People have all sorts of reasons for hating Washington — the cost of living, the traffic, the summer humidity — but near the top of the list is this: In Washington, the first question people ask when they meet you is, “What do you do?”
WAMU 88.5 recently broadcast an in-depth examination of that question and how some Washingtonians are pushing back against it. Congregants at Capitol Hill United Methodist Church, for example, are discouraged from asking "What do you do?" Some people prefer questions like "what are you passionate about" or "what brings you joy?"
Just don’t answer “my job,” because you know where that might lead: “Oh, really? What do you do?” Then you’re out on your ear.
I don't see anything wrong with that question. Sure, we shouldn't be defined solely by how we earn a paycheck, but a job still tells us a lot about a person. Even if you don't like your job — "I'm a congressman from Texas but my real passion is decorative tole painting" — it's an entry point to further conversation.
I've been pondering this since reading "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome," a wonderful new book by Cambridge University classics scholar Mary Beard. In one section, Beard writes about how proud ordinary Romans were of their jobs. We know this because they were quite specific about it on their tombstones. Some Roman tombs featured elaborate carvings depicting the deceased at work, surrounded by the tools of his or her trade: shoes if he was a cobbler; knives if he sold cutlery; skeins of wool if he was a purpurarius, a person who dyed cloth purple (an exacting and important job in a society where only senators and the emperor were allowed to wear the color).
Such trimmings don’t appear on the tombs of Rome’s uppermost echelons, Beard told me when I phoned her in England. But, she said, “when you actually look at how those people lower down the social ladder actually chose to memorialize themselves, or would memorialize their parents or their loved ones, you find a whole culture in which the idea of work — of what you do, of what you make, of what you sell — is really, in a sense, part of who you are. . . . In many ways, the ancients were much more talkative about themselves than we have become.”
Not all of them. The Romans we know best — Cicero, Pliny — would have looked down their Roman noses at anyone so declasse as to actually work. They defined themselves by the vast tracts of land they owned, by their speaking skills or political influence. At parties attended by the Roman elite, no one was asking, "What do you do?"
Said Beard: "We don't actually know what people said at parties lower down. If only we did, it would be really great. The evidence that we have suggests that you were very up front about it. You'd say, 'I'm Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, the baker.' You came out with your trade or your craft as part of your identity."
And that identity was celebrated after your death. The tomb of Eurysaces — a successful high-volume baker and, Beard writes, likely an ex-slave — is incredible. It resembles bread-making equipment and is topped by friezes illustrating the bread-making process.
I like these Romans. Last week in my column, I mentioned a man named Joseph Krause, who in 1881 sailed to the Arctic to help search for a missing expedition. On his return, he joined the post office and spent his entire career delivering letters by bicycle.
Imagine what a Roman tombstone maker could have made of a life like that: the icebergs, the envelopes, the wheels. Instead, Krause’s tombstone at Walker Chapel Cemetery in Arlington, Va., is a slab of granite inscribed with little more than his and his wife’s names.
“It’s really interesting that modern tombstones, even of the relatively wealthy, tend now to be quite succinct,” Beard said. “We expect on a modern tombstone to have the date of birth, date of death, the name and perhaps what they did — perhaps. But ancient tombstones, including — perhaps especially — those below the elite, don’t have the date of birth and death. They probably had no clue when they were born. But they do really invest in the jobs that they did, in a sense talking about themselves as craftspeople.”
I’m going to continue behaving like a Roman, unafraid to ask people what they do. And though I hope I won’t be in the market anytime soon, I can see myself in a tombstone decorated with notebooks, rollerball pens and tape recorders. And chiseled alongside of them: a newspaper and a computer screen.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
