A Typical Day in Ancient Rome ...
The ancient Romans started their day with breakfast.
The lower class Romans (plebeians) might have a breakfast of bread, dry or dipped in wine, and water. Sometimes olives, cheese, or raisins were sprinkled on the bread. In 1AD, it became the custom to distribute bread daily to the unemployed. Workmen, on their way to work, grabbed some bread, and ate it on the way.
The upper class Romans (patricians) enjoyed fresh meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, bread, and used honey to sweeten food. (Sugar was unknown). They had slaves to cook and clean. Slaves cut their food for them, as they didn't use forks or knives, but ate with their fingers. A wet towel was handy (or brought by slaves) to tidy up after a meal. Early in the morning, schoolboys, on the run, often stopped at a bakery for a quick meal, or to buy a pancake to eat on their way to school.
Then, they got dressed to go out.
Clothing & hair styles
The very early Romans wore a toga. It looked like a white sheet 9 yards long. Togas were arranged very carefully, in a stylish way. Togas fell out of style rather early.
(The toga was inconvenient, and people felt the cold when they wore it.) To get anyone to wear them, even very early emperors had to legislate the wearing of togas by at least senators. Eventually, the emperors gave up. The Romans switched to comfortable tunics, which looked like long tee shirts. They were far more practical. Tunics were made of cool linen, for summer wear, and warm wool, for winter wear. Sometimes, they wore trouserlike affairs.
Roman Soldiers/Armour
It’s interesting to note that most Roman armour probably did not shine. They used a lot of chain mail (a sort of cloth made of circular links), which doesn't shine. They also made scale armour (metal plates about 3 inches long and about an inch wide, sewn together on a linen/leather backing.)
Scale armour shines a little, but not much. And, they made leather armour, with the metal on the inside, or at least under the leather, probably again on a backing of linen, to make three layers. So, although the ancient Romans loved the ornate and glittery, their armour most probably did not shine!
Roman Men
Rings were the only jewellery worn by Roman citizen men, and good manners dictated only one ring. Of course, some men did not follow "good taste", and wore as many as sixteen rings. Hairstyles and beards varied with the times. In early Roman times, men wore long hair and full beards. For a while, they were clean-shaven with short hair. About 1AD, they had started to style their hair and wear beards again.
Roman Women
Women enjoyed gazing at themselves in mirrors of highly polished metal (not glass).
The ancient Roman women loved ornate necklaces, pins, earrings, bracelets and friendship rings. Pearls were favourites. Women often dyed their hair, usually golden-red. They used false hairpieces to make their hair thicker or longer. Sometimes, Roman women wore their hair up, in carefully arranged styles, held with jewelled hairpins. Sometimes they wore it down, curled in ringlets. Parasols were used, or women might carry fans made of peacock feathers, wood or stretched linen. Women's street shoes were made of leather, like a man's. In the house, most Romans (men and women) wore sandals. Women's sandals were brightly coloured. Some were even decorated with pearls.
Roman Boys
Boys wore a tunic down to their knees. It was white, with a crimson border. Once a boy became a man, he put aside his childish clothes, and wore an all-white tunic.
A boy became a citizen at age 16 or 17. The year was selected by choosing the date which came closest to March 17th. Coming of age, becoming a citizen, was quite a celebration. On a boy's sixteenth or seventeenth birthday, the boy dressed himself in a white tunic, which his father adjusted. The day ended with a dinner party, given by the father, in honour of the new Roman citizen.
Roman Girls
Girls wore a simple tunic with a belt at the waist. When they went outside, they wore a second tunic that reached their feet.
Bulla
Children wore a special locket around their neck, given to them at birth, called a bulla. It contained an amulet as a protection against evil and was worn on a chain, cord, or strap. Girls wore their bulla until the eve of their wedding day, when their bulla was set aside with other childhood things, like her toys. Boys wore their bulla until they day they became a citizen. Boys’ bullas were put aside and carefully saved. A boy's bulla could be wore by the owner again, if he won special honours. For example, if he became a successful general, and won the honour of triumph, he would wear his bulla in ceremonial parades, to protect him from the evil jealously of men or gods.
Once they got dressed, adults might wander down to the Forum, to do their shopping and banking.
The Forum was the main marketplace and business centre, where the ancient Romans went to do their banking, trading, shopping, and marketing. It was also a place for public speaking. The ancient Romans were great orators. They loved to talk (although not nearly as much as the ancient Greeks!) The job of their orators was not to argue, but to argue persuasively! People thronging the Forum would stop and listen, then wander away to do their shopping, and perhaps leave a gift at a temple for one of their gods. The Forum was also used for festivals and religious ceremonies. It was a very busy place.
School
The goal of education in ancient Rome was to be an effective speaker. The school day began before sunrise, as did all work in Rome. Kids brought candles to use until daybreak. There was a rest for lunch and the afternoon siesta, and then back to school until late afternoon. No one knows how long the school year actually was; it probably varied from school to school. However, one thing was fixed.
School began each year on the 24th of March!
In early Roman days, a Roman boy's education took place at home. If his father could read and write, he taught his son to do the same. The father instructed his sons in Roman law, history, customs, and physical training, to prepare for war. Reverence for the gods, respect for law, obedience to authority, and truthfulness were the most important lessons to be taught. Girls were taught by their mother. Girls learned to spin, weave, and sew.
About 200 BC, the Romans borrowed some of the ancient Greek system of education. Although they did not add many subjects, they did begin sending their boys, and some of their girls, with their father's permission, to school, outside their home, at age 6 or 7.
The children studied reading, writing, and counting. They read scrolls and books. They wrote on boards covered with wax, and used pebbles to do math problems. They were taught Roman numerals, and recited lessons they had memorised. At age 12 or 13, the boys of the upper classes attended "grammar" school, where they studied Latin, Greek, grammar, and literature. At age 16, some boys went on to study public speaking at the rhetoric school, to prepare for a life as an orator.
Did the kids of the poor go to school? At the poorer levels, no. School was not free. Nor should anyone imagine large classes in special buildings. Children, educated outside of the home, were sent to the house of a tutor, who would group-tutor. Children, educated in the home, were taught by intelligent and gifted slaves. Children, in poorer homes, did not have slaves to teach them; they were taught by their parents, as they were in early Roman days.
Baths
The ancient Romans might hit the baths first, and then wander down to the Forum, although many did prefer to get their shopping done early. In all but the largest baths, there were separate hours for men and women. The women's time slot was apparently much shorter, so that women probably had to be more careful scheduling. Large baths had duplicate facilities.
The Public Baths were extremely popular. Roman women and men tried to visit the baths at least once every day. The baths had hot and cold pools, towels, slaves to wait on you, steam rooms, saunas, exercise rooms, and hair cutting salons. They had reading rooms and libraries, as among the freeborn, who had the right to frequent baths, the majority could read. They even had stores, selling all kinds of things, and people who sold fast food. The baths were arranged rather like a very large mall, with bathing pools.
The baths were packed. The people loved them. At one time, there were as many as 900 public baths in ancient Rome. Small ones held about 300 people, and the big ones held 1500 people or more! Some Roman hospitals even had their own bathhouses. A trip to the bath was a very important part of ancient Roman daily life.
Could kids use the baths? No. Was there an admission charge to the baths? Yes. Could slaves use the baths? Properly, no. But the people who could, as a matter of course, brought their slave attendants with them.
In the afternoon, wealthy Romans took some time to rest at home, or to relax with friends. The poor worked constantly.
Luncheon was usually a cold meal, eaten about 11 o'clock in the morning. Lunch was bread, salad, olives, cheese, fruit, nuts, and cold meat left over from dinner the night before.
Siesta
After lunch, the ancient Romans enjoyed a midday rest or siesta. In summer, nearly everybody took a nap. In ancient Rome, the streets were as nearly deserted during the midday rest period as they were at midnight. Even kids got a 2-3 hour break from school during the midday rest. (After siesta, kids returned to school to finish their school day.)
Roman Houses:
The lower class Romans (plebeians) lived in apartment houses, called flats, above or behind their shops.
Even fairly well-to-do tradesmen might chose to live in an apartment-building compound over their store, with maybe renters on the upper stories. Their own apartments might be quite roomy, sanitary and pleasant, occasionally with running water. But others were not that nice.
In the apartment houses, or flats, an entire family (grandparents, parents, children) might all be crowded into one room, without running water. They had to haul their water in from public facilities. Fire was a very real threat because people were cooking meals in crowded quarters, and many of the flats were made of wood. They didn't have toilets. They had to use public latrines (toilets).
The upper class Romans (patricians) lived very differently. Their homes were single family homes, which in ancient Rome meant the great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and kids of one family lived in a home together. Homes were made, quite often, of brick with red tile roofs, with rooms arranged around a central courtyard. The windows and balconies faced the courtyard, not the street, to keep homes safe from burglars. There were painting on the walls and beautiful mosaics on the floor. There was very little furniture, and no carpeting. Wealthy Romans might have a house with a front door, bedrooms, an office, a kitchen, a dining room, a garden, a temple, an atrium, a toilet, and a private bath.
The Romans made time, each day, to honour their gods.
The ancient Romans had gods for nearly everything. There were temples all over the Roman Empire. There was a temple in the Forum. Every home had a household god. Most ancient Romans had some sort of shine in their home, which might be a small display or a grand, separate room, to honour the household god. The ancient Romans brought offerings of meat and other items to many temples. Honouring their gods was part of ancient Romans everyday life.
When the kids got home from school, they played with their pets, their toys, and their friends.
Toys
Balls, board games, hobbyhorses, kites, tiny models of people and animals. The ancient Romans played with hoops, with pieces of metal on them, like bells, to jingle and warn people in their way. Boys walked on stilts and played games with balls. They played tic-tac-toe, and a game called "knucklebones", which is a lot like jacks, only played with bones.
The boys played war-type games. They played war, and fought with wooden swords, quite fiercely. The game of "Troy" (lusus Troiae) was a team thing involving resisting a whole pack of kids outnumbering you, who'd try to drag you across a line.
The girls played with rags dolls and dolls of wax or clay. Some dolls even had jointed legs and arms. The girls played board and ball games, and even lifted weights.
The ancient Romans loved games. Horace tells of children building small houses, riding on hobbyhorses, and hitching mice to little carts. Kids from poor families had to work a great deal, but they still found a little time to play. Kids from wealthy families did not work or help around the house. They had slaves who did all the work for them, so they had lots of time to play.
Pets
Dogs were common and favourite pets. Many kinds of birds were pets including pigeons, ducks, quail, and geese. Monkeys were known but they were not very common. Cats started to become pets around 1AD.
Dinner time.
During the Republic: (And perhaps almost through the second century BCE) Romans ate mostly vegetables, and dined very simply. Meals were prepared by the mother or by female slaves under her direction. A table was set up in the atrium of the house. The father, mother, and children sat on stools around the table. Often the kids waited on their parents.
Table knives and forks were unknown, but the Romans had spoons like ours today. Before food was served, it was cut into fingerfood, and eaten by using your fingers or a spoon. In the last two centuries of the Republic, this simple style of living changed a bit. A separate dining room was designed. In place of benches or stools, there were dining couches.
During the Imperial Age
The lower class Romans (plebeians) might have a dinner of porridge made of vegetables, or, when they could afford it, fish, bread, olives, and wine, and meat on occasion.
Since many of the lower class were citizens, the ancient Romans had a program to help them, somewhat like a welfare program. The welfare program was called the annona.
There was also a separate WIC-type or school-lunch program (the alimenta), just for kids, which was instituted, or at least greatly developed in early 2c CE.
In the regular food welfare system, people were issued welfare stamps, which were little tokens, called tesserae. How these were issued (remember there was no open public postal system), and how Romans identified themselves to the authorities in the first place, we (the authors of this article) do not know. You showed up with your tokens (tesserae) and containers, at large government warehouses. You got wheat flour -- or bread already baked from government bakeries, and other foodstuffs. Meat was distributed on special occasions with special tokens.
The upper class Romans (patricians) had dinners that were quite elaborate. The men had the dinner parties; (decent) women and children ate separately. They ate many different foods, drank lots of wine, and spent hours at dinner. Quite often, the men's dinner parties had entertainment, such as dancing girls or a play, or both. Men reclined on couches, arranged around the dinner table. In their separate dining
quarters, women and children usually sat on chairs. As things loosened up in the late Empire, decent women could go to a dinner party.
To make up for it, there were several types of events that only women attend, the most prominent of which was the religious/social Festival of the Bona Dea, the "Good Goddess", held in the house of the hostess. If a man went to the Bona Dea, even the woman's husband in what was after all his own house, he could be put to death!
In the evening, the ancient Romans might go to the theatre.
Entertainment
The ancient Romans enjoyed many different kinds of entertainment. Most events were free, which meant poor people could attend as well as the rich. Plays were performed in large open air theatres. There were lots of theatres, and even the small ones could seat 7,000 people. Some events were scheduled during the day, some were scheduled at night. If wealthy Romans stayed home, they lit oil lamps, to enjoy the evening. The poor, unless they went out, went to bed as soon as it got dark as they couldn't afford to keep oil lamps burning.
The Colosseum was a huge public entertainment centre. The Colosseum could seat 45,000 spectators! This is where the ancient Romans gathered to watch bloody combat between gladiators, and battles between men and wild animals. This is where they threw people to the lions! To see men being killed was very entertaining to the ancient Romans. On occasion, they flooded the Colosseum with water, to hold naval battles, where many competitors died!
The Circus Maximus was another public entertainment centre, and was just a single, specific facility in Rome. The Maximus was used mostly for chariot racing. It could seat 250,000 people! (That's a quarter of a million people!) There were other circuses in ancient Rome.
Roman Games (Field & Track) In the city, there was a place called the Campus. This was the old drill ground for soldiers. It was a large section of plain near the Tiber River. Over time, the Campus became ancient Rome's field and track playground. Even such famous people as Caesar and Augustus exercised on the Campus. Young men, all over Rome, gathered at the Campus to play and exercise. On the Campus, men participated in foot racing, jumping, archery, wrestling and boxing. After a bout of exercise, they might jump in the Tiber River for a swim, or wander off to the Baths, to relax.
All over Rome, men practised riding, fencing, wrestling, throwing, and swimming. In the country, men went hunting and fishing. At home, men played ball before dinner, which were games of throwing and catching. A popular game was to throw a ball as high as they could, and then catch it before it hit the ground. Women did not join in these games.
Drinking: Drinking wine was part of daily life. In very early days, women were not allowed to drink wine. Their husband might kiss them on the mouth to see if they had been drinking. It sounds sweet, but if a husband believed his wife had been drinking, she could be severely beaten. During the Empire, women could drink wine! Life was very different during the Empire than it was in the days of early Rome.
Roman Families:
The head of the family was the oldest male. That could be the father, the grandfather, or perhaps even an uncle. Each family had slightly different customs and rules, because the head of the family had the power to decide what those rules were for his family. He owned the property, and had total authority, the power of life and death, over every member of his household. Even when his children became adults, he was still the boss. But, he was also responsible for the actions of any member of his household. He could order a child or a grown-up out of his house, but if they committed a crime, he might be punished for something his family did. In poor families, the head of the house might decide to put a sick baby out to die or to sell grown-ups in his family into slavery, because there wasn't enough food to feed everyone. A women had no authority. Her job was to take care of the house and to have children.
During the imperial age: (late 1c CE to about 500 CE)
Things changed very rapidly towards the end of 1c AD. Although families still lived in one home, during the Imperial Age, women could own land, run businesses, free slaves, make wills, be heirs themselves, and get a job in some professions. The ancient Romans tried to help their family grow through marriage, divorce, adoption, and re-marriage. After a divorce, ex-in-laws were still important, as were their children. Adopted children had the same rights as any of the other children, rights based on their sex and age. In addition to wives and children, wealthy ancient Roman homes supported slaves.
Old Age
The ancient Romans greatly respected and cared for their elderly. When the older members of a family became too tired for other activities, they could always play with their grandchildren and great grandchildren, all of whom had all been born under their roof, and would one day be honouring them at the Parentalia, the festival of the dead.
Slaves: Wealthy ancient Romans had slaves. In some homes, slaves were treated like valued servants. In others, they were severely abused. Slaves kept the furnaces burning in the bath houses, cooked meals in smoking chimneys in the kitchens, cleaned, sewed, and did the household and garden labour for wealthy Romans. Intelligent and gifted slaves also tutored the kids (those kids who studied their subjects at home), kept the accounts, and sometimes ran vast farm estates or commercial departments of their masters' firms.
The ancient Romans were great builders. They built things to last.
Roman Buildings
The Colosseum was built of concrete, faced with stone, as were most amphitheatres. The Romans also used concrete (an ancient Roman invention!) to build the dome of the Pantheon, a temple dedicated to all the Roman gods, which even today is still one of the largest single-span domes in the world. They used concrete to build the underwater port facilities at Caesarea in Israel (fantastic technology, still analysed by modern engineers.)
Roman Roads
The Romans built thousands of miles of wonderful roads, to connect every part of the empire back to Rome. Up until about a hundred years ago, people were still using these roads, as roads! In recent years, instead of building new roads, modern engineers simply covered many of the old Roman roads with a coat of asphalt. The Romans did a wonderful job building roads!
To help people find their way, while travelling these roads, the Romans more or less invented the milestone which grew increasingly wordy, and increasingly tall, to be easily readable from a vehicle. Some are 6 feet tall. The milestone usually gave the mileage to the nearest large city, sometimes to an intermediate place as well; and the date and perhaps who paid for the road.
There seems to have been no formal traffic code, including what side of the road to drive on; but there were various laws about what you could and could not do on a given type and location of road, and when you could do it. Roads were considerably less crowded, and much less travel than today. The real danger on a road was ambush by highway robbers: which shows that a travelling vehicle could be alone on any given stretch of road.
Roman Aqueducts
As cities grew, the ancient Romans needed more fresh water. To solve this problem, they built aqueducts. These were massive construction projects.
An aqueduct, properly speaking, is the entire conduit - from fresh water spring to town. (CONDUIT—A natural or artificial channel through which fluids may be conveyed). Where aqueducts had to cross valleys, some were built above ground, on arches. Most of the time, they were underground conduits, and sometimes conduits lying right on the ground. These conduits could be made of clay or wood, covered or encrusted with stone. The pipes inside the conduits, that carried the water, were made of lead, which in turn required vast mining enterprises and then transportation to get all this pipe out into the field all over the empire, although most of the lead was mined in Spain.
What is extraordinary about the aqueducts is the planning that must have gone into their construction. Since the ancient Romans didn't use pumps, aqueducts had to be positioned at a relatively constant gradient for dozens of miles. You try building something that drops by only 100 feet in 40 miles....and you'll begin to understand why scholars refer to the ancient Romans as such great builders!
Roman Inscriptions
You may have heard that the ancient Romans could not read or write. Actually, the ancient Romans wrote quite a bit. Much of their pottery was signed. Very often, the bricks used to make buildings were stamped with their makers names. Lead pipes leading to these buildings, by law, were stamped. Scholars have found 200,000 Latin inscriptions and, incredibly, several thousands are still being found every year! From a stash of letters written by just plain enlisted men, preserved by being waterlogged from being dumped in a well in Scotland, it would appear that some of the Roman army could read and write. Scholarly estimates are at around 30% of all adult men in Imperial times had the ability to read and write.
Slavery In Ancient Italy. So far as we may learn from history and legend, slavery was always known at Rome. In the early days of the Republic, however, the farm was the only place where slaves were employed. The fact that most of the Romans were farmers and that they and their free labourers were constantly called from the fields to fight the battles of their country led to a gradual increase in the number of slaves, until slaves were far more numerous than the free labourers who worked for hire. We cannot tell when the custom became general of employing slaves in personal service and in industrial pursuits, but it was one of the grossest evils resulting from Rome’s foreign conquests. In the last century of the Republic not only most of the manual labour and many trades but also certain of what we now call professions were in the hands of slaves and freedmen. The wages and living conditions of free labour were determined by the necessity of competition with slave labour.
Further, every occupation in which slaves engaged was degraded in the eyes of men of free descent until all manual labour was looked upon as dishonourable. The small farms were more and more absorbed in the vast estates of the rich; the sturdy native yeomanry of Rome grew fewer from the constant wars, and were supplanted by foreign stock with the increase of slavery and frequency of manumission (§ 175). By the time of Augustus most of the free-born citizens who were not soldiers were either slaveholders themselves or the idle proletariat of the cities, and the plebeian classes were largely of foreign, not Italian, descent.
Ruinous as were the economic results of slavery, the moral effects were no less destructive. To slavery more than to any other one factor is due the change in the character of the Romans in the first century of the Empire. With slaves swarming in their houses, ministering to their love of luxury, pandering to their appetites, directing their amusements, managing their business, and even educating their children, it is no wonder that the old virtues of the Romans, simplicity, frugality, and temperance, declined and perished. And with the passing of Roman manhood into oriental effeminacy began the passing of Roman sway over the civilised world.
Numbers of Slaves. We have almost no testimony as to the number of slaves in Italy, none even as to the ratio of the free to the servile population.1 We have indirect evidence enough, however, to make good the statements in the preceding paragraphs. That slaves were few in early times is shown by their names. An idea of the rapid increase in the number of slaves after the Punic Wars may be gained from the number of captives sold into slavery by successful generals.
Scipio Aemilianus is said to have disposed in this way of 60,000 Carthaginians, Marius of 140,000 Cimbri, Aemilius Paulus of 150,000 Greeks, Pompeius and Caesar together of more than a million Asiatics and Gauls.
About the number of slaves under the Empire we may get some idea from more direct testimony. Horace implies that ten slaves were as few as a gentleman in even moderate circumstances could afford to own. Tacitus tells us of a city prefect who had four hundred slaves in his mansion. Pliny the Elder says that one Caius Caecilius Claudius Isodorus left at his death over four thousand slaves. Athenaeus (170-230 A.D.) gives us to understand that individuals owned as many as ten thousand and twenty thousand. The fact that house slaves were sometimes divided into “groups of ten” (decuriae) indicates how numerous slaves were.
Sources of Supply. Under the Republic most slaves brought to Rome and offered there for sale were captives taken in war.
The wholesale dealers assembled their purchases in convenient depots, and, when sufficient numbers had been collected, marched them to Rome, in chains and under guard, to be sold to local dealers or to private individuals.
Under the Empire large numbers of slaves came to Rome as articles of ordinary commerce, and Rome became one of the great slave marts of the world.
Some of the slaves were captives taken in the petty wars that Rome was always waging in defence of her boundaries, but they were numerically insignificant. Others had been slaves in the countries from which they came, and merely exchanged old masters for new when they were sent to Rome. Still others were the victims of slave hunters, who preyed on weak and defenceless peoples two thousand years ago much as slave hunters are said to have done in Africa until very recent times.
A less important source of supply was the natural increase in the slave population as men and women formed permanent connections with each other, called contubernia. This became of general importance only late in the Empire, because in earlier times, especially during the period of conquest, it was found cheaper to buy than to breed slaves. To the individual owner, however, the increase in his slaves in this way was a matter of as much interest as the increase in his flocks and herds. Such slaves would be more valuable at maturity, for they would be acclimated and less liable to disease, and, besides, would be trained from childhood in the performance of the very tasks for which they were destined. They would also have more love for their home and for their master’s family, since his children were often their playmates. It was only natural, therefore, for slaves born in the familia to have a claim upon their master’s confidence and consideration that others lacked, and it is not surprising that they were proverbially pert and forward. They were called vernae so long as they remained the property of their first master.
Sales of Slaves. Slave dealers usually offered their wares at public auction sales. These were under the supervision of the aediles, who appointed the place of the sales and made rules and regulations to govern them. A tax was imposed on imported slaves.
Prices of Slaves. The prices of slaves varied as did the prices of other commodities. Much depended upon the times, the supply and demand, the characteristics and accomplishments of the particular slave, and the requirements of the purchaser.
We are told that Lucullus once sold slaves in his camp at an average price of eighty cents each.
Private Slaves. Private slaves were either employed in the personal service of their master and his family or were kept for gain. The latter may be classified according as they were kept for hire or employed in the business enterprises of their master. Of these last the most important as well as the oldest class was that of the farm labourers. Of the others, engaged in all sorts of industries, it may be remarked that it was considered more honourable for a master to employ his slaves in enterprises of his own than to hire them out to others. However, slaves could always be hired for any desired purpose in Rome or in any other city.
Industrial Employment. It must be remembered that in ancient times much work was done by hand that is now done by machinery. In work of this sort were employed armies of slaves fit only for unskilled labour: porters for the transportation of materials and merchandise, stevedores for the loading and discharging of vessels, men who handled the spade, pickax, and crowbar, men of great physical strength but of little else to make them worth their keep. Above these came artisans, mechanics, and skilled workmen of every kind: smiths, carpenters, bricklayers, masons, seamen, etc. The merchants and shopkeepers required assistants, and so did the millers and bakers, the dealers in wool
and leather, the keepers of lodging-houses and restaurants, all who helped to supply the countless wants of a great city. Even the professions, as we should call them, were largely in the hands of slaves. Books were multiplied by slaves. The artists who carved wood and stone, designed furniture, laid mosaics, painted pictures, and decorated the walls and ceilings of public and private buildings were slaves. So were the musicians and the acrobats, the actors and the gladiators who amused the people at the public games. So too, as we have seen, were some of the teachers in the schools; and physicians were usually slaves.
Slaves did not merely perform these various functions under the direction of their master or of the employer to whom he had hired them for the time. Many of them were themselves captains of industry. When a slave showed executive ability as well as technical knowledge, it was common enough for his master to furnish him with the capital necessary to carry on independently the business or profession which he understood. In this way slaves were often the managers of estates, of banks, of commercial enterprises, though these might take them far beyond the reach of their masters’ observation, even into foreign countries. Sometimes such a slave was expected to pay the master annually a fixed sum out of the proceeds of the business; sometimes he was allowed to keep for himself a certain share of the profits; sometimes he was merely required to repay the sum advanced, with interest from the time he had received it. In all cases, however, his industry and intelligence were stimulated by the hope of acquiring sufficient means from the venture to purchase his freedom and eventually make the business his own..
The number of slaves kept by the wealthy Roman in his city mansion was measured not by his needs, but by the demands of fashion and his means. In the early days a sort of butler had relieved the master of his household cares, had done the buying, had kept the accounts, had seen that the house and furniture were in order, and had looked after the few slaves who did the actual work. Under the late Republic all this was changed.
Other slaves, relieved the master of the purchasing of the supplies and the keeping of the accounts, and left to him merely the supervision of the house and its furniture. The duties of the slaves under him were, in the same way, distributed among a number many times greater than the slaves of early days. Every part of the house had its special staff of slaves, often so numerous as to be distributed into decuriae, with a separate superintendent for each decuria: one for the kitchen, another for the dining-rooms, another for the bedrooms, etc.
The very entrance door had assigned to it its special slave who was some times chained to it like a watchdog, in order to keep him literally at his post. The duties of the several sets were again divided and subdivided; each slave had some one office to perform, and only one. The names of the various functionaries of the kitchen, the dining-rooms, and the bedchambers are too numerous to mention, but an idea of the complexity of the service may be gained from the number of attendants that assisted the master and mistress with their toilets.
When the master or mistress left the house, a large retinue was deemed necessary. If he or she walked, slaves went before to clear the way, and pages and lackeys followed, carrying wraps or the sunshade and fan of the mistress, and ready to perform any little service that might be necessary. The master was often accompanied out of the house by his slave, who prompted him in case he had forgotten the name of anyone who greeted him. If the master did not walk, he was carried in a litter somewhat like a sedan chair. The bearers were strong men all carefully matched in size and dressed in gorgeous liveries. As each member of the household had his own litter and bearers, this one class of slaves made an important item in the family budget. When master or mistress rode in this way, the same attendants accompanied him as when they walked. At night, as there were no street lights torches had to be carried by some of the attendants to light the way.
When the master dined at the house of a friend, his slaves attended him at least as far as the door. Some remained with him to care for his sandals, and others returned at the appointed hour to see him home. A journey out of the city was a more serious matter and called for more pomp and display. In addition to the horses and mules that drew the carriages of those who rode, there were mounted outriders and beasts of burden loaded with baggage and supplies. Numerous slaves followed on foot, and an occasional Roman even had a band of gladiators to act as escort and bodyguard. It is not too much to say that the ordinary train of a wealthy traveller included dozens, perhaps scores, of slaves.
Among the town family must be numbered also those who furnished amusement and entertainment for the master and his guests, especially during and after meals. There were musicians and readers, and, for persons of less refined tastes, dancers, jesters, dwarfs, and even misshapen freaks. Under the Empire little children were kept for the same purpose.
Lastly may be mentioned the slaves of the highest class, the confidential assistants of the master, the amanuenses who wrote his letters, the secretaries who kept his accounts, and the agents through whom he collected his income, audited the reports of his stewards and managers, made his investments, and transacted all sorts of business matters. The greater the luxury and extravagance of the house, the more the master would need these trained and experienced men to relieve him of cares, and by their fidelity and skill to make possible the gratification of his tastes and passions.
Legal Status of Slaves. The power of the master over the slave was absolute. The master could assign to the slave laborious and degrading tasks, punish him even unto death at his sole discretion, sell him, and kill him (or turn him out in the street to die) when age or illness had made him incapable of labour. Slaves were mere chattels in the eyes of the law, like oxen or horses. They could not legally hold property, they could not make contracts, they could testify in court only on the rack, they could not marry.
There were two important differences between the son, for example, and the slave. The son was relieved of the slavery on the death of the pater but the death of the master did not make the slave free.
Under the Empire various laws were passed that seemed to recognise the slave as a person, not a thing; it was forbidden to sell him to become a fighter with wild beasts in the amphitheatre; it was provided that the slave should not be put to death by the master simply because he was too old or too ill to work, and that a slave “exposed” should become free by the act; at last the master was forbidden to kill the slave at all without due process of law. As a matter of fact, these laws were very generally disregarded, much as are our laws for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and it may be said that it was only the influence of Christianity that at last changed the condition of the slave for the better.
The Treatment of Slaves. There was nothing in the stern and selfish character of the Roman that would lead us to expect from him gentleness or mercy in the treatment of his slaves. At the same time, he was too shrewd and sharp in all matters of business to forget that a slave was a piece of valuable property, and to run the risk of the loss or injury of that property by wanton cruelty. Much depended, of course, upon the character and temper of the individual owner. The case of Vedius Pollio, in the time of Augustus, who ordered a slave to be thrown alive into a pond as food for the fish because he had broken a goblet, may be offset by that of Cicero, whose letters to his slave Tiro disclose real affection and tenderness of feeling. If we consider the age in which the Roman lived, and pass for a moment the matter of punishments, we may say that he was exacting as a taskmaster rather than habitually cruel to his slaves.
Of the daily life of the town slave we know little except that his work was light and that he was the envy of the drudge upon the farm. Of the treatment of the latter we get some knowledge from the writings of the Elder Cato, who may be taken as a fair specimen of the rugged farmer of his time (234-149 B.C.). He held that slaves should always be at work except in the hours, few enough at best, allowed them for sleep, and he took pains to find plenty for his to do even on the public holidays. He advised farmers to sell immediately worn-out draft cattle, diseased sheep, broken implements, aged and feeble slaves, “and other useless things.”
Food and Dress. Slaves were fed on coarse food, but, when Cato tells us that besides the monthly allowance of grain (about a bushel) they were to have merely the fallen olives, or, if these were lacking, a little salt fish and vinegar, We must remember that this allowance corresponded closely to the common food of the poorer Romans.
But, entirely apart from the grinding toil and the harshness and insolence of the overseer, and, perhaps, of the master, the mere restraint from liberty was torture enough in itself. There was little chance of escape by flight. In Greece a slave might hope to cross the boundary of the little state in which he served, to find freedom and refuge under the protection of an adjoining power. But Italy had ceased to be cut up into hostile communities, and, should the slave by a miracle reach the border or the sea, no neighbouring state would dare defend him or even hide him from his Roman master. If he attempted flight, he must live the life of an outlaw, with organised bands of slave hunters on his track, with a reward offered for his return, and unspeakable tortures awaiting him as a warning for others. It is no wonder, then, that slaves sometimes sought rest from their labours by a voluntary death. It must be remembered that many slaves were men of good birth and high position in the countries from which they came, many of them even soldiers, taken on the field of battle with weapons in their hands.
Punishments. It is not the purpose of the following sections to catalogue the fiendish tortures sometimes inflicted upon slaves by their masters. They were not very common, for the reason suggested in 158, and were no more characteristic of the ordinary correction of slaves than lynching is characteristic of the administration of justice in our own states. Certain punishments, however, are so frequently mentioned in Latin literature that a description of them is necessary in order that the passages in which they occur may be understood by the reader.
The most common punishment for neglect of duty or petty misconduct was a beating with a stick or a flogging with a lash. The stick or rod was usually of elm wood (ulmus); the elm-rod thus used corresponded to the birch of England and the hickory of America, once freely used in flogging. For the lash or rawhide was often used a sort of cat-o’-nine-tails, made of cords or thongs of leather. When the offence was more serious, bits of bone, and even metal buttons were attached to this, to tear the flesh, and the instrument was called a flagrum or flagellum. To render the victim incapable of resistance he was sometimes drawn up to a beam by the arms, and weights were even attached to his feet, so that he could not so much as writhe under the torture.
Another punishment for offences of a trivial nature resembled the stocks of old New England days. The offender was exposed to the derision of his fellows with his limbs so confined that he could make no motion at all—he could not even brush a fly from his face. A variation of this form of punishment is seen in the furca, which was so common that furcifer became a mere term of abuse. The culprit was forced to carry upon his shoulders a heavy forked log, and had his arms stretched out before him with his hands fastened to the ends of the fork. This log he had to carry around in order that the other members of the familia might see him and take warning. Sometimes to this punishment was added a lashing as he moved painfully along.
Less painful and degrading for the moment, but even more dreaded by the slave, was a sentence to harder labour than he had been accustomed to perform. The final penalty for misconduct on the part of a city slave for whom the rod had been spoiled in vain was banishment to the farm, and to this might be added at a stroke the odious task of grinding at the mill or the crushing toil of labour in the quarries. The last were the punishments of the better class of farm slaves, while the desperate and dangerous class of slaves who regularly worked in the quarries paid for their misdeeds by forced labour under the scourge and by having heavier shackles during the day and fewer hours of rest at night. These may be compared to the galley slaves of later times. The utterly incorrigible might be sold to be trained as gladiators.
For actual crimes, not mere faults or offences, the punishments were far more severe. Slaves were so numerous (§ 131) and their various employments gave them such free access to the person of the master that his property and very life were always at their mercy. It was indeed a just and gentle master that did not sometimes dream of a slave holding a dagger at his throat. There was nothing within the confines of Italy so much dreaded as an uprising of the slaves. It was simply this haunting fear that led to the inhuman tortures inflicted upon the slave guilty of an attempt upon the life of his master or of the destruction of his property.
The runaway slave was a criminal; he had stolen himself. He was also guilty of setting a bad example to his fellow slaves; and, worst of all, runaway slaves often became bandits (§ 161), and they might find a Spartacus to lead them (§ 132). There were, therefore, standing rewards for the capture of one and there were men who made it their business to track them down and return them to their masters. The fugitive was brought back in shackles, and was sure to be flogged within an inch of his life and sent to the quarries for the rest of his miserable days. Besides this, he was branded on the forehead with the letter F, for fugitive and sometimes had a metal collar riveted about his neck.
For an attempt upon the life of the master the penalty was death in its most agonising form, by crucifixion. This was also the penalty for taking part in an insurrection; we may recall the twenty thousand crucified in Sicily and the six thousand crosses that Pompey erected along the road to Rome, each bearing the body of one of the survivors of the final battle in which Spartacus fell. The punishment was inflicted not only upon the slave guilty of taking his master’s life, but also upon the family of the slave, if he had a wife and children.
Manumission. The slave might purchase freedom from his master by means of his savings, as we have seen or he might be set free as a reward for faithful service or some special act of devotion. In either case it was only necessary for the master to pronounce him free in the presence of witnesses, though a formal act of manumission often took place before a praetor. The new-made freedman set on his head the cap of liberty (pilleus), seen on some Roman coins. The relation that existed between the master and the freedman was one of mutual helpfulness. The patron assisted the freedman in business, often supplying the means with which he was to make a start in his new life. If the freedman died first, the patron paid the expenses of a decent funeral and had the body buried near the spot where his own ashes would be laid. He became the guardian of the freedman’s children; if no heirs were left, he himself inherited the property. The freedman was bound to show his patron marked deference and respect at all times, to attend him upon public occasions, to assist him in case of reverse of fortune, and in short to stand to him in the same relation as the client had stood to the patron in the brave days of old.
The lower class Romans (plebeians) might have a breakfast of bread, dry or dipped in wine, and water. Sometimes olives, cheese, or raisins were sprinkled on the bread. In 1AD, it became the custom to distribute bread daily to the unemployed. Workmen, on their way to work, grabbed some bread, and ate it on the way.
The upper class Romans (patricians) enjoyed fresh meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, bread, and used honey to sweeten food. (Sugar was unknown). They had slaves to cook and clean. Slaves cut their food for them, as they didn't use forks or knives, but ate with their fingers. A wet towel was handy (or brought by slaves) to tidy up after a meal. Early in the morning, schoolboys, on the run, often stopped at a bakery for a quick meal, or to buy a pancake to eat on their way to school.
Then, they got dressed to go out.
Clothing & hair styles
The very early Romans wore a toga. It looked like a white sheet 9 yards long. Togas were arranged very carefully, in a stylish way. Togas fell out of style rather early.
(The toga was inconvenient, and people felt the cold when they wore it.) To get anyone to wear them, even very early emperors had to legislate the wearing of togas by at least senators. Eventually, the emperors gave up. The Romans switched to comfortable tunics, which looked like long tee shirts. They were far more practical. Tunics were made of cool linen, for summer wear, and warm wool, for winter wear. Sometimes, they wore trouserlike affairs.
Roman Soldiers/Armour
It’s interesting to note that most Roman armour probably did not shine. They used a lot of chain mail (a sort of cloth made of circular links), which doesn't shine. They also made scale armour (metal plates about 3 inches long and about an inch wide, sewn together on a linen/leather backing.)
Scale armour shines a little, but not much. And, they made leather armour, with the metal on the inside, or at least under the leather, probably again on a backing of linen, to make three layers. So, although the ancient Romans loved the ornate and glittery, their armour most probably did not shine!
Roman Men
Rings were the only jewellery worn by Roman citizen men, and good manners dictated only one ring. Of course, some men did not follow "good taste", and wore as many as sixteen rings. Hairstyles and beards varied with the times. In early Roman times, men wore long hair and full beards. For a while, they were clean-shaven with short hair. About 1AD, they had started to style their hair and wear beards again.
Roman Women
Women enjoyed gazing at themselves in mirrors of highly polished metal (not glass).
The ancient Roman women loved ornate necklaces, pins, earrings, bracelets and friendship rings. Pearls were favourites. Women often dyed their hair, usually golden-red. They used false hairpieces to make their hair thicker or longer. Sometimes, Roman women wore their hair up, in carefully arranged styles, held with jewelled hairpins. Sometimes they wore it down, curled in ringlets. Parasols were used, or women might carry fans made of peacock feathers, wood or stretched linen. Women's street shoes were made of leather, like a man's. In the house, most Romans (men and women) wore sandals. Women's sandals were brightly coloured. Some were even decorated with pearls.
Roman Boys
Boys wore a tunic down to their knees. It was white, with a crimson border. Once a boy became a man, he put aside his childish clothes, and wore an all-white tunic.
A boy became a citizen at age 16 or 17. The year was selected by choosing the date which came closest to March 17th. Coming of age, becoming a citizen, was quite a celebration. On a boy's sixteenth or seventeenth birthday, the boy dressed himself in a white tunic, which his father adjusted. The day ended with a dinner party, given by the father, in honour of the new Roman citizen.
Roman Girls
Girls wore a simple tunic with a belt at the waist. When they went outside, they wore a second tunic that reached their feet.
Bulla
Children wore a special locket around their neck, given to them at birth, called a bulla. It contained an amulet as a protection against evil and was worn on a chain, cord, or strap. Girls wore their bulla until the eve of their wedding day, when their bulla was set aside with other childhood things, like her toys. Boys wore their bulla until they day they became a citizen. Boys’ bullas were put aside and carefully saved. A boy's bulla could be wore by the owner again, if he won special honours. For example, if he became a successful general, and won the honour of triumph, he would wear his bulla in ceremonial parades, to protect him from the evil jealously of men or gods.
Once they got dressed, adults might wander down to the Forum, to do their shopping and banking.
The Forum was the main marketplace and business centre, where the ancient Romans went to do their banking, trading, shopping, and marketing. It was also a place for public speaking. The ancient Romans were great orators. They loved to talk (although not nearly as much as the ancient Greeks!) The job of their orators was not to argue, but to argue persuasively! People thronging the Forum would stop and listen, then wander away to do their shopping, and perhaps leave a gift at a temple for one of their gods. The Forum was also used for festivals and religious ceremonies. It was a very busy place.
School
The goal of education in ancient Rome was to be an effective speaker. The school day began before sunrise, as did all work in Rome. Kids brought candles to use until daybreak. There was a rest for lunch and the afternoon siesta, and then back to school until late afternoon. No one knows how long the school year actually was; it probably varied from school to school. However, one thing was fixed.
School began each year on the 24th of March!
In early Roman days, a Roman boy's education took place at home. If his father could read and write, he taught his son to do the same. The father instructed his sons in Roman law, history, customs, and physical training, to prepare for war. Reverence for the gods, respect for law, obedience to authority, and truthfulness were the most important lessons to be taught. Girls were taught by their mother. Girls learned to spin, weave, and sew.
About 200 BC, the Romans borrowed some of the ancient Greek system of education. Although they did not add many subjects, they did begin sending their boys, and some of their girls, with their father's permission, to school, outside their home, at age 6 or 7.
The children studied reading, writing, and counting. They read scrolls and books. They wrote on boards covered with wax, and used pebbles to do math problems. They were taught Roman numerals, and recited lessons they had memorised. At age 12 or 13, the boys of the upper classes attended "grammar" school, where they studied Latin, Greek, grammar, and literature. At age 16, some boys went on to study public speaking at the rhetoric school, to prepare for a life as an orator.
Did the kids of the poor go to school? At the poorer levels, no. School was not free. Nor should anyone imagine large classes in special buildings. Children, educated outside of the home, were sent to the house of a tutor, who would group-tutor. Children, educated in the home, were taught by intelligent and gifted slaves. Children, in poorer homes, did not have slaves to teach them; they were taught by their parents, as they were in early Roman days.
Baths
The ancient Romans might hit the baths first, and then wander down to the Forum, although many did prefer to get their shopping done early. In all but the largest baths, there were separate hours for men and women. The women's time slot was apparently much shorter, so that women probably had to be more careful scheduling. Large baths had duplicate facilities.
The Public Baths were extremely popular. Roman women and men tried to visit the baths at least once every day. The baths had hot and cold pools, towels, slaves to wait on you, steam rooms, saunas, exercise rooms, and hair cutting salons. They had reading rooms and libraries, as among the freeborn, who had the right to frequent baths, the majority could read. They even had stores, selling all kinds of things, and people who sold fast food. The baths were arranged rather like a very large mall, with bathing pools.
The baths were packed. The people loved them. At one time, there were as many as 900 public baths in ancient Rome. Small ones held about 300 people, and the big ones held 1500 people or more! Some Roman hospitals even had their own bathhouses. A trip to the bath was a very important part of ancient Roman daily life.
Could kids use the baths? No. Was there an admission charge to the baths? Yes. Could slaves use the baths? Properly, no. But the people who could, as a matter of course, brought their slave attendants with them.
In the afternoon, wealthy Romans took some time to rest at home, or to relax with friends. The poor worked constantly.
Luncheon was usually a cold meal, eaten about 11 o'clock in the morning. Lunch was bread, salad, olives, cheese, fruit, nuts, and cold meat left over from dinner the night before.
Siesta
After lunch, the ancient Romans enjoyed a midday rest or siesta. In summer, nearly everybody took a nap. In ancient Rome, the streets were as nearly deserted during the midday rest period as they were at midnight. Even kids got a 2-3 hour break from school during the midday rest. (After siesta, kids returned to school to finish their school day.)
Roman Houses:
The lower class Romans (plebeians) lived in apartment houses, called flats, above or behind their shops.
Even fairly well-to-do tradesmen might chose to live in an apartment-building compound over their store, with maybe renters on the upper stories. Their own apartments might be quite roomy, sanitary and pleasant, occasionally with running water. But others were not that nice.
In the apartment houses, or flats, an entire family (grandparents, parents, children) might all be crowded into one room, without running water. They had to haul their water in from public facilities. Fire was a very real threat because people were cooking meals in crowded quarters, and many of the flats were made of wood. They didn't have toilets. They had to use public latrines (toilets).
The upper class Romans (patricians) lived very differently. Their homes were single family homes, which in ancient Rome meant the great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and kids of one family lived in a home together. Homes were made, quite often, of brick with red tile roofs, with rooms arranged around a central courtyard. The windows and balconies faced the courtyard, not the street, to keep homes safe from burglars. There were painting on the walls and beautiful mosaics on the floor. There was very little furniture, and no carpeting. Wealthy Romans might have a house with a front door, bedrooms, an office, a kitchen, a dining room, a garden, a temple, an atrium, a toilet, and a private bath.
The Romans made time, each day, to honour their gods.
The ancient Romans had gods for nearly everything. There were temples all over the Roman Empire. There was a temple in the Forum. Every home had a household god. Most ancient Romans had some sort of shine in their home, which might be a small display or a grand, separate room, to honour the household god. The ancient Romans brought offerings of meat and other items to many temples. Honouring their gods was part of ancient Romans everyday life.
When the kids got home from school, they played with their pets, their toys, and their friends.
Toys
Balls, board games, hobbyhorses, kites, tiny models of people and animals. The ancient Romans played with hoops, with pieces of metal on them, like bells, to jingle and warn people in their way. Boys walked on stilts and played games with balls. They played tic-tac-toe, and a game called "knucklebones", which is a lot like jacks, only played with bones.
The boys played war-type games. They played war, and fought with wooden swords, quite fiercely. The game of "Troy" (lusus Troiae) was a team thing involving resisting a whole pack of kids outnumbering you, who'd try to drag you across a line.
The girls played with rags dolls and dolls of wax or clay. Some dolls even had jointed legs and arms. The girls played board and ball games, and even lifted weights.
The ancient Romans loved games. Horace tells of children building small houses, riding on hobbyhorses, and hitching mice to little carts. Kids from poor families had to work a great deal, but they still found a little time to play. Kids from wealthy families did not work or help around the house. They had slaves who did all the work for them, so they had lots of time to play.
Pets
Dogs were common and favourite pets. Many kinds of birds were pets including pigeons, ducks, quail, and geese. Monkeys were known but they were not very common. Cats started to become pets around 1AD.
Dinner time.
During the Republic: (And perhaps almost through the second century BCE) Romans ate mostly vegetables, and dined very simply. Meals were prepared by the mother or by female slaves under her direction. A table was set up in the atrium of the house. The father, mother, and children sat on stools around the table. Often the kids waited on their parents.
Table knives and forks were unknown, but the Romans had spoons like ours today. Before food was served, it was cut into fingerfood, and eaten by using your fingers or a spoon. In the last two centuries of the Republic, this simple style of living changed a bit. A separate dining room was designed. In place of benches or stools, there were dining couches.
During the Imperial Age
The lower class Romans (plebeians) might have a dinner of porridge made of vegetables, or, when they could afford it, fish, bread, olives, and wine, and meat on occasion.
Since many of the lower class were citizens, the ancient Romans had a program to help them, somewhat like a welfare program. The welfare program was called the annona.
There was also a separate WIC-type or school-lunch program (the alimenta), just for kids, which was instituted, or at least greatly developed in early 2c CE.
In the regular food welfare system, people were issued welfare stamps, which were little tokens, called tesserae. How these were issued (remember there was no open public postal system), and how Romans identified themselves to the authorities in the first place, we (the authors of this article) do not know. You showed up with your tokens (tesserae) and containers, at large government warehouses. You got wheat flour -- or bread already baked from government bakeries, and other foodstuffs. Meat was distributed on special occasions with special tokens.
The upper class Romans (patricians) had dinners that were quite elaborate. The men had the dinner parties; (decent) women and children ate separately. They ate many different foods, drank lots of wine, and spent hours at dinner. Quite often, the men's dinner parties had entertainment, such as dancing girls or a play, or both. Men reclined on couches, arranged around the dinner table. In their separate dining
quarters, women and children usually sat on chairs. As things loosened up in the late Empire, decent women could go to a dinner party.
To make up for it, there were several types of events that only women attend, the most prominent of which was the religious/social Festival of the Bona Dea, the "Good Goddess", held in the house of the hostess. If a man went to the Bona Dea, even the woman's husband in what was after all his own house, he could be put to death!
In the evening, the ancient Romans might go to the theatre.
Entertainment
The ancient Romans enjoyed many different kinds of entertainment. Most events were free, which meant poor people could attend as well as the rich. Plays were performed in large open air theatres. There were lots of theatres, and even the small ones could seat 7,000 people. Some events were scheduled during the day, some were scheduled at night. If wealthy Romans stayed home, they lit oil lamps, to enjoy the evening. The poor, unless they went out, went to bed as soon as it got dark as they couldn't afford to keep oil lamps burning.
The Colosseum was a huge public entertainment centre. The Colosseum could seat 45,000 spectators! This is where the ancient Romans gathered to watch bloody combat between gladiators, and battles between men and wild animals. This is where they threw people to the lions! To see men being killed was very entertaining to the ancient Romans. On occasion, they flooded the Colosseum with water, to hold naval battles, where many competitors died!
The Circus Maximus was another public entertainment centre, and was just a single, specific facility in Rome. The Maximus was used mostly for chariot racing. It could seat 250,000 people! (That's a quarter of a million people!) There were other circuses in ancient Rome.
Roman Games (Field & Track) In the city, there was a place called the Campus. This was the old drill ground for soldiers. It was a large section of plain near the Tiber River. Over time, the Campus became ancient Rome's field and track playground. Even such famous people as Caesar and Augustus exercised on the Campus. Young men, all over Rome, gathered at the Campus to play and exercise. On the Campus, men participated in foot racing, jumping, archery, wrestling and boxing. After a bout of exercise, they might jump in the Tiber River for a swim, or wander off to the Baths, to relax.
All over Rome, men practised riding, fencing, wrestling, throwing, and swimming. In the country, men went hunting and fishing. At home, men played ball before dinner, which were games of throwing and catching. A popular game was to throw a ball as high as they could, and then catch it before it hit the ground. Women did not join in these games.
Drinking: Drinking wine was part of daily life. In very early days, women were not allowed to drink wine. Their husband might kiss them on the mouth to see if they had been drinking. It sounds sweet, but if a husband believed his wife had been drinking, she could be severely beaten. During the Empire, women could drink wine! Life was very different during the Empire than it was in the days of early Rome.
Roman Families:
The head of the family was the oldest male. That could be the father, the grandfather, or perhaps even an uncle. Each family had slightly different customs and rules, because the head of the family had the power to decide what those rules were for his family. He owned the property, and had total authority, the power of life and death, over every member of his household. Even when his children became adults, he was still the boss. But, he was also responsible for the actions of any member of his household. He could order a child or a grown-up out of his house, but if they committed a crime, he might be punished for something his family did. In poor families, the head of the house might decide to put a sick baby out to die or to sell grown-ups in his family into slavery, because there wasn't enough food to feed everyone. A women had no authority. Her job was to take care of the house and to have children.
During the imperial age: (late 1c CE to about 500 CE)
Things changed very rapidly towards the end of 1c AD. Although families still lived in one home, during the Imperial Age, women could own land, run businesses, free slaves, make wills, be heirs themselves, and get a job in some professions. The ancient Romans tried to help their family grow through marriage, divorce, adoption, and re-marriage. After a divorce, ex-in-laws were still important, as were their children. Adopted children had the same rights as any of the other children, rights based on their sex and age. In addition to wives and children, wealthy ancient Roman homes supported slaves.
Old Age
The ancient Romans greatly respected and cared for their elderly. When the older members of a family became too tired for other activities, they could always play with their grandchildren and great grandchildren, all of whom had all been born under their roof, and would one day be honouring them at the Parentalia, the festival of the dead.
Slaves: Wealthy ancient Romans had slaves. In some homes, slaves were treated like valued servants. In others, they were severely abused. Slaves kept the furnaces burning in the bath houses, cooked meals in smoking chimneys in the kitchens, cleaned, sewed, and did the household and garden labour for wealthy Romans. Intelligent and gifted slaves also tutored the kids (those kids who studied their subjects at home), kept the accounts, and sometimes ran vast farm estates or commercial departments of their masters' firms.
The ancient Romans were great builders. They built things to last.
Roman Buildings
The Colosseum was built of concrete, faced with stone, as were most amphitheatres. The Romans also used concrete (an ancient Roman invention!) to build the dome of the Pantheon, a temple dedicated to all the Roman gods, which even today is still one of the largest single-span domes in the world. They used concrete to build the underwater port facilities at Caesarea in Israel (fantastic technology, still analysed by modern engineers.)
Roman Roads
The Romans built thousands of miles of wonderful roads, to connect every part of the empire back to Rome. Up until about a hundred years ago, people were still using these roads, as roads! In recent years, instead of building new roads, modern engineers simply covered many of the old Roman roads with a coat of asphalt. The Romans did a wonderful job building roads!
To help people find their way, while travelling these roads, the Romans more or less invented the milestone which grew increasingly wordy, and increasingly tall, to be easily readable from a vehicle. Some are 6 feet tall. The milestone usually gave the mileage to the nearest large city, sometimes to an intermediate place as well; and the date and perhaps who paid for the road.
There seems to have been no formal traffic code, including what side of the road to drive on; but there were various laws about what you could and could not do on a given type and location of road, and when you could do it. Roads were considerably less crowded, and much less travel than today. The real danger on a road was ambush by highway robbers: which shows that a travelling vehicle could be alone on any given stretch of road.
Roman Aqueducts
As cities grew, the ancient Romans needed more fresh water. To solve this problem, they built aqueducts. These were massive construction projects.
An aqueduct, properly speaking, is the entire conduit - from fresh water spring to town. (CONDUIT—A natural or artificial channel through which fluids may be conveyed). Where aqueducts had to cross valleys, some were built above ground, on arches. Most of the time, they were underground conduits, and sometimes conduits lying right on the ground. These conduits could be made of clay or wood, covered or encrusted with stone. The pipes inside the conduits, that carried the water, were made of lead, which in turn required vast mining enterprises and then transportation to get all this pipe out into the field all over the empire, although most of the lead was mined in Spain.
What is extraordinary about the aqueducts is the planning that must have gone into their construction. Since the ancient Romans didn't use pumps, aqueducts had to be positioned at a relatively constant gradient for dozens of miles. You try building something that drops by only 100 feet in 40 miles....and you'll begin to understand why scholars refer to the ancient Romans as such great builders!
Roman Inscriptions
You may have heard that the ancient Romans could not read or write. Actually, the ancient Romans wrote quite a bit. Much of their pottery was signed. Very often, the bricks used to make buildings were stamped with their makers names. Lead pipes leading to these buildings, by law, were stamped. Scholars have found 200,000 Latin inscriptions and, incredibly, several thousands are still being found every year! From a stash of letters written by just plain enlisted men, preserved by being waterlogged from being dumped in a well in Scotland, it would appear that some of the Roman army could read and write. Scholarly estimates are at around 30% of all adult men in Imperial times had the ability to read and write.
Slavery In Ancient Italy. So far as we may learn from history and legend, slavery was always known at Rome. In the early days of the Republic, however, the farm was the only place where slaves were employed. The fact that most of the Romans were farmers and that they and their free labourers were constantly called from the fields to fight the battles of their country led to a gradual increase in the number of slaves, until slaves were far more numerous than the free labourers who worked for hire. We cannot tell when the custom became general of employing slaves in personal service and in industrial pursuits, but it was one of the grossest evils resulting from Rome’s foreign conquests. In the last century of the Republic not only most of the manual labour and many trades but also certain of what we now call professions were in the hands of slaves and freedmen. The wages and living conditions of free labour were determined by the necessity of competition with slave labour.
Further, every occupation in which slaves engaged was degraded in the eyes of men of free descent until all manual labour was looked upon as dishonourable. The small farms were more and more absorbed in the vast estates of the rich; the sturdy native yeomanry of Rome grew fewer from the constant wars, and were supplanted by foreign stock with the increase of slavery and frequency of manumission (§ 175). By the time of Augustus most of the free-born citizens who were not soldiers were either slaveholders themselves or the idle proletariat of the cities, and the plebeian classes were largely of foreign, not Italian, descent.
Ruinous as were the economic results of slavery, the moral effects were no less destructive. To slavery more than to any other one factor is due the change in the character of the Romans in the first century of the Empire. With slaves swarming in their houses, ministering to their love of luxury, pandering to their appetites, directing their amusements, managing their business, and even educating their children, it is no wonder that the old virtues of the Romans, simplicity, frugality, and temperance, declined and perished. And with the passing of Roman manhood into oriental effeminacy began the passing of Roman sway over the civilised world.
Numbers of Slaves. We have almost no testimony as to the number of slaves in Italy, none even as to the ratio of the free to the servile population.1 We have indirect evidence enough, however, to make good the statements in the preceding paragraphs. That slaves were few in early times is shown by their names. An idea of the rapid increase in the number of slaves after the Punic Wars may be gained from the number of captives sold into slavery by successful generals.
Scipio Aemilianus is said to have disposed in this way of 60,000 Carthaginians, Marius of 140,000 Cimbri, Aemilius Paulus of 150,000 Greeks, Pompeius and Caesar together of more than a million Asiatics and Gauls.
About the number of slaves under the Empire we may get some idea from more direct testimony. Horace implies that ten slaves were as few as a gentleman in even moderate circumstances could afford to own. Tacitus tells us of a city prefect who had four hundred slaves in his mansion. Pliny the Elder says that one Caius Caecilius Claudius Isodorus left at his death over four thousand slaves. Athenaeus (170-230 A.D.) gives us to understand that individuals owned as many as ten thousand and twenty thousand. The fact that house slaves were sometimes divided into “groups of ten” (decuriae) indicates how numerous slaves were.
Sources of Supply. Under the Republic most slaves brought to Rome and offered there for sale were captives taken in war.
The wholesale dealers assembled their purchases in convenient depots, and, when sufficient numbers had been collected, marched them to Rome, in chains and under guard, to be sold to local dealers or to private individuals.
Under the Empire large numbers of slaves came to Rome as articles of ordinary commerce, and Rome became one of the great slave marts of the world.
Some of the slaves were captives taken in the petty wars that Rome was always waging in defence of her boundaries, but they were numerically insignificant. Others had been slaves in the countries from which they came, and merely exchanged old masters for new when they were sent to Rome. Still others were the victims of slave hunters, who preyed on weak and defenceless peoples two thousand years ago much as slave hunters are said to have done in Africa until very recent times.
A less important source of supply was the natural increase in the slave population as men and women formed permanent connections with each other, called contubernia. This became of general importance only late in the Empire, because in earlier times, especially during the period of conquest, it was found cheaper to buy than to breed slaves. To the individual owner, however, the increase in his slaves in this way was a matter of as much interest as the increase in his flocks and herds. Such slaves would be more valuable at maturity, for they would be acclimated and less liable to disease, and, besides, would be trained from childhood in the performance of the very tasks for which they were destined. They would also have more love for their home and for their master’s family, since his children were often their playmates. It was only natural, therefore, for slaves born in the familia to have a claim upon their master’s confidence and consideration that others lacked, and it is not surprising that they were proverbially pert and forward. They were called vernae so long as they remained the property of their first master.
Sales of Slaves. Slave dealers usually offered their wares at public auction sales. These were under the supervision of the aediles, who appointed the place of the sales and made rules and regulations to govern them. A tax was imposed on imported slaves.
Prices of Slaves. The prices of slaves varied as did the prices of other commodities. Much depended upon the times, the supply and demand, the characteristics and accomplishments of the particular slave, and the requirements of the purchaser.
We are told that Lucullus once sold slaves in his camp at an average price of eighty cents each.
Private Slaves. Private slaves were either employed in the personal service of their master and his family or were kept for gain. The latter may be classified according as they were kept for hire or employed in the business enterprises of their master. Of these last the most important as well as the oldest class was that of the farm labourers. Of the others, engaged in all sorts of industries, it may be remarked that it was considered more honourable for a master to employ his slaves in enterprises of his own than to hire them out to others. However, slaves could always be hired for any desired purpose in Rome or in any other city.
Industrial Employment. It must be remembered that in ancient times much work was done by hand that is now done by machinery. In work of this sort were employed armies of slaves fit only for unskilled labour: porters for the transportation of materials and merchandise, stevedores for the loading and discharging of vessels, men who handled the spade, pickax, and crowbar, men of great physical strength but of little else to make them worth their keep. Above these came artisans, mechanics, and skilled workmen of every kind: smiths, carpenters, bricklayers, masons, seamen, etc. The merchants and shopkeepers required assistants, and so did the millers and bakers, the dealers in wool
and leather, the keepers of lodging-houses and restaurants, all who helped to supply the countless wants of a great city. Even the professions, as we should call them, were largely in the hands of slaves. Books were multiplied by slaves. The artists who carved wood and stone, designed furniture, laid mosaics, painted pictures, and decorated the walls and ceilings of public and private buildings were slaves. So were the musicians and the acrobats, the actors and the gladiators who amused the people at the public games. So too, as we have seen, were some of the teachers in the schools; and physicians were usually slaves.
Slaves did not merely perform these various functions under the direction of their master or of the employer to whom he had hired them for the time. Many of them were themselves captains of industry. When a slave showed executive ability as well as technical knowledge, it was common enough for his master to furnish him with the capital necessary to carry on independently the business or profession which he understood. In this way slaves were often the managers of estates, of banks, of commercial enterprises, though these might take them far beyond the reach of their masters’ observation, even into foreign countries. Sometimes such a slave was expected to pay the master annually a fixed sum out of the proceeds of the business; sometimes he was allowed to keep for himself a certain share of the profits; sometimes he was merely required to repay the sum advanced, with interest from the time he had received it. In all cases, however, his industry and intelligence were stimulated by the hope of acquiring sufficient means from the venture to purchase his freedom and eventually make the business his own..
The number of slaves kept by the wealthy Roman in his city mansion was measured not by his needs, but by the demands of fashion and his means. In the early days a sort of butler had relieved the master of his household cares, had done the buying, had kept the accounts, had seen that the house and furniture were in order, and had looked after the few slaves who did the actual work. Under the late Republic all this was changed.
Other slaves, relieved the master of the purchasing of the supplies and the keeping of the accounts, and left to him merely the supervision of the house and its furniture. The duties of the slaves under him were, in the same way, distributed among a number many times greater than the slaves of early days. Every part of the house had its special staff of slaves, often so numerous as to be distributed into decuriae, with a separate superintendent for each decuria: one for the kitchen, another for the dining-rooms, another for the bedrooms, etc.
The very entrance door had assigned to it its special slave who was some times chained to it like a watchdog, in order to keep him literally at his post. The duties of the several sets were again divided and subdivided; each slave had some one office to perform, and only one. The names of the various functionaries of the kitchen, the dining-rooms, and the bedchambers are too numerous to mention, but an idea of the complexity of the service may be gained from the number of attendants that assisted the master and mistress with their toilets.
When the master or mistress left the house, a large retinue was deemed necessary. If he or she walked, slaves went before to clear the way, and pages and lackeys followed, carrying wraps or the sunshade and fan of the mistress, and ready to perform any little service that might be necessary. The master was often accompanied out of the house by his slave, who prompted him in case he had forgotten the name of anyone who greeted him. If the master did not walk, he was carried in a litter somewhat like a sedan chair. The bearers were strong men all carefully matched in size and dressed in gorgeous liveries. As each member of the household had his own litter and bearers, this one class of slaves made an important item in the family budget. When master or mistress rode in this way, the same attendants accompanied him as when they walked. At night, as there were no street lights torches had to be carried by some of the attendants to light the way.
When the master dined at the house of a friend, his slaves attended him at least as far as the door. Some remained with him to care for his sandals, and others returned at the appointed hour to see him home. A journey out of the city was a more serious matter and called for more pomp and display. In addition to the horses and mules that drew the carriages of those who rode, there were mounted outriders and beasts of burden loaded with baggage and supplies. Numerous slaves followed on foot, and an occasional Roman even had a band of gladiators to act as escort and bodyguard. It is not too much to say that the ordinary train of a wealthy traveller included dozens, perhaps scores, of slaves.
Among the town family must be numbered also those who furnished amusement and entertainment for the master and his guests, especially during and after meals. There were musicians and readers, and, for persons of less refined tastes, dancers, jesters, dwarfs, and even misshapen freaks. Under the Empire little children were kept for the same purpose.
Lastly may be mentioned the slaves of the highest class, the confidential assistants of the master, the amanuenses who wrote his letters, the secretaries who kept his accounts, and the agents through whom he collected his income, audited the reports of his stewards and managers, made his investments, and transacted all sorts of business matters. The greater the luxury and extravagance of the house, the more the master would need these trained and experienced men to relieve him of cares, and by their fidelity and skill to make possible the gratification of his tastes and passions.
Legal Status of Slaves. The power of the master over the slave was absolute. The master could assign to the slave laborious and degrading tasks, punish him even unto death at his sole discretion, sell him, and kill him (or turn him out in the street to die) when age or illness had made him incapable of labour. Slaves were mere chattels in the eyes of the law, like oxen or horses. They could not legally hold property, they could not make contracts, they could testify in court only on the rack, they could not marry.
There were two important differences between the son, for example, and the slave. The son was relieved of the slavery on the death of the pater but the death of the master did not make the slave free.
Under the Empire various laws were passed that seemed to recognise the slave as a person, not a thing; it was forbidden to sell him to become a fighter with wild beasts in the amphitheatre; it was provided that the slave should not be put to death by the master simply because he was too old or too ill to work, and that a slave “exposed” should become free by the act; at last the master was forbidden to kill the slave at all without due process of law. As a matter of fact, these laws were very generally disregarded, much as are our laws for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and it may be said that it was only the influence of Christianity that at last changed the condition of the slave for the better.
The Treatment of Slaves. There was nothing in the stern and selfish character of the Roman that would lead us to expect from him gentleness or mercy in the treatment of his slaves. At the same time, he was too shrewd and sharp in all matters of business to forget that a slave was a piece of valuable property, and to run the risk of the loss or injury of that property by wanton cruelty. Much depended, of course, upon the character and temper of the individual owner. The case of Vedius Pollio, in the time of Augustus, who ordered a slave to be thrown alive into a pond as food for the fish because he had broken a goblet, may be offset by that of Cicero, whose letters to his slave Tiro disclose real affection and tenderness of feeling. If we consider the age in which the Roman lived, and pass for a moment the matter of punishments, we may say that he was exacting as a taskmaster rather than habitually cruel to his slaves.
Of the daily life of the town slave we know little except that his work was light and that he was the envy of the drudge upon the farm. Of the treatment of the latter we get some knowledge from the writings of the Elder Cato, who may be taken as a fair specimen of the rugged farmer of his time (234-149 B.C.). He held that slaves should always be at work except in the hours, few enough at best, allowed them for sleep, and he took pains to find plenty for his to do even on the public holidays. He advised farmers to sell immediately worn-out draft cattle, diseased sheep, broken implements, aged and feeble slaves, “and other useless things.”
Food and Dress. Slaves were fed on coarse food, but, when Cato tells us that besides the monthly allowance of grain (about a bushel) they were to have merely the fallen olives, or, if these were lacking, a little salt fish and vinegar, We must remember that this allowance corresponded closely to the common food of the poorer Romans.
But, entirely apart from the grinding toil and the harshness and insolence of the overseer, and, perhaps, of the master, the mere restraint from liberty was torture enough in itself. There was little chance of escape by flight. In Greece a slave might hope to cross the boundary of the little state in which he served, to find freedom and refuge under the protection of an adjoining power. But Italy had ceased to be cut up into hostile communities, and, should the slave by a miracle reach the border or the sea, no neighbouring state would dare defend him or even hide him from his Roman master. If he attempted flight, he must live the life of an outlaw, with organised bands of slave hunters on his track, with a reward offered for his return, and unspeakable tortures awaiting him as a warning for others. It is no wonder, then, that slaves sometimes sought rest from their labours by a voluntary death. It must be remembered that many slaves were men of good birth and high position in the countries from which they came, many of them even soldiers, taken on the field of battle with weapons in their hands.
Punishments. It is not the purpose of the following sections to catalogue the fiendish tortures sometimes inflicted upon slaves by their masters. They were not very common, for the reason suggested in 158, and were no more characteristic of the ordinary correction of slaves than lynching is characteristic of the administration of justice in our own states. Certain punishments, however, are so frequently mentioned in Latin literature that a description of them is necessary in order that the passages in which they occur may be understood by the reader.
The most common punishment for neglect of duty or petty misconduct was a beating with a stick or a flogging with a lash. The stick or rod was usually of elm wood (ulmus); the elm-rod thus used corresponded to the birch of England and the hickory of America, once freely used in flogging. For the lash or rawhide was often used a sort of cat-o’-nine-tails, made of cords or thongs of leather. When the offence was more serious, bits of bone, and even metal buttons were attached to this, to tear the flesh, and the instrument was called a flagrum or flagellum. To render the victim incapable of resistance he was sometimes drawn up to a beam by the arms, and weights were even attached to his feet, so that he could not so much as writhe under the torture.
Another punishment for offences of a trivial nature resembled the stocks of old New England days. The offender was exposed to the derision of his fellows with his limbs so confined that he could make no motion at all—he could not even brush a fly from his face. A variation of this form of punishment is seen in the furca, which was so common that furcifer became a mere term of abuse. The culprit was forced to carry upon his shoulders a heavy forked log, and had his arms stretched out before him with his hands fastened to the ends of the fork. This log he had to carry around in order that the other members of the familia might see him and take warning. Sometimes to this punishment was added a lashing as he moved painfully along.
Less painful and degrading for the moment, but even more dreaded by the slave, was a sentence to harder labour than he had been accustomed to perform. The final penalty for misconduct on the part of a city slave for whom the rod had been spoiled in vain was banishment to the farm, and to this might be added at a stroke the odious task of grinding at the mill or the crushing toil of labour in the quarries. The last were the punishments of the better class of farm slaves, while the desperate and dangerous class of slaves who regularly worked in the quarries paid for their misdeeds by forced labour under the scourge and by having heavier shackles during the day and fewer hours of rest at night. These may be compared to the galley slaves of later times. The utterly incorrigible might be sold to be trained as gladiators.
For actual crimes, not mere faults or offences, the punishments were far more severe. Slaves were so numerous (§ 131) and their various employments gave them such free access to the person of the master that his property and very life were always at their mercy. It was indeed a just and gentle master that did not sometimes dream of a slave holding a dagger at his throat. There was nothing within the confines of Italy so much dreaded as an uprising of the slaves. It was simply this haunting fear that led to the inhuman tortures inflicted upon the slave guilty of an attempt upon the life of his master or of the destruction of his property.
The runaway slave was a criminal; he had stolen himself. He was also guilty of setting a bad example to his fellow slaves; and, worst of all, runaway slaves often became bandits (§ 161), and they might find a Spartacus to lead them (§ 132). There were, therefore, standing rewards for the capture of one and there were men who made it their business to track them down and return them to their masters. The fugitive was brought back in shackles, and was sure to be flogged within an inch of his life and sent to the quarries for the rest of his miserable days. Besides this, he was branded on the forehead with the letter F, for fugitive and sometimes had a metal collar riveted about his neck.
For an attempt upon the life of the master the penalty was death in its most agonising form, by crucifixion. This was also the penalty for taking part in an insurrection; we may recall the twenty thousand crucified in Sicily and the six thousand crosses that Pompey erected along the road to Rome, each bearing the body of one of the survivors of the final battle in which Spartacus fell. The punishment was inflicted not only upon the slave guilty of taking his master’s life, but also upon the family of the slave, if he had a wife and children.
Manumission. The slave might purchase freedom from his master by means of his savings, as we have seen or he might be set free as a reward for faithful service or some special act of devotion. In either case it was only necessary for the master to pronounce him free in the presence of witnesses, though a formal act of manumission often took place before a praetor. The new-made freedman set on his head the cap of liberty (pilleus), seen on some Roman coins. The relation that existed between the master and the freedman was one of mutual helpfulness. The patron assisted the freedman in business, often supplying the means with which he was to make a start in his new life. If the freedman died first, the patron paid the expenses of a decent funeral and had the body buried near the spot where his own ashes would be laid. He became the guardian of the freedman’s children; if no heirs were left, he himself inherited the property. The freedman was bound to show his patron marked deference and respect at all times, to attend him upon public occasions, to assist him in case of reverse of fortune, and in short to stand to him in the same relation as the client had stood to the patron in the brave days of old.
