020 Римские квартиры

In April 44 BCE, a month after Caesar was murdered, Cicero wrote to a friend that two of his rental shops had fallen down and the rest were cracking: not only the tenants, but even the mice had moved out. You'll often hear that ancient Rome was basically us, with apartment blocks, landlords and a housing crisis. Some of that is true. Some of it is upside down. So we rented a flat in a Roman block for one day, from the shops at street level to the rooms under the roof tiles, and checked it against the record: the painted to-let notices of Pompeii, the Roman law of leases, Cicero's letters about his rents, and the satirists Martial and Juvenal on noise, fire, collapse and the wagons that kept them awake. Why the first of July was moving day. Who your landlord really was. Why the best flat sat low and the cheapest at the top. And which famous numbers about Roman apartments don't hold. Every quote is read from its ancient text in a translation we name, every figure is given as its source gives it, and every picture is captioned with the place and date it's from, or labelled when it isn't. In this video 0:00 Even the mice 1:01 The first of July 4:32 Dawn, at the shop 6:08 The good floor 8:00 Three flights up 11:13 Under the tiles 13:31 Fire 15:45 The night carts 16:53 Rent day, today Where this comes from Cicero, Letters to Atticus 14.9 and 14.10 (Winstedt's translation, 1918): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51403 Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum IV (1871), nos. 138 and 1136, and its Supplement: https://archive.org/details/inscripti... The Digest of Justinian, book 19.2 (the law of leases), Latin text: https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alp... Martial, Epigrams (Ker's translation, 1919-1920): https://archive.org/details/epigramsw... Juvenal, Satire 3 (Ramsay's translation, 1918): https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ju... Bruce W. Frier, The Rental Market in Early Imperial Rome, Journal of Roman Studies 67 (1977): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa... Ostia: the House of Diana and the Garden Houses (ostia-antica.org): https://www.ostia-antica.org/regio1/3... Plutarch, Life of Crassus 2 (Perrin's translation, 1916): https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/... Pictures and credits North Lincolnshire Museum, Martin Foreman (Portable Antiquities Scheme), CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Lalupa, CC BY 2.5: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Patrick Denker, CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Marie-Lan Nguyen (Jastrow), CC BY 2.5: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Patrick Denker, CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Stock footage: Pexels Archive photos and engravings: Wikimedia Commons (public domain) Maps: Natural Earth (public domain) #History #AncientRome #HistoryMyths