Your Life as a Roman Plebeian

You probably pay rent, live stacked on top of strangers and buy lunch from a counter on the street. Two thousand years ago, so did a million people in Rome. Tova wants to know what life was really like for a nobody in Rome: not an emperor, not a gladiator, a plebeian. You move in with Bram on the top floor of an insula, the Roman apartment block, where the poorest lived highest. You walk the Subura, eat at a street-food counter, line up for the free grain, work, borrow money before the Kalends, survive the fire every Roman feared, and spend your free time at the chariot races, the public baths and the shared latrine. Chapters 0:00 A nobody in Rome 0:41 Your apartment 2:09 Your street 3:11 Your food 4:18 Your work 5:33 The fire 7:13 Your fun 8:31 Your life What the evidence says The city of Rome may have held about a million people under Augustus (scholars' estimates vary). Augustus limited the height of apartment blocks (insulae) to 70 Roman feet, about 68 feet (Strabo). The cheapest rooms were at the top. Part of a real insula, the Insula dell'Ara Coeli, still stands at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. Cicero wrote (Letters to Atticus 14.9) that two of his rental shops had collapsed and the rest were cracking, so that even the mice had moved out. The poet Juvenal (Satire 3) complained about rent, night-time cart noise, buildings propped up on thin poles and things thrown from windows; Roman law allowed a claim for damage caused by anything thrown or poured from a building. Many apartments had no kitchen; street-food counters were everywhere. A counter excavated at Pompeii in 2019-2020 still shows painted ducks and a rooster, with food remains in its jars. From 58 BC registered male citizens received free grain; under Augustus about 200,000 men received roughly five modii (about 70 lb) a month. Fullers cleaned wool with urine; the emperor Vespasian taxed it ("money doesn't smell", Suetonius). Debts were due on the Kalends, the first day of the month; the moneylender's account book, the kalendarium, gave us the word calendar. Augustus created the vigiles, a force of freedmen firefighters and night watchmen, in AD 6. Plutarch's story that Crassus bought burning buildings cheaply is told here as an anecdote. The Great Fire of AD 64 burned for about six days; of Rome's 14 districts, 3 were destroyed and 7 badly damaged (Tacitus). The violin did not exist until the 1500s. "Bread and circuses" comes from Juvenal (Satire 10). The Circus Maximus may have held around 150,000 spectators. Entry to the public baths cost a quadrans, the smallest coin. Shared multi-seat latrines survive at Ostia; whether Romans used the sponge on a stick (tersorium) for wiping is still debated. Sources: Strabo, Geography 5.3.7; Cicero, Ad Atticum 14.9; Juvenal, Satires 3 and 10; Suetonius, Vespasian 23; Tacitus, Annals 15.38-41; Plutarch, Crassus 2; Digest 1.15.3 and 9.3; Jerry Toner, Popular Culture in Ancient Rome (2009); Mary Beard, SPQR (2015); Parco Archeologico di Pompei (Regio V thermopolium, 2020). Tomorrow, Tova's next question: how ancient humans hunted animals ten times their size. Ancient humans, every day: one question about how people really lived. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.