How Did Ancient Romans Sleep Without Modern Beds?

How Did Ancient Romans Sleep Without Modern Beds? You have been awake for what feels like most of the night, but that is not quite right, because the night is not a single thing here. It has a seam in it. Somewhere around the third hour of darkness, you woke up — not because anything startled you, not because of the noise from the street below, though there is noise, there is always noise — but because your body told you to. The first sleep is done. You lie in the dark on your lectus, a wood-framed platform with a wool-stuffed mattress that cost more than you paid for last month's rent, and you are awake in the way people are awake in the middle of a Roman night: not anxious, not sick, just awake, the way your body has always been awake at this hour, the way your father's body was, and his father's before him. In another hour you will sleep again. You know this. The city outside is not quiet — Ostian grain carts are banned from the streets during the day, so they come through now, wooden wheels grinding on stone, drivers shouting — but the noise is not what woke you. What woke you is the same thing that woke every person in this city tonight. The night has a hinge in it, and you are sitting at the hinge, and you have no word for insomnia because lying awake in the dark for an hour is not something that would occur to you as a disorder. It is just what nighttime is. What you do with this hour is the question. And the answer turns out to say more about what it meant to be a Roman than almost anything that happens in the light.