What Did Ancient Romans Do All Day?What Did Ancient Romans Do All Day?

A Roman day, hour by hour: from the dark street before sunrise to the wagons at night. In this video: Where the "bread and circuses" picture of lazy Romans really comes from How Romans told the time with no watches, and the sundial that was wrong for ninety-nine years The first hours: morning calls at a patron's door for a handful of coins The working morning: lawyers, schoolmasters before the roosters, bakers and market days The sixth hour: the Roman midday rest The eighth hour: the baths, for the smallest coin in Rome, and what was floating in the water The ninth hour: dinner on couches, street food, and the truth about the vomitorium Whose day was it? The grain dole, the apartment blocks, and the few who had real free time Holidays, chariot races and illegal dice An eight-day week, a law about Sunday, and a city that never slept Sources: Martial, Epigrams 4.8, 9.68, 10.48, 12.57 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.212-215 Pliny the Younger, Letters 1.9, 2.11, 3.1, 3.5, 9.6, 9.36 Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius 56 and 86 Juvenal, Satires 1, 3 and 10 Suetonius, Life of Augustus 40, 71, 76, 78 Augustus, Res Gestae 15 P. D. Mitchell (2017), Human parasites in the Roman world: health consequences of conquering an empire, Parasitology 144(1), 48-58 E. Rowan (2017), Bioarchaeological preservation and non-elite diet in the Bay of Naples, Environmental Archaeology 22(3), 318-336 G. R. Storey (1997), The population of ancient Rome, Antiquity 71, 966-978 #AncientRome #RomanHistory #DailyLifeInAncientRome