What Did an Ordinary Roman Do All Day?

What did an ordinary Roman do all day? Ancient Rome had no weekend: no Saturday off, no Sunday off. And yet the internet says Romans worked half days. This history documentary follows one ordinary Roman, a shoemaker in the city of Rome around AD 100, through twelve Roman hours, from the baker shouting before dawn to the wagons under his window at night. Daily life in ancient Rome looked nothing like the marble version. You will see how Romans lived in tall apartment blocks, why a Roman hour lasted 45 minutes in winter and 75 in summer, what the poet Martial meant by "the seventh will be the end", how the Roman baths worked for the smallest coin in the empire, and what the grain dole really gave the 200,000 men on the list. This is everyday life in ancient Rome, a day in the life of the people nobody wrote about. The shoemaker is invented. Everything around him is not: every number and every quotation comes from a Roman source listed below (Martial, Juvenal, Seneca, Strabo, Pliny, Augustus). If you like Roman history, ancient history and Roman daily life told without emperors and battles, this is the first episode of Ordinary Day. CHAPTERS 0:00 No weekends 1:30 Before the first hour 2:42 The second hour: Roman time 3:39 The third hour: the street 4:30 The sixth hour: midday 4:58 The seventh hour: whose day was it? 6:01 The eighth hour: the baths 7:24 The ninth hour: bread and grain 8:05 The twelfth hour: night 8:57 The weekend he didn't have 10:24 Three questions for you 11:00 One ordinary day SOURCES Martial, Epigrams 4.8 (the hours of the day): https://pages.pomona.edu/~cmc24747/so... Martial, Epigrams 14.223 (the baker at dawn): https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/marti... Martial, Epigrams 12.57 (no place to think or rest): https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ma... Juvenal, Satire 3, tr. A. S. Kline (the tenant under the tiles, 190-231; sleeplessness, 232-267; the candle, the will and the windows, 268-314): https://poetryintranslation.com/PITBR... Strabo, Geography 5.3.7 (the seventy-foot limit): https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/... Apartment blocks and houses in the city lists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_...) Roman hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_t... Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 3.3 (the curse on the sundial): https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/... Rome's first public sundial, 263 BC (Pliny, Natural History 7.213-214): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History... Pompeii, bakeries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeii Pompeii, bars and food counters: https://the-past.com/feature/lets-go-... Daytime wagon ban: Tabula Heracleensis (Lex Iulia municipalis) Historia Augusta, Hadrian 22.7 (no baths before the eighth hour): https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/... Baths and the quadrans fee (Horace, Satires 1.3.137; Seneca, Letters 86): https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/... Agrippa's 170 baths (Pliny, Natural History 36.121): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baths_o... Seneca, Letters 56 (living above a bathhouse): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_... Augustus, Res Gestae 15 (the grain list): https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/... The grain ration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_dole Market days and the eight-day week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae The Sunday law of AD 321: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week Historia Augusta, Marcus Aurelius 10.10 (230 court days): https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/... Quotations from ancient authors are paraphrased for narration; follow the links for the full texts. Illustrations were made for this channel in the style of old-master oil paintings. More ordinary days:    / @ordinarydayhistory   This video is for educational purposes. #ancientrome #romanhistory #dailylife