What Did Ordinary Romans Actually Do All Day? 24 Hours

Imagine waking up in the richest city on Earth with two tunics, one clay pot and no kitchen. By nightfall you will have eaten the emperor's free grain, bathed in marble for a quarter of an as, shared a toilet bench with strangers and screamed with 150,000 people at the races. And not one minute of it will have been private. This is one ordinary Roman's whole day, hour by hour: the twelve stretchy Roman hours, life under the roof tiles of an insula, the dawn queue at a patron's door (salutatio and sportula), hauling water up five flights from the street fountain, a shift at the dye works, the grain dole (annona) and the hill of broken jars at Monte Testaccio, lunch at a thermopolium counter, the public baths and the Bath curse tablets, the shared latrine, the Circus Maximus and the charioteer Diocles, a woman's day of wool and work, and a city night of carts, thieves and the vigiles. We compare it with the real daily schedules Martial, Horace and Pliny wrote down themselves. Sources: Martial, Epigrams 4.8 and 9.68; Horace, Satires 1.6; Pliny the Younger, Letters 3.5 and Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.214; Juvenal, Satires 1, 3 and 10; Seneca, Moral Letters 7, 56 and 70; Claudia's epitaph (CIL 6.15346); the Bath curse tablets (Tabulae Sulis); Pompeii Regio V thermopolium excavation (2020); A. Koloski-Ostrow, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy; G. Jansen et al., Roman Toilets. Ancient quotes are paraphrased; population, dole and attendance figures are estimates given as ranges. If you enjoyed walking through a Roman day, subscribe for more stories from the streets of ancient Rome. Chapters: 0:00 Intro: A Nobody in the City of Marble 0:52 A Day Measured in Shadows 3:38 Life Under the Roof Tiles 6:27 Paid to Say Good Morning 9:20 The Fountain and the Five Flights 12:03 Hands Blue to the Elbow 14:52 The Emperor's Grain Sack 17:47 Lunch at the Counter 20:35 Luxury for a Quarter of a Coin 23:35 A Bench Built for Fifty 26:25 A Hundred and Fifty Thousand Throats 29:32 She Worked Wool 32:27 When the Watchmen Walk 35:25 Everything but a Door #RomanHistory #AncientRome #RomanEmpire #HistoryDocumentary #DailyLifeInAncientRome #AncientCivilizations