The Ancients - How to Survive in Ancient Rome

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

This episode contains a reference to animal crueltyWould you be able to survive in ancient Rome?Today, Tristan Hughes is joined by Ben Kane to discusses the realities of daily life in the Roman Empire. Together, they discuss everything from street life and chamber pots through to pick pockets and slavery. Spoiler alert: it was quite smelly and dangerous.If you enjoyed this episode, Ben Kane also joined us for an episode on The Roman Legionary.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we are kicking off 2024 with a cracker. Imagine you've been sent back 2,000 years to ancient Rome, the eternal city. What would you see and what would you need to do in order to survive? Well, to explain everything from tombs to transport, from evading pickpockets to emptying chamber pots, well I was delighted to

have the historical fiction bestseller Ben Kane return the show. Now, Ben, he is a wonderful speaker who I interviewed about the Roman Legionary a few months back. It was one of our most popular episodes of 2023. So no surprise we've had him return so quickly to the show. I really do hope you enjoy. And here's Ben. Ben, always a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thanks, Tristan. It's great to be here. And this is going to be a really fun talk because it's so wide ranging. It's going to cover a lot of ground.

What it was like, who were the people who lived there, and did they have an easy time of it or a hard time? Come on, Ben, all of our talks are fun anyway, even if it is the Roman military. We're just doing something a little, little different today. I mean, with Rome sometimes known as the eternal city but sometimes and from movies and stuff we get these portrayals of rome as this very glamorous place in ancient history but your experience in rome it very much depended on your wealth where you lived some parts of rome and for some people of rome the life was better than for others. Yeah, like it was throughout the whole empire. If you were wealthy, you had a very nice life.

And if you're middle class, you had a decent life. But the vast majority of the Roman population in the city itself and throughout the empire were poor, and they had short, sharp, brutal lives. And it's estimated there were six to 10 slaves for every Roman citizen. And their lives, most of them, was worse than the ordinary people. So Roman streets, for example, you see in the movies, these great big wide avenues, the average street in Rome was about 10 feet across. And even at the height of the Roman Empire, there still would have been open sewage in some areas. So it wasn't necessarily, for many people, a particularly pleasant place to live. Sewage, roads, transport, we're going to delve into all of that over the next 40 minutes, my friend. If we were flung back to ancient Rome, let's say in the first century AD or first century BC, roughly 2000 years ago, what kind of city would we be greeted with?

So we mentioned a little bit about this in the previous talk. Dead people were not allowed to be buried within the city walls. It was very, very bad luck for Romans to do that. Quick segue. So the skeleton was found of a teenage girl inside the confines of a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall. That means almost definitely she was murdered because she was buried underneath the floorboards of a barracks. And we know that because of what I just said about where you could bury people. Going back to the original, if you go to Rome, be sure you visit the Via Appia Antica. That's the original Via Appia, about eight miles of which actually exists on the outskirts of Rome near the second airport. And you can actually walk on the cobblestones, original cobblestones with wheel ruts in the stones,

the main Roman road that led from the capital down to Brindisi, modern day Brindisi. And that is lined with tombs because you can't bury people inside cities. So approaching Rome, the last couple of miles, there will have been literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tombs. And Romans were very fond of building big tombs if they could afford it and telling people about themselves and their lives. There's a famous baker's one that has all the examples of his bakery industry. And it's absolutely enormous.

I mean, the thing is the size of a house. And this was a mere baker, but he was a millionaire baker. And we know from Roman literature and poems that this was the haunt of criminals and prostitutes. So you had to be careful when you were making your way into Rome. You didn't want to be doing it in the evening or you might be mugged. And what's also worth mentioning is that even though the roads are paved, you can't have a uniform surface like you can with tarmac with paving stones. So the stones are very uneven. And when there are ruts, basically, even in a wagon, you would have had a really bumpy ride. It wouldn't have been particularly comfortable.

It's worth mentioning the wall around Rome at this stage. Then you had the Servian Wall. And that was something that was built in the 4th century BC because a tribe of Gauls came down from modern day northern Italy and attacked Rome. And famously, the geese at the Temple of Diana were the only animals to sound the alarm, and the dogs that should have done didn't. And so there's a religious festival where they used to celebrate the geese every year. Most people don't mention that they also used to nail a live dog to the door of the temple as punishment for the unfortunate. Yeah, really awful. So the Romans were pretty barbaric in some ways, but there was this massive wall around Rome, many remnants of

which remain today. Only the foundations and the first few levels of bricks are original from that period, but they were built on and never fell down. And that was more than 30 miles in length with gates. And that's one of the reasons why Hannibal didn't besiege Rome. It's because it had two legions inside it and it would have been able to withstand a big siege. You had the River Tiber running through it as well, obviously, running down to the port of Ostia. And I thoroughly recommend any of you ever visit Italy. Most people don't know about Ostia. They don't go to Ostia.

It's a 20-minute train ride from the center of Rome. It's an entire Roman town, and there's nobody there. You wander around it for three or four hours and meet five other tourists. It's amazing. So they had the port, which supplied all the grain used to come in there, a lot of it, and obviously ships from all around the Mediterranean bringing in the vast amount of produce that its population needed, whether that was olive oil or goods from the Middle East and the Far East, slaves, animals that will have been trapped in Africa coming in

for the circus. And then you had the Seven Hills, obviously, you've all heard of that, the Palatine being where the emperor lived. And a very higgledy-piggledy arrangement of streets. There was no American grid or anything. This was something that had grown up from a small village. People living on the hilltops with marsh down below and mosquitoes and malaria, they drained the marshes, it gradually became a town and then a city and it just sprawled. So it was very, very disorganized, much of it. And you did have rich neighborhoods, but you often had, just like modern cities ever in the world, you had poor people living beside rich people as well, and middle class people living everywhere. But those streets, apart from a very

few, were very narrow. I mentioned that 10 feet wide, maybe at the maximum. And there would have been temples and public buildings in various public spaces. But there were also temples in the streets, and then residential areas. And most people lived in, although the rich lived in mansions, the most ordinary people lived in apartments. And I say that again, they lived in, although the rich lived in mansions, the most ordinary people lived in apartments. And I say that again. They lived in apartments and they were three to five stories tall. So think of a street that's 10 feet wide with five-story buildings each side. There's not much light and obviously no electricity.

So when it gets dark, it gets really dark. So these apartment blocks were often rectangular in shape with a hollow center so there was a courtyard and that would have been somewhere that was safe to be outside and to hang out your washing maybe because believe you me the streets of rome were very dangerous at night probably in the day as well in certain areas but at night because for a lot of rome's history there wasn't even a police force and even when there was there weren't very of them. You weren't allowed to have a bladed weapon in Rome. So your slaves that were protecting you maybe had big sticks and maybe knives, but you still want to be really careful on the streets.

And do we know much about these apartment blocks that it seems a large proportion of the Roman population lived in these insulae? We do, yeah. We know a lot about them. So Ostia that I just mentioned, that's got examples of them. And there are examples of them from, I believe, from Rome and other cities as well. They were historically built of stone on the ground floor with wooden upper stories. And they had wooden staircases that went up the outside of the building.

The ground floors were pretty much exclusively shops and workshops, and people lived above them. And the apartment blocks were divided into one-room apartments, although at Ostia there are examples of slightly larger ones. Generally, they were one room, and we're not talking large. We're talking maybe 15 feet by 20, maybe a bit smaller, maybe a bit bigger, depended on the building. But they were very confined spaces that entire family units lived in. And there was no sanitation. Although interestingly, in Ostia, there are some apartments with toilets, but most of them, it's believed, didn't have toilets. The cooking facilities would have been very basic as well.

People would have cooked on a brazier, which is essentially an iron bowl on a tripod stand in which you would have charcoal, just like a barbecue. Wooden building, braziers in every room. One falls over, you get the drift. Fires were a major problem, just like they were. Fire of London, 1666. I mean, that's fairly recent, but a huge portion of Rome burnt

down under Nero. More than, I think, about two-thirds of the city's precincts were really badly affected. And it was after that that buildings increasingly were built of stone all the way up. But there was no fire service for most of Rome's history. And when I say most of Rome's history, I'm referring to the Republic, the Kingdom of Rome, and then the Republic, because that lasted for longer than the Empire did. And it's worth mentioning at this point,

Marcus Licinius Crassus, who was the richest man in Rome, and he was in a trilogy I wrote about. What I didn't write about was how he got rich, and that was by employing his own private fire brigade, essentially his slaves.

And so what would happen is a fire would start in a neighborhood and you would spread really, really quickly from building to building, and obviously across streets because they were so narrow. And Crassus would arrive with his slaves. And the main way of fighting fires back then is they didn't have access to pumps and water. So they used to just pull down buildings either side of ones on fire as a firebreak, which is quite successful, you know, in certain circumstances. And Crassus would come along with

all his slaves with big long poles and hooks. And these distraught business owners would beg him to pull down the building beside their one before their business went on fire, their apartment block went on fire. And Crassus would stand there and say, what's it worth? And he would offer to buy their building for a fraction of what it was worth. And 10% of something is worth than 0% of something. And so people would sell and then he would get his slaves to do the firebreak. And that is apparently the way he became the richest man in Rome, by being completely unscrupulous. So fires were a major problem. And the other thing that's worth mentioning is sanitation.

So most people in the Roman Empire didn't live in a city or a town. They lived in the countryside and were farmers, and they didn't have sanitation, but they had the countryside. So they would go out the back, or they would dig a hole, and they would do the sanitation, but they had the countryside. So they would go out the back or they would dig a hole and they would do the necessary and so on. And presumably, if you're careful about it, it isn't that big a deal. But when you live in a big city in Roman times, you did have access to public toilets. That was a major perk.

It's worth mentioning here that not every Roman used a sponge on a stick. That's what most people think, thanks to TV. Sponges are soft corals from the Mediterranean, and if you don't have access to that, i.e. you're in a fort in Bulgaria or you're living on Hadrian's Wall, or your sponge fell down into the sewer while you were in the toilet and you can't afford another one, you will use whatever comes to hand.

You only have to ask a serving soldier in any country what they will do when they're out in the middle of nowhere if they don't have a roll of toilet paper and they will tell you grass, leaves, lichen, moss, their bare fingers if they have to. And I love when I'm giving talks, I have a slide that comes up as I say this, and it's two round flat stones from a museum in Britain that have 2,000-year-old human feces on them. And there's even a line from a Roman poet called Horace in one of his verses that refers to the man with the really red sore behind. And some historians think it's because he was using sharp stones. And the ancient Greeks used

to say three stones is enough to clean your bum. So it wasn't just the Romans that would do it. So major perk in the daytime of having public toilets, you're 10 o'clock at night, middle of the night, and you need to go to the loo, toilet. You're not going to go out on the street. So chamber pots were standard and plenty of examples of them have been found. And again, when I'm giving this talk, I love to illustrate this with a scene where you've got a husband and wife. Let's say they've got four kids. Everyone has a wee in the night.

One of the kids has a very upset tummy. So you've got that in the pot as well. In the morning, the father goes off at the crack of dawn because he's working hard somewhere. The mother is busy with the baby and cooking food. So she says to the 12-year-old child, carry that pot downstairs and empty it into the sewer. So there will have been places where you could empty these things into the sewer, or you could just throw it into the alleyway between two houses. And what I always say to the audience is, when I was a teenager, I didn't like doing what my parents said,

so I would have gone down two flights of stairs to make sure my mother didn't see me, and I would have poured the bucket out the window. And we have numerous accounts from England in the 13 and 1400s of people walking on the streets in London and having chamber pots emptied on their heads. So although I'm making that up, we've got a reference from the 1400s,

and I firmly believe that it wouldn't have been any different in Roman times. So you wouldn't have just had animal ordeal from wagons pulled by oxen and horses with messengers in the streets. You will have had potentially human ordeal as well. And so if you ever go to Pompeii, you'll see that the kerbstones are actually a good eight, nine inches higher than the level of the road. Yes. And we don't know why, but it's probably because when you've got heavy rain and water running down the streets, you don't want it flowing up to where you're walking.

And what's beautiful, and I don't know of examples in Rome, but there will have been because Pompeii was a small town. But the pedestrian crossing points in Pompeii have been constructed. They're still there such that there are stones that you can walk across stepping stones walk across without going down to street level and the gaps have been left between them wide enough for wagon wheels to go between and what's also incredible and lovely and shows you how smart the romans were is that the curb stones right at the pedestrian crossings in pompeii are slightly lighter colored stone than the ones around them. So in poor light, perhaps, you can go, I can see a crossing point because those stones are a

different colour. There's little things like that that really bring history alive because you're just like, yeah, that's like something I would do, you know, flashing lights or a zebra crossing, as we call it here in the UK. those stepping stones are really amazing that you say you can walk across today in pompeii and try to imagine something similar perhaps in rome some 2000 years ago it was interesting what you highlighted there we go down so many different avenues now but i will ask a bit more about sanitation first because you mentioned the sewer system now what do we know about the sewer system of rome was it beneath the streets what do we know about the sewer system of Rome? Was it beneath the streets? What do we know?

I'm not an expert on this by any manner or means, but I do know there was a sewage system built in Republican times. It was called the cloaca maxima. And any of you that know anything to do with birds, you'll know that they have a combined exit from their bodies for urine and feces, and it's called a cloaca. It's a vent. And so that's where the Latin word comes from. And what's truly remarkable is that the cloaca maxima is still used today. People think about building projects and a house lasting

100 years is great or whatever. But if you build something really well, it will last 2000 years. And I've seen a documentary where they had to put on biohazard suits and have breathing apparatus because it's so toxic. But they actually went down into the sewers and you can see the original Roman bricks. It didn't extend through the entire city as far as I'm aware. But it's one of those things that I've never seen described in a textbook. And my knowledge of it, like a lot of things to do with rome because it's still a city today the amount of archaeology that's been done on rome below ground is usually to do with the construction of metro stations and often gets halted because of what they find because there's everything there so i actually don't know a huge amount about the sewer system of ancient rome but

i wouldn't have wanted to go swimming in the Tiber. We were talking about that earlier. There will have, in my opinion, no doubt been sewage going into that and people throwing things into it and potentially dead bodies as well. It would have been a very aromatic place in the summertime because you would have had a million people living in it and many, many animals and no refrigeration. So food going off, you know, bodies found in alleyways and so on. And it would have stunk to high heaven. Tanners,

who are the people that deal with leather hides, they use a lot of very smelly products. And fullers, who are the people who used to dye or bleach i should say tunics and togas they used urine and so people used to there were places literally to pee so that your urine could be taken to bleach the fabric and that would have stunk to high heaven as well so hot summer days will have been quite something quite something something indeed. You mentioned animals there. So before we move on to looking at, you know, where you would try and find somewhere to stay if you want to get off the streets before nightfall, which seems like the real bad time

to be on the streets of ancient Rome. When you were walking up one of those streets, let's say during the daytime, would you constantly be seeing wagons and animals going past you with goods going in and out of the city down these small roads? What do we know about the use of these roads for transport in ancient Rome? Yeah, that's a great question and something I got a very annoyed email once about. So traffic was obviously very heavy because of the number of people that lived in the city who needed to be fed and they needed clothing and they

needed footwear and there were building projects stone and wood needed to be brought in it couldn't all be brought in by ship so traffic was actually very heavy and it was recognized as a problem because during the reign of the first emperor augustus who famously never called himself emperor because that would have been politically unacceptable. There was a ruling made where wagons were only allowed to come in at night. So a bit like you can have the same kind of law in big cities today, where trucks are restricted to certain hours of the day. It was decreed that wagons could only come in at night. And I'd written about wagons on the street in the daytime. And I got a very annoyed email from a reader that told me that I was wrong. But he was wrong because my book was set in the 50s BC and it only came in in the 30s BC.

So we know about this from a wonderful example. It wasn't wonderful for the person who wrote it, but one of the Roman authors, some of whose work survives, I should say. I think it might be juvenile, but I'm not sure. But he describes being kept awake at night by the constant noise of wagons outside his house. Because axles, wooden axles, you know, they creak and cattle make noises and wagon drivers shout at each other when two of them are on a narrow street and neither of them wants to back up, just like people today, you know, in the same situation in cars so it was obviously a big problem because he wrote about it yeah but that's quite interesting because you mentioned how these wagons they're going past at night but night is also the most dangerous time

to be navigating these roads in ancient rome quite true quite true but by that stage there were urban policemen so it was augustus who brought them in. And you've got to use your common sense here. If it's a builder with a wagon load of stone, he's probably not going to get robbed because thieves don't want stones. If it was a man coming in with a wagon load of amphorae of wine, which would be valuable, he probably had three or four hefty slaves with very big sticks. And in today's sanitized society, where most of us wouldn't dream of having a fight on the street, because we don't do that type of thing, that will have been a second away from happening in ancient Rome. Anyone that tries to come near your wagon, you'll just attack them because who's going to stop you if you don't stop them taking your wine? You know, it was a

very red blooded society of tooth and claw. And even though there may have been police investigations of assault and robbery and theft and murder were very badly investigated. And it was he said, she said, he said, she said. And if you're the wealthy person or the wronged farmer coming in with your wine and there's a dead scumbag, excuse me, lying there who was trying to rob you and you killed him, the cops aren't going to care. There wouldn't have been any kind of investigation

like there will be today, particularly if it was someone poor who died or a slave. I mean, you could kill a slave and there was no legal repercussion, literally no legal repercussion. So slaves, when they had a bad master, they didn't do what the, in the first century AD, there was a slave owner between Rome and Naples who was so horrible that one of his slaves murdered him in his sleep. And the response of the authorities was to execute all 400 of his slaves. And so that delivered in very uncertain terms what happens to you if you hurt your master.

So if you had a horrible master as a slave, you ran away, if you had any sense. well if we go back to the scenario that we've entered ancient rome during the day and you've described horribly horrifically what the scene would have been like. But you want to find somewhere to stay and you don't own property in Rome. You want to find somewhere to stay before it gets dark and it gets very dangerous. What would you do? You would look for a tavern or an inn. So we know that they existed in towns all around the Roman Empire. There's a good example of one in Zantan on the River Rhine.

And I don't know of many examples that have been described in Rome, particularly other than drinking places where people went to drink. But there, without doubt, just like there have been in every city since the dawn of time, there will have been hostels and taverns and so on. And there will have been various qualities of taverns and so on. And there will have been various qualities of those depending on what you could pay. And so people would have literally asked, and I'm sure there would have been little boys running around offering you what you need, just like you get if you're in India or somewhere like that. Nowadays, there are people at bus

stations and railway stations saying, do you need a place to stay? There will have been very easy to spot the tourist, the person who isn't at home. And so that's what people would have done. And I'm sure that people who had apartments would have potentially sublet spaces in the courtyard. I'm not aware really of many written cases of what exactly happened.

But again, it's like so much to do with ancient Rome. You just use common sense. So find somewhere safe park your wagon if you can and keep your purse very close to your body well Colin let's talk about the purse then and keeping hold of your possessions from pickpockets and thieves which seems to be so rife if you were walking through Rome let's say you're at the market stalls or you're just going through the streets I mean what measures do we know that Romans took to try and make sure that their belongings weren't stolen? Yeah, that's a good question. And we talked about

this in one of your videos that you shot last time we were talking. The most viral video I've ever had. Wow. Wow. So Roman women wore dresses and Roman men wore dresses, tunics, long tunics that went down to the knee. They didn't have pockets. And it isn't until you wear a tunic a lot, like I do, giving my talks or walking Hadrian's Wall, you realize how useful pockets are. And so carrying money was a problem. And people had purses. I've got several examples of these.

And they're just literally leather bags with drawstrings, all copied from archaeological finds throughout the Roman Empire. I've got several examples of these, and they're just literally leather bags with drawstrings, all copied from archaeological finds throughout the Roman Empire. No same size uniformity in size or shape. All you need is a bag with a drawstring. It doesn't have to be any particular shape or size. And so that's how most people carry their coins. And they either held them in their hand, or they looped them around their waist at the belt and i there was a annoying example of this yesterday i was giving a talk in two schools and i had my leather purse strap hanging around the strap from my roman army belt and my mobile phone was in it and it fell off while i was walking on the street and i didn't notice and it got picked up by someone and not

handed in so i did actually laugh at at it because that would have happened to people if you didn't pay attention to the long drawstring and looping it enough times around your waist. That still wouldn't stop. A cut purse, think of the word, someone literally just cutting that off your belt in a crowd, very easy to do. So there were ways around that.

One of my favorite objects that I've ever seen in a museum, and I've only seen it in one Roman museum, it's Great Chester's Fort on Hadrian's Wall, and it's a bronze arm purse. So it's a band of bronze that goes around your arm, and perhaps, if you think of it as a circle, perhaps 120 degrees of it is enlarged into a sort of hollow shell-like affair that's U-shaped and has an opening that only opens when you take it off. It's the bit that fits against your arm. So it's this slightly flattened U-shape, about a third or half the circumference of your arm that can hold something. You put coins in it. It can hold quite a few few coins and you slip it on with the money the coins

in your armpit essentially and it fits underneath the arm of your tunic and you can slide it off your arm and in front of you at a stall pay for something and slide it back on without anybody seeing that you're wearing it and it won't fall off and you can't cut it off either and my first question i got one made so i photographed it loads of times and i got a roman artisan to make one for me and i was showing it to a roman reenactor friend of mine who makes roman footwear and he's been in that world for years and i said to him but it would rattle it would make noise and people would know you had one and he said oh they found them with wool in them so clever romans were clever so people would have had those and anyone who had money enough would have had

a big slave behind them with a big stick or more than one slave with a big stick so you know a bit like it was in london until the 1800s i mean the british police force founded by sir robert peel known as peelers only came into existence in the early 1800s 200 years mean, the British police force founded by Sir Robert Peel, known as Peelers, only came into existence in the early 1800s, 200 years ago. Before that, the streets of London weren't probably much different to Rome. You need another person with a really, really big stick. That's the message I'm taking away from this so far. I mean, that is so interesting. And I like how we're kind of focusing on this kind of dangerous aspect of Rome, because we should for those living every day and the everyday difficulties that they would have faced because you've highlighted how people

buying goods from these various market stores could have had things like these arm purses to try and protect their wealth and the money that they're spending but what about the people who own the stores themselves who are receiving this money from vendors who are selling their goods at the end of the day you know there's no credit cards back then. The money you've acquired is all there physically. And then at the end of the day, you've got to bring that back to where you are, whatever, to try and make a living. Do you know how they try to protect themselves?

Simple answer is no, we don't. We do know what, for example, open-fronted restaurants in Herculaneum, how they shut their doors. They literally had wooden shutters that they just pulled across the front of the shop. And you can see the groove down at the bottom of the counter. And they were really light shutters. But then a restaurant potentially doesn't have much of worth taking. People had big wooden chests. They had very primitive padlocks and keys, iron-bound chests. But it would have been a dangerous thing if you were making perfume, perhaps,

or you were selling jewelry. But again, it would have just gone back to the amount of security. And maybe people actually left the wealth in the shop in a very big chest and had really good ways of locking up the shop. It's worth mentioning what street life was like as well, because, and we know this from Pompeii and Herculaneum, it won't have been any different in Rome, that nowadays in the age of the internet where you can order anything you like and it comes tomorrow, and you can, especially in Britain, I don't know about America, but you can

order your groceries to be delivered tomorrow as well, so you don't even have to go and do that. When you need a pair of shoes, you don't have to go to a shoe shop. When you need some fish, you don't have to go to a fish shop. In ancient Rome, it was very different. So think a street in India, if you've been anywhere like that, or maybe Istanbul or a farmer's market in the UK where you have people with cheese and sausages and nice artisan goods, every Roman street, and there will have been quarters where there would have been more carpenters or butchers and

others, but there will also have been a huge percentage of the city where they were just all mixed up. So there were bakeries, lots of them, lots of restaurants. People often ate on the street because cooking was very dangerous in your house and food was cheap. But you will have had people making literally everything. So I've mentioned a perfume shop. You will have had scribes. You will have had carpenters, butchers, ironmongers, fish shops, meat shops, places selling fabric. People making everything you needed to live in your house or your villa or your apartment. And they will have been present on a ubiquitous basis throughout the whole of the

city. And so street life was very, very busy and bustling constantly because of that commercial aspect. It wasn't just people going to and fro like it is maybe in cities today. You mentioned security that it's worth mentioning here. The word bank comes from the Latin word bankus, which means bench. And that comes from the open spaces. So if any of your listeners have been to the forum in Rome, the central beating heart of every Roman city was the forum. It's where political business was conducted and speeches were made. It's where often lawyers were found and scribes as well. And there were great big roofed but open-sided buildings called basilicae, which had lawyers and scribes in them and moneylenders. So if you

needed to expand your business and you needed a loan to do so, you would go and approach a moneyl lender in the forum and he would be sitting there with documents to draw up to make legal contracts for people to borrow money and he would have quite a lot of money sitting on the table in front of him, potentially, and he would have big guys behind him and weighing scales and so on.

And people would do business and they would borrow money. And the story that I was mentioning to you earlier, Tristan, was this wonderful example from Roman Egypt of a woman moneylender. So sadly, because women were second-class citizens and not educated to the same standard as men, couldn't hold political office and all the whole nine yards, we know very little about Roman women other than a few letters from Hadrian's Wall and some poetry by Sappho.

There's almost nothing surviving that was written by women in the Roman times, even though they were half of society. But there's this beautiful example from Roman Egypt of a woman moneylender. And I've sworn that I'm going to put her in a novel sometime because she must have been one tough lady to be able to live in that world and cut it. Because it was, I would say, quite a dangerous job. I mean, absolutely. And that grey, that highlight, how bustling it was, that street life, with all those types of shops. And you say those moneylenders too.

I must also ask, if we take a step back, if you are walking through the streets of Rome, and you've already mentioned how it would be a very noisy place with all the wagons and animals and so on. Do you have any idea what languages you might hear if you're walking through Rome some 2,000 years ago? Yeah, you would have heard every language of the Mediterranean basin and potentially further afield. Scientists recently have concluded from skeletons and other evidence that the population of Rome in the first century AD was one third immigrant.

So you will have had obviously Italians and Italianate peoples, but you will have had people from Gaul and Germany, and you will have had potentially Britons. You will have had Phoenician traders from modern day Lebanon and Syria. You would have had North Africans, Numidians. There will have been slaves from sub-Saharan Africa as well, potentially. A lot of Middle Eastern people. We know of an embassy that came from China in the 160s AD, all the way to Rome. So Chinese people in Rome. We even know there are examples of Roman silverware and so on being found in Scandinavia. Now, it's highly possible that they were just tribute to chieftains concluded in Germany, perhaps,

but it's not inconceivable that you would have had people from Scandinavia there as well. And so it would have been a real melting pot of all types of shapes, sizes, and colors of people. A real melting pot indeed. And away from the languages that you can hear, also when you're walking through the streets,

you mentioned how there are these people, you know, who'll be offering you a place to sleep for the night and so on and so forth. But on the walls of these streets, would you also see like advertisements and graffiti and various types of art either for selling something or notice boards almost? Yeah, great question.

Thank you. So your average Roman building was painted usually a deep ochre colour up to about chest height. And after that, it was plastered white. And there was no electricity, obviously. So shops could not advertise what they sold with a neon light or indeed any kind of electric light. So what they would do is they

would actually paint a motif on the wall or a symbol of what was being sold. How do we know this? Because they found examples of it in Herculaneum. So if it was a wine shop, you would have an amphora painted on the wall outside the shop. If it was an ironmonger's, you would have a pair of shears painted on the wall outside the shop. How did people advertise themselves as political candidates? Well, when they wanted to stand for office, they would pay groups of men to go around painting and writing messages on street corners. How do we know this? Because they found examples of them in Pompeii and Herculaneum. So it would say, such and such a man, this is his three name, Praenorm and Cognomen, and the third one I can never remember, is standing for the office

of Aedile, and he's going to hold gladiator games on such a date with so many fighters, vote for him. That's what people would do. They would also write, I love such and such a waitress in this restaurant, and she doesn't love me. That's from Pompeii. Quite rude stuff as well. People would draw little stick gladiators saying, this fighter beat this fighter, and so on. You know, people would write anything on the wall. There was a wine shop in Herculaneum, one of my favorite ones I've ever seen. If you think about going to a restaurant or a bar nowadays, you can buy quite a lot of the wines by the glass. You don't have to drink them by the bottle. And there's a wine

shop in Herculaneum, and the fresco from the wall outside is almost entire. And there are four jugs that you can see, and they're all different colors. And the price of each one is written down below. So there's a cheap one and a not so cheap one and a medium priced one and an expensive one. And above it is written ad cucumas, which means by the glass. And just think that's no different to a restaurant today. It's worth mentioning as well about water troughs

and the advent of bringing water into a town. So although we mentioned that I write a lot of books about the Roman military, one of my favorite textbooks is How to Run the Roman Home by Alexandra Krum. It's a slim little paperback, but it's absolutely brilliant at describing how you clean a house that doesn't have electricity, and when you you use a broom what type of broom do you use and what was the furniture like in a roman house it was really simple think ikea think really bare stools not chairs really simple beds chests very few cupboards but the water one of the things that really brought it home to me was taking scientific information from about 100 years ago and from

countries in Asia and Africa where still today millions of people don't have access to running water. They have to walk to a river, however far that is, and bringing all their children that are strong enough to do so before the kids go to school. They carry water back to the house and when the kids come home from school they all go and do it again. And a common amount of time every day for carrying water to and from your house is four to six hours, 365 days a year. So when I'm giving this talk, I say, when's the last time you turned on a tap and you thought, this is really easy? We don't, we just take it for granted. But when you bring through the advent of aqueducts and this obviously happened after Rome was built and so a lot of the cities like Pompeii and so on there were a lot of houses that were built that

didn't have sanitation and then had to that when they brought it in they couldn't put it in the houses so they put it on the street because that was easier than trying to get it into all the houses. But having a water trough on a street corner, I'm going to say 200 feet from your front door, is a life-changing thing for you. Can you just go down, it's fresh water, 24 hours a day, you fill up your thing, and you've got a two-minute walk back home again. So that is a major plus that's worth mentioning. Potentially more than sanitation. so public baths we should talk about them too come on then we haven't got too much time but let's talk about public baths

as well because the image i'm getting so far is that to try and survive in ancient rome if you were thrown back there it's finding a place to stay quickly before it gets dark but also during all the hours of lights that you have available, there's no kind of resting and relaxing. It's either you need to find somewhere to work quick to get the money in, and also to bring in daily activities like gathering water and so on. Yeah. A real boon advantage of living in a city was the public baths, that has to be said. And there were lots of them in Rome, and they were present in all Roman towns and quite civilized. So men and women had separate bathing times, but public nudity was the norm.

And so when you went in, you took off all your clothes, and there were alcoves above the bench that you sat on where you put your clothes. In Britain, we'd call it a leisure center or a sports center where there's a gym and a swimming pool. Nowadays, you put your trainers and your phone and your keys in a locker and you have a band around your wrist well two thousand years ago they didn't have them so roman poet described how your sandals would be stolen unless you gave the attendant who would have been a slave interesting a coin so you give the guy sitting there on a stool a coin and he looks after your stuff and your sandals don't get stolen. I would say you wouldn't take your purse to the public baths. The public baths were a real social part of Roman society. This wasn't somewhere where you went just to get clean.

So you had these big complexes of refreshment pools where you could splash your face and then cold pools, warm pools, hot pools, rooms where you could have a massage, and so on. But they were somewhere that people would go potentially to hang out for half the day, or maybe even more. And it was common to do business at the baths as well. So people would actually meet and while they were going around, be dealing with business. And it is worth mentioning, though, that they didn't change the water very often. And so if you went in in the morning, it would be nice and clean. But by the end of the day, it wouldn't. And although Romans' understanding of medicine and disease was very poor compared to today,

it was recognized, again, a Roman poet wrote down that you didn't want to go to bathe if you had an open wound. So that kind of changes your opinion of how nice Roman baths were, doesn't it? Absolutely. And I put that in my notes, they go to the baths early in the day rather than at the end of the day. Lastly, if we also talk about religion as well, or if you're also walking down one of these streets, you see graffiti on the walls.

Would you also see much art or different types of, well, yes, I guess art, from small to big things, statues or little carvings in the walls also around most corners, either to religion or other stuff? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, there were temples throughout Rome. It's worth mentioning that another thing you would have seen on walls was public notices. So the Romans really liked laws and rules. There's a joke in Roman times that even the horses in the Roman army had three sets of paperwork. And so you'll all be familiar with street stalls,

people selling rugs or nice cheese or whatever at a market. When you do that, wherever it is in the world, you've got to have a permit from the town council. They found a Roman one of them. They found a wall in ancient Rome which had a permit from the town council they found a roman one of them they found a wall in ancient rome which has had a plaque on the wall it says no one can sell anything here unless they have a license from the city magistrates just things like that i just go it's amazing so yes there will have been statues of not just of the emperor because that was a way having statues of the

emperor augustus started it with uniform images of himself all around the empire. It's a way of making everybody recognize who the boss is and establishing that as an instrument of state. But the temples, there were literally hundreds of them in Rome. And unlike most houses of worship for whichever religion today in which you go inside to worship, the altars of pagan temples, because I'm talking pre-Christian here, Rome didn't become Christian until the 4th century AD, which was when it was definitely on the way down compared to the heyday. So the altars of shrines were outside and big statues inside, but you will have had statues of important people, magistrates and emperors all

around as well. And ceremonies took place outside the shrine. So this will have been another really vivid, bustling part of life because you will have had people selling the things for you to offer. So commonly people would offer a little miniature amphorae or they would offer pieces of pottery. You could put food there. You could leave coins. You would have had people offering to read the future for you, charlatans, obviously all of them. And you will have had animals being sacrificed as well. So that was the most powerful way you

could get the attention of a god. Women most commonly died in childbirth. It's very common for crops to fail. And all those were given a divine reason because people didn't understand, you know, babies get stuck or they didn't understand you can have a disease like a fungus kill your wheat crop. So people would go and pray at the relevant god or goddess. Romans were very egalitarian in that regard. They didn't really care what god or goddess you worshipped and indeed happily adopted the gods and goddesses from all around the empire. A very good way of helping to subjugate people is if you continue to allow them to practice their own religion and you don't try and crush it,

but they would then often take it on themselves. For example, Isis, not the horrible terrorist organization, the goddess, was a god in in rome and mithras who was a mystical god potentially from turkey there are temples to him in rome and sacrifices took place outside these these temples and when they'd finished sacrificing say a sheep they would chop it up and they would give the meat out free so poor people would be hanging around looking to get meat so you think of these things as being just about religion. It wasn't.

I mean, the kids would have been hanging around. The poor kids was going, just can they finish it now? Because I want to get a bit of meat and take it home to my dad because he's going to give me a clip around the ear if I don't come home with something. You know, I know I'm making that up,

but it's entirely feasible to think because in many ways, the Romans were just like us. In many ways, indeed. Ben, this has been really great. Any last words of wisdom for how to survive in ancient Rome? Oh my goodness me.

Speaking fluent Latin would be useful. I've often thought what would happen if I got transported back to ancient Rome. Looking the same as people, you know, if you go to a country and you look very different, then you really stand out as a tourist. Like when I went to Mexico and South America. So trying to fit in would be quite good. And one thing that I still utilize is when I come out of an airport, out of the arrivals hall, I never slow down. I walk really fast, 50 meters away from all

the taxi people and everything like that, to a quiet corner where I can look at my phone or look at my map, because I look like I know what I'm doing. I don't know whether that would work in ancient Rome or not, but it works for me so far. Well, Ben, on that note, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. Thank you. Thank you, Tristan. Well, there you go. There was the one and only Ben Kane

talking all things how to survive in ancient Rome, from baths to disposing of human waste with chamber pots, to those amazing objects, those arm purses used to try and keep your money away from prying pickpockets in places like the Forum or just going down an everyday street of ancient Rome. I really do hope you enjoy today's episode. It is a symbol of the great array of riches that we have recorded for the podcast already that we can't wait to

share with you in the weeks ahead from the Ice Age to more on Rome and Roman emperors, to mysterious peoples and buildings of the ancient world, from Western Europe to Mesopotamia and beyond. Stay tuned for all of that. Last thing from me, wherever you're listening to The Ancients, whether it be on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts or on another service, make sure that you are subscribed so you don't miss out. We release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.