088 - A Day in the Life

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Hello and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 88, A Day in the Life. When the sun rose, so too did the Romans. For the country population, this was only natural. After all, they had to get out in the fields and get working. But even in the cities, a Roman daily life revolved around daylight. Across the empire, whether farmer or lawyer, slave or emperor, the first crack of light was your cue to get up and get going. The Romans made a number of civilizational leaps that helped bridge the gap between prehistory and the modern world, but one conspicuous absence was any sort of public streetlight network in their cities. This meant that whatever you need to get done today has to be done while the sun is still up. And if darkness fell, you had better be safely back home, or you're going to be in for a long night. So there was no time to waste, and the Romans wasted no time. There was no such thing as a morning shower, a leisurely breakfast, or even a cup of coffee. The Romans slept in their underclothes, woke up, slipped on their overclothes, grabbed a glass of water, and maybe a few nuts or a piece of bread for breakfast, and were out the door literally minutes later.

As Pacean liked to brag, that he could go from sleep to ready for work in thirty seconds. But just because all Romans got started at dawn did not mean that they were all natural larks, as poor old Marcus Aurelius testified in a quote near and dear to my own owlish heart. Obviously pained to be forever awakened at such a hideous hour as dawn, the Stoic emperor chronicled his recurring internal debates as he fought each morning to do the right thing. At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, as a human being, I have to go to work. Why am I complaining if I'm going to do what I was born to do, the things I was brought into this world to do? Is this really what I was created for, to snuggle under blankets and stay warm? But you say, it's nicer here. I see, so you were born to feel nice, is that it? Not to do things and experience them? But we have to sleep sometime, you say, and I agree. But nature set a limit on that, just as it did with eating and drinking, and you're over the limit. You've had more than enough of that, and when it comes to working, you're still below quota. This is usually the point where I personally would roll over and go back to sleep, but then again, I sometimes think I would have made a pretty lousy Roman.

Once out of bed, the Roman farmer went off and did what farmers do. They worked all day in the fields, came home, ate some dinner, and went to bed. Since that's not a particularly interesting routine, I'm going to spend the rest of the episode focused on the lives of the folks in the city. Just remember as we go along, though, that 90% of the empire's population simply spent all day slaving away in the fields. When you get right down to it, for most Romans, that's what Roman daily life was. But again, boring, so off to the city we go.

Just as they did not linger in bed, Roman men did not linger at home either, and most were hitting the streets as soon as they physically could. Roman women during the age of the Antonines usually spent most of their days indoors, so after they woke up, they either fussed with their hair, if they were wealthy, or began the household chores, if they were too impoverished to have slaves do it for them. You'll recall from two weeks ago that the annual income of the average Roman was subsidized by the morning calls they paid to their patrons, and so naturally that was the first thing the men did after waking up. The only men who remained at home during these crucial early hours were those high enough on the socioeconomic pyramid to be receiving visits, rather than making them. If you were rich enough, you rolled out of bed, welcomed in the waiting mass of clients, and began dispensing the daily allotment of cash and prizes. Clients were received in order of prominence, with equites cutting ahead of the lower class schleps and senators cutting ahead of them. The trick then was to get there early, so you could be received before the richy-riches started showing up and forcing you to wait in the wings. That way you could pay your respects, get your cash, and then get along with the rest of your day, or have time to hit up a few more patrons.

For those of you wondering what the patron got out of all this, after all, votes were no longer a valuable pro-quo, so why even bother? The answer is that for the super-wealthy, even more prestigious than being surrounded by a ton of slaves was being surrounded by a ton of free citizens who called you their patron. If a large entourage of slaves was the fancy car of the Roman world, a large entourage of clients was the private jet.

If you had a job, after you paid your respects to your patron you hustled off to work. If you didn't, you called on a few more patrons and then generally loafed around the city, playing the part of spectator at legal proceedings or chariot races, depending on whether it was a work day or a holiday. The Romans didn't observe the same regular work week that we've grown accustomed to, five days on, two off. But by no means did that mean that they worked every day, or even, God forbid, five days in a row. The Romans loved their days off even more than we do, and each month was packed with holidays of various shapes and sizes and purposes. The old Republican calendar listed about ninety days of public holiday throughout the year, but by the reign of Claudius that number had grown to at least a hundred and fifty, and that number did not include the steady stream of spontaneous holidays, festivals, and games that emperors were forever declaring to shore up support for their regime. In all, Jerome Carcapino reckoned that by the second century, Romans, at least in the capital, enjoyed roughly one holiday for each day of work, and that is something I think we can all get behind.

When it was, sigh, a work day, everyone was settled in fully by mid-morning. Retail shops were open in the commercial spaces that existed on the ground floor of almost every tenement building in the city. Restaurants, taverns, and inns served food and drink to passerbyers. Barbers worked on the men's daily shave that everyone was socially obligated to undergo, until Hadrian finally put a stop to that unpleasant madness. Trade gills managed the imports and exports of their city from offices adjacent to the Forum. Manufacturers, brickmakers, potters, and the like toiled in their various districts, and everywhere in between, manual laborers built, moved, picked up, and set down the ever-changing landscape of the city. The streets were crammed with people, and chaos reigned. Everyone was trying to get somewhere, and everyone else was trying to sell something, or beg for something, or announce something to those walking and riding by. The porticos of every building were jammed with makeshift businesses of every sort, and run by businessmen of every nationality. Adding to the general craziness were the children of the empire, suffering through the lessons of their teachers, who usually taught in these same porticos.

Adding to the chaos was the fact that these crowded streets had been laid out haphazardly and without an ounce of foresight. The city had grown organically over the centuries, and an accurate street map, if such a thing was even possible, would have just looked like a jumble of random lines. Some roads crossed themselves, others were far too narrow for the arterial traffic they now bore, while others led to nowhere at all. In setting up colony cities, the Romans always planned the streets using a grid system, centered on a well-calculated axis. But the mother city was beyond hope, the dark shame of the obsessively Type A Romans.

The hustle of economic life that energized every inch of every street, reached its peak in the forum. Most cities and towns in the empire were built around a forum, the large open area that served as the center of political and economic life. This was where the ruling councils would meet, the main religious temple stood, and the primary business of any extended metropolitan area was conducted. By the second century, Rome itself had long outgrown the forum, and various rulers, Julius Caesar, Augustus, the Flavians, and most recently Trajan, all built additional forums near the original to accommodate the increase in both population and economic activity.

It was in these forums, too, that the famously litigious Romans sued the bejesus out of each other. Every day, in various public buildings around the various forums, judges, jurors, lawyers, defendants, plaintiffs, and spectators, all crowded together to parse through the ugly business of suing and being sued. Where your case was heard, and by whom it was heard, depended on the facts of the case. Romans sued each other over everything, and, just like today, there were attorneys who specialized in contract law, and family law, and estate law, commercial law, criminal law, employment law, international law, and, of course, there was the Roman equivalent of the ambulance chaser, who drummed up business by being first on the scene any time they heard of anything bad happening to anyone, anywhere. Cases were submitted and trials began each morning, and were supposed to last until around But continuances, appeals, and recesses would often push things well into the late afternoon. Civil cases were usually presented to a body of jurors, overseen by one of the year's praetors. Membership in the jury pool was a mark of distinction, and the pool usually consisted of young men with political ambition. Appeals in either civil or criminal matters could be made to the supreme judicial body, which, in the second century, meant the emperor, who would then be forced to come and sit in session to sort it all out all over again.

Roman law probably deserves its own dedicated show, and hopefully I'll get around to writing it one of these days. The procedural intrigues alone are worth the price of admission. But today, I want to focus on the trials as an aspect of everyday life, rather than on the particulars of how the Romans kept each other honest. For the general public, the courtroom battles were a source of daily amusement when there were no games to attend. Just as in the arena, there were favorite advocates and orators, who would be followed around by fans, who would cheer noisily for their hero's well-turned phrase, and hiss the opposing counsel. Sometimes, these fan clubs would be kept on retainer by theatrically inclined attorneys looking to stack the deck in their client's favor by packing the house with noisy supporters. The courtroom sessions would begin in the morning, and were supposed to be wrapped up by noon, but, like I say, things never ended on time. By the time court adjourned at the end of the day, everyone was exhausted. The judges from being forced to sit and listen to windbag advocates zealously and overzealously represent their clients, the attorneys from having to perform sederations, the clients from sitting and waiting and sweating out their fate, and everyone else from being crammed into too close quarters for too long.

When the last case came and went, everyone quickly hurried to their favorite public bath of choice, where the average Roman spent the better part of his late afternoon. It wasn't just the courts that shut down in the afternoon. Across the city, and this is true both for Rome itself and the hundreds of municipalities across the empire who followed the capital's lead, the workday drew to a close in the early afternoon when the heat became unbearable. Siestas were a common way to break up the day, as work gave way to recreation, but after catching a quick nap, and maybe a light lunch of cold meat and bread, Romans of all stripes headed down to the baths.

If the forum was the focal point of political and economic life, the baths were the center of social life. The public bath was a luxury that had grown in fits and starts over the course of the Republic, but by the age of the Antonines it had developed into an indispensable part of daily life. During the Middle Republic, baths began to appear in the private residences of the rich, as the virtuously dirty Roman citizen-farmer gave way to the clean and cultured leader of the world's ruling class. Eventually, wealthy patrons began to construct bathhouses in their neighborhoods of residence for the general public to use. During his year as aedile in 33 BC, Agrippa took account of the public baths in Rome and came up with 170 scattered across the city. By the time his term was over, there were at least 171, as Agrippa built one himself that he generously announced would be free to the public forever. Over the course of the next century, the popularity of the baths would explode and by the reign of Trajan, plenty of the younger would reckon that there were more than a thousand in Rome alone.

At first, the bathhouse was a simple unit. Usually there would be some changing rooms, a cold pool, and a hot pool, heated from an underground furnace and pipe system run by slaves. But as time passed, the bathhouse became a full-blown recreational complex. In addition to the litany of hot baths, cold baths, warm baths, private baths, air baths, steam baths, and any other kind of bath you can dream up, there were also sport rooms where you could wrestle, work out, or play one of the myriad ball games the Romans had come to love. If rigorous activity wasn't your thing, there were gardens, promenades, sitting rooms, and even libraries. All pleasantly landscaped and providing ample shade from the heat or cover from the rain. In the promenades wrapping around the complex, retail shops sprang up, with legitimate vendors selling food, drink, clothes, and jewelry, while their black-market cousins dealt in less savory wares.

Depending on which emperor's reign we're talking about, the baths would be opened in the early or late afternoon, and at some point an hour or two would be set aside so that women could have the baths to themselves. That didn't mean that there wasn't mixed bathing, just that, if she wanted to, a Roman woman could bathe in peace. The bath would then stay open until around nightfall. Some citizens came and went quickly, staying just long enough to get clean, but others began to see the baths as the whole point of life. These loafers would line up and wait for the doors to open, and then stay until they were kicked out at closing time. Everyone in between these two extremes would enjoy a leisurely bath, maybe work out a bit, or stroll through the gardens before returning to the hustle and bustle of the city. You get the very real sense that for most Romans, the bath was their sole refuge from the pressures of an otherwise hot, dirty, and noisy city.

After the bath, everyone would retire to their residences to get ready for the one formal meal that the Romans actually enjoyed, dinner. As we've seen, breakfast and lunch were catch-as-catch-can meals of cold meat, bread, nuts, fruit, and water. Anything that could be eaten on the run or while preparing to be on the run. Dinner though, was a different story. The family would actually sit down together to eat hot dishes served on real, actual plates. Though sit down is the wrong word. They would actually recline on couches, propped up on one elbow while they ate, because anything less would be uncivilized. A curious historical footnote on the subject concerns Cato the Younger, who, just before the Battle of Pharsalus, declared that he would eat sitting down in a chair until the tyrant Julius Caesar was dead. After Caesar won, Cato apparently followed through on this threat, and never reclined while eating again, a small but daily protest against the fall of the Republic.

But getting back to the topic at hand, on most nights, dinner was a meal shared not just with the family, but also with close friends. The Romans, in other words, were big on dinner parties. Usually good taste and size constraints kept the total numbers between six and nine, but the wealthy in vain liked to throw parties for thirty guests or more, with multiple tables and dozens of courses. Getting invited to dinner was serious business in Rome, and the satirists of the imperium had a field day with the antics of freeloaders forever angling to get themselves invited to dine, and jealous potential hosts fighting over the most prestigious guests. But leaving the mockery aside, everyone invited everyone else to dinner every night, and then returned the favor the next night. Going out to eat meant going over to a friend or colleague's house for dinner, as the fancy restaurant had not yet been invented.

The meal itself could range from a modest three or four courses, to preposterous dozens, with intermissions in between the main eating bouts. The Romans should not be mistaken for great culinarians, but by the second century they at least had the whole empire from which to draw their ingredients, and even if preparation sometimes left a great deal to be desired, the smorgasbord of dishes was still impressive. Fish from the Mediterranean and wild game from the forest was standard fare, but boar, goose liver, oysters and lamb all made appearances on the menu. These main dishes were served with asparagus, apples, olives, grapes, beans, pumpkins, eggs, figs, cabbage, and dozens of other exotic fruits and vegetables from across the empire and beyond. The drink of choice, in all houses, was wine. Often heated in the winter and chilled in the summer, aristocratic Romans took their wine selection as seriously as they do today, and often paid top dollar for the best years and vintages. Everyone else, meanwhile, drank whatever bottom-shelf jug of viscous alcohol they could afford.

To underscore how important wine was to daily life, I should point out that those free grain allotments I have been talking about also included free allotments of wine, because apparently, starving to death and remaining sober for a whole night were roughly equivalent catastrophes in the mind of the average Roman. Due to the limits of their distilling technology, what the Romans purchased was actually more of a wine concentrate than it was the table-ready wine that we know today. The concentrate would be mixed with water before serving, usually half and half, but sometimes as high as one part wine for five parts water. Only the most debauched hedonist actually drank the wine straight.

The average dinner began around four in the afternoon, depending on the time of year, and lasted until just before sundown. Appetizers and main courses and desserts came in the order that we are accustomed to, and the evenings were usually interspersed with informal musical or poetic performance. But unless you and your companions were crazy brave, everyone said their goodbyes as the sun began to set. This was to ensure that guests had a chance to make it home before being engulfed by a terror more frightening than Hannibal leading an army of barbarian Gauls, the city at night.

As I said, Rome had no streetlights. Folks who were out after dark had to make do with personal torches to light their way. So being out after dark was a dangerous proposition for three reasons. One, Rome was a maze that was easy to get lost in during the day, and almost impossible to navigate at night. One wrong turn and you were spending the night in the street. Two, night was when the most unsavory of unsavory characters emerged from Rome's ample underbelly. That wrong turn may not just make you late, it may also get you mugged, beaten, or killed. And three, in an attempt to decongest street traffic during the day, Julius Caesar had decreed that all commercial shipments be delivered only at night. The precedent stuck for the remaining life of the empire, which meant that the poorly lit streets of Rome were, preposterously, crammed with carts making deliveries. One wrong step, or one reckless driver, and that was it. All of this added up to the universal understanding that Rome after dark was no place anyone wanted to be. Best to be at home with the doors locked and the windows shuttered by the time the sun went down. Besides, you had to be up at dawn the next morning anyway.

So that's a bit of a slice of daily life. Up at dawn, work into the afternoon, take a bath, have some dinner, and go to bed. Obviously, we could add several layers of complexity to this story, and I hope to eventually add a few of those complexing layers, and deal with things like sanitation, clothes, the theater, and of course, the races and gladiatorial shows. But for now, I think we're off to a pretty good start.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to take next week off, but we'll be back for sure in two weeks to go on a tour of the provinces. Then the hundredth episode, then it's back to business. Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, the wars that erupted in the East and along the Danube, at least one really major plague. Then the handoff to Commodus and his assassination, the rise of Septimus Severus, and then the total political, economic, and social breakdown that accompanied the fall of his dynasty forty years later.