’ is a part of a man’s life, so be it – but it is not a concern of the first order. He is much more concerned with the realia of ‘love,’ for example if he will get access to a woman he loves, or, on a more personal level, if he will be impotent (‘joy will not come to him in the acts of Aphrodite’) or ‘oversexed’: excess in sexual intercourse is predicted for both men and women in the case of one natal horoscope.
    The possibility of a happy marriage is there, but overshadowed by many fates of poor outcome, and there is much worry about quarrelsome marriage, emphasized by the frequency with which epitaphs of happily married couples state that they ‘lived without quarrels,’ perhaps sometimes protesting overmuch and at the very least validating that lack ofquarrelsomeness was something to be sought in a marriage.