24 Hours in Ancient Rome: A Day in the Life of the People Who Lived There

211 Pages·2017·3.76 MB·English

by  Philip Matyszak

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
HORA NOCTIS VI (00.00–01.00)
THE WATCHMAN HANDLES A COMPLAINT
HORA NOCTIS VII (01.00–02.00)
THE CARTER IN A JAM
HORA NOCTIS VIII (02.00–03.00)
THE BAKER STARTS WORK
HORA NOCTIS IX (03.00–04.00)
THE SLAVE GIRL PREPARES BREAKFAST
HORA NOCTIS X (04.00–05.00)
THE MOTHER CARES FOR HER SICK BABY
HORA NOCTIS XI (05.00–06.00)
THE IMPERIAL MESSENGER SETS OFF FOR BRITAIN
HORA NOCTIS XII (06.00–07.00)
THE SCHOOLBOY STARTS MORNING CLASS
HORA I (07.00–08.00)
THE SENATOR GOES TO MEET HIS PATRON
HORA II (08.00–09.00)
THE VESTAL VIRGIN GATHERS WATER
HORA III (09.00–10.00)
THE JURIST CONSULTS ON A CASE
HORA IV (10.00–11.00)
THE TEENAGER BREAKS UP WITH HER BOYFRIEND
HORA V (11.00–12.00)
THE STONEMASON WORKS ON AN IMPERIAL TOMB
HORA VI (12.00–13.00)
THE TAVERN KEEPER AT LUNCHTIME
HORA VII (13.00–14.00)
THE WATER-CLOCKMAKER STARTS A PROJECT
HORA VIII (14.00–15.00)
THE BATH ATTENDANT CHECKS IN CUSTOMERS
HORA IX (15.00–16.00)
THE HOSTESS ORGANIZES THE EVENING
HORA X (16.00–17.00)
THE WASHERWOMAN DOES A LATE SHIFT
HORA XI (17.00–18.00)
THE COOK GETS FRANTIC
HORA XII (18.00–19.00)
THE PRIESTESS PREPARES TO SACRIFICE
HORA NOCTIS I (19.00–20.00)
THE SPICE TRADER SETS OUT FOR DINNER
HORA NOCTIS II (20.00–21.00)
THE PROSTITUTE FINDS A CLIENT
HORA NOCTIS III (21.00–22.00)
THE ASTROLOGER CASTS A HOROSCOPE
HORA NOCTIS IV (22.00–23.00)
THE GLADIATOR STRUTS HIS STUFF
HORA NOCTIS V (23.00–00.00)
THE PARASITE RETURNS FROM DINNER
ENDNOTES
PICTURE CREDITS
INDEX
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I
NTRODUCTION
It is early September in the year AD 137. Rome’s empire is almost at the height
of its power. The imperial eagles have been carried into Mesopotamia and Dacia
(and back out again, in the case of Mesopotamia). From the Thames to the
Tigris, Rome is mighty, feared and respected.
Most of the people we encounter in this book don’t really care about that. For
them, life is not about celebrating the glory of empire but about making the rent,
coping with difficult relatives and the daily challenges of home and work. Rome
might be the greatest city on earth, but those living here still need to navigate the
traffic, get on with the neighbours and find good, reasonably priced food in the
markets.
This book takes us through one day in the life of Hadrian’s Rome, with the
city seen from the very different perspectives of twenty-four of its inhabitants.
We begin at the sixth hour of the night – rather confusingly, the Romans started
the twenty-four-hour day at midnight, but began counting the hours of the night
from the previous sunset. This is just one example of the many ways in which
the Romans saw the world differently from how we see it today.
From the viewpoint of the modern reader, many of the people described here
live short, squalid lives in an unjust and highly unequal society. Death from
infection and illness is omnipresent. Health care and policing are rudimentary,
and most social services non-existent. Yet that is not how the people of Rome
perceive things. For them, injustice and disease are universal hazards, to be
endured and accepted. With all its flaws and inconveniences, Rome is still a
better place to live than almost anywhere in the world. Rome has the same
disadvantages as everywhere else, but its advantages are incomparable.
Not that the people of this city spend much time wandering about, gawping at
their monuments and great civic buildings. They have lives to get on with, and it
is into these lives that we take a brief look during this late summer day. Note,
though, that our main purpose in doing so is not for what we can discover about
the lives of individual people in Rome, but for what they can tell us about Rome
itself. Because the Greeks and Romans believe that even should you take away
itself. Because the Greeks and Romans believe that even should you take away
the walls, buildings and roads, you still have a city.
The people are the city: the buildings and monuments later generations of
tourists will admire are secondary, important only as the physical echo of the
people who built and lived among them. For this reason there are few
monuments in this book. The buildings we do encounter are not a set of sterile
ruins but one part of a lively, multi-layered and challenging environment.
In the same way, the twenty-four men and women we meet today are not just
the inhabitants of Rome – they, and hundreds of thousands like them, are Rome.
This book is not an attempt to reconstruct the hours of the day for two dozen
individual Romans – it strives to reconstruct a slice of the life of the city itself,
reflected in twenty-four of its many thousands of facets.
While the people in this reconstruction are (largely) fictional, their lives are
not. From the point of view of the modern ancient historian, antiquity is less
about ‘Great Men’ than about the social infrastructure that underpinned those
men and their deeds. Consequently, archaeologists, sociologists, epigraphists and
those in a host of other disciplines have contributed to giving us an overall
picture of how ordinary people lived and worked in ancient Rome. This book has
drawn upon all these sources, and also upon the most valuable resource of all:
the anecdotes, jokes, speeches and correspondence of the people who actually
lived there.
The classicist will note where – in the cheerful knowledge that the copyright
on these works expired centuries ago – the writing of a host of contemporary or
near-contemporary Romans is woven into the text, from the letters of the erudite
Pliny to lewd graffiti salvaged from brothel walls. As far as possible, the people
of Rome speak of their experiences for themselves here and, for those Romans
who had no voice in their society, this book attempts to speak for them. Often,
examples of the original sources are given as excerpts, which accompany the
main text, and in many cases the experiences of numerous individuals have been
combined to depict one hour in the day of a single person.
The totality of these twenty-four hours is more than the sum of its parts. In the
end, this book has only a single protagonist. That protagonist is the city of Rome
– a teeming, bawdy, barely governable ant-heap of a place. Its flaws are many
and sometimes horrifying, yet we nevertheless find in this city a huge energy and
optimism.
There’s an entrepreneurial spirit and an unflinching belief that, no matter how
good or bad things may be, they can always be made better. In Rome, the slave
strives to be free, the freedman to be prosperous, and the wealthy merchant to be
accepted by higher society. While often complaining bitterly about their lot, the
Romans are seldom resigned to it. They are dynamic, not depressed. They are
convinced of their own superiority, and imbued with the feeling that, now they
are here at the centre of the universe, they should make the most of it and kick
and claw their way to a better life for themselves and their children.
Ancient Rome was more than a collection of buildings. It was even more than
a society of interlocked communities of very different peoples and individuals.
Above all, ancient Rome was an attitude.
HORA NOCTIS VI
(00.00–01.00)
T W H
HE ATCHMAN ANDLES A
C
OMPLAINT
The fact that Petronius Brevis has a child – a daughter – gives rise to much
ribald humour in the small apartment block that he calls home.
The wife of Petronius Brevis works at a fishmonger’s stall in Rome’s Forum
Piscarium. As part of her job she has to supervise the transfer of live fish. These
fish are brought to Rome at night in barrels of water. They are shipped live to
avoid the problem of the fish spoiling during transport from where they were
caught. Once extracted from the barrels, during market hours the fish swim
around in shallow basins carved into the shop’s stone counter-tops. That way
Romans can get their fish really, really fresh. In fact, it is not unusual for a fish
to be served at the table within an hour of its demise at the fishmonger’s.
Getting the fish out of their barrels and into their counter-top basins needs to
be done before the first shoppers hit the forum around sunrise, and this means
that the wife of Brevis has to leave home an hour beforehand. Before she sets off
for work she usually prepares breakfast and leaves this on the kitchen counter for
her husband to eat when he gets in, although, given the hour he will arrive, he
might view it as supper.
Brevis usually arrives home an hour after his wife has left for work, after
which he eats his meal, has a quick wash and retires to bed. For Petronius Brevis
is a member of the Vigiles, the Night Watch of Rome, and by that time he has
been on his feet for the past nine hours. Thanks to their overlapping work hours,
sometimes Petronius does not see his wife for a week. That’s where the jokes
about his daughter come from, as the neighbours speculate about how the
conception was managed.
At the moment, Brevis has several long hours of his shift to go. He and his
At the moment, Brevis has several long hours of his shift to go. He and his
squad have a dual function: while the vigiles are charged with maintaining law
and order on the streets after dark, this is really incidental to their main task,
which is fire prevention. After all, the damage a violent drunk or even a
murderous mugger can do is tiny compared to the havoc wrought by even a
moderate blaze. Rome is divided into seven districts for fire prevention
purposes, and Brevis and his colleagues are well aware that it was in the district
covered by their cohort – Regio II – that the worst fire in Roman history began.
This was in AD 64, and the fire that started in these winding streets near the
Circus Maximus eventually grew into a conflagration that was only brought
under control six days later – by which time well over a quarter of Rome had
been completely destroyed.
The Great Fire
On the hot, breezy summer night of 19 June ad 64, a fire broke out in one of the shops that lined the
street-side walls of the Circus Maximus. As the historian Tacitus later explained, ‘There were neither
mansions screened by boundary walls, nor temples surrounded by stone enclosures, nor obstructions
of any description to bar its progress.’
Tacitus – who experienced the fire for himself while a lad – gives this description from personal
experience: ‘The streets were clogged with fugitives. There were shrieking and terrified women, the
disabled and the aged. There were men looking out for themselves or for others, some with the
infirm on their backs, or waiting for them to catch up. While they looked back [the fire] attacked
them from the flanks or from the front. Sometimes they escaped into a neighbouring district only to
find it in an even worse state than the one they had just left.’
Many believed that so great a fire must have been helped along its way, and suspicion developed that
the Emperor Nero had decided on the fire as a drastic form of urban clearance, after which he would
rebuild Rome according to his own plans.
The jerry-built street traders’ stalls, the warehouse sheds and the upper floors
of many buildings are all of wood, tinder dry and jammed so close together that
there is barely a single structure that is not touching another. All it takes is a coal
spat out from a badly made fire, or an unattended oil lamp knocked over by a
foraging rat, and within minutes a wall of flames might come sweeping down the
street that Brevis and his squad are patrolling.
MODEL OF A ROMAN FIRE ENGINE. THE ROCKING LEVER OPERATED A FORCE PUMP.
Little wonder that the watch have the power to break into any premises where
they suspect a fire might get out of control. As well as statutory powers to fine
careless businesses or householders, the watch are not above handing out some
basic physical chastisement as well. Given the huge danger that a fire presents to
the neighbourhood, the epithet ‘fire-starter’ is among the worst insults one
Roman can throw at another, and there is little sympathy for anyone at the
receiving end of the vigiles’ attentions.
Once a blaze has been detected, the unit has long-established protocols for
attacking the fire. In the short term, they see to the evacuation of nearby
buildings and organize a bucket-chain from nearby residences. All households
have to keep a certain amount of water on hand for just this purpose, and Brevis
and his men can tell you to the minute how long it takes for a bucket-chain to
reach from any part of their patrol route to the nearest fountain. An unfortunate
junior member of the squad is the designated ‘blanket man’, and carries vinegar-
soaked blankets with which to smother any small fire before it gets going. If
reinforcements are needed, the cohort fire engine will be pulled up. The fire
engine is not a new invention – the ancestors of the machine used by the vigiles
were putting out fires in Egypt centuries before. It was a Greek inventor working
for the Great Library of Alexandria (a man named, appropriately, Hero) who
first worked out the principles of a pump powerful enough to force water
through a fire hose.
Every cohort of vigiles has specialists. There are, of course, doctors who tend
to those roughed up by muggers and vigiles who sometimes come second in a
bruising encounter with a large gang of thugs. There are also those injured by