205 points by surprisetalk39 days ago | 79 comments
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I can highly recommend Lindsey Davis' Falco series, murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. She brings the city to life, it's remarkably vivid, and -- I promise this comment is on topic for this thread! -- Roman apartment living is threaded throughout the series and apartment building construction even forms a major plot point in one book.
I can't say more without spoilers. Excellent for "feeling" what Rome was like.
See how pots strike and dint the sturdy pavement.
There’s death from every window where you move.
You’d be a fool to venture out to dine,
oblivious of what goes on above,
without your having penned that dotted line,
of your last testament.
This feels very modern. "Sure, you might get randomly killed by a pot flying out a window, but there are _walkable_ restaurants!"
I really really wish, there was a VR game/app where I can transport myself to different places/times in the past and just walk around to get the texture and feel for what it felt like living in that time.
Walking around a Roman town, hearing what people talked like, what they wore, what technology was around, what did they do most of the day.
It's coming. I actually imagine it will seem trivial in a few years. "Better Than Life" from Red Dwarf is the next tier of computer games I guess. They wrote that episode back in the late 80s or early 90s and here we are with Google Genie 3 and the models that will supersede it.
For thousands of years, people have seen the benefits of living in cities.What is really a city? Simply a place where people have a mutual interest in living close to each other. Urban sprawl and car centric society seems to be a really bad idea. Build better cities rather than self driving cars.
You don't even have to tell anyone to "build better cities". All you have to do is get rid of the arbitrary restrictions on upward city growth. Zoning was a really bad idea.
For thousands of years, high-density living meant a 3 or 4 story apartment building. Certainly not sky-scrapers, they weren't even possible to build until the last century or two.
What you state as "urban sprawl" would be "mostly normal" living density for a city like Rome. When I walk the streets of larger cities, its not like the downtown core has acres of land per house, or even a 1/4 acre.
Now of course, there are some differences over time. But my point is that it's not as if the car has caused urban sprawl, in fact, downtown cities are far more dense than 500 years ago. Or 2000, or whatever. One 40 story apartment building, which is common not even just in downtown cores, is a lot more dense than anything 1000 years ago, land use would be 10x or 20x or even 40x.
I know there's this fad to pretend the car caused every problem ever, but it's just not true.
People lived in cities because they couldn't find a farm. Anyone who had a farm didn't leave because you controlled your survival. 95% of the people (numbers varied but this is good enough) lived on a farm. Cities were full of diseases and they didn't have good jobs.
Of course what you read in history is from the rich point of view. If you had wealth (slaves back on the farm) city life was really good.
that seems like a reductive truth in the other direction, i'd even say it's largely false.
the wealth explosion in the high middle ages and significant rise in standard of living was fully accompanied by (and maybe precisely because of) the flourishing of urbanity as well. there were great jobs in the city. proto industry and cottage industry, specialized trades, guilds, ... would you rather be a farmer, subject to the whims of your lord and the weather, or instead weave cloth at a more individualized pace, as a band of brothers?
that city was also a much more calm and verdant atmosphere than we now image as well. gardens, high intensity cultivation, markets, plazzas, all within city walls, not to mention a very accessible country side outside in walking distance ... no noise pollution from cars. i think people tend to forget this aspect a lot more, because they imagine the crowded industrial city. that machine-environment wasnt the norm for the hundreds of years preceding it. we should image bruges in 1370 here as the norm, not manchester in 1870.
sure, the city could be filthy, but farmlife was miserable in its own ways. and sanitation was bad in the city, it was just as bad as on the farmstead.
Same pattern with labor markets generally. Company towns and non-competes are just softer versions of the same thing — tie workers to a location, suppress wage competition. Rome had it too; coloni were legally bound to land by late empire.
Serfdom existed to prevent peasants from leaving those farms, people wanted to move to cities were wages and jobs were better but nobility wanted to force them to stay on those farms.
I really enjoyed the film Fellini Satyricon because it shows a couple of regular guys on a crazy adventure after their apartment building in Rome collapses in an earthquake. Most other stuff about Rome/Romans follows leaders, generals, aristocrats, etc. so it was refreshing to see regular people.
And completely not based on reality, I also liked the British comedy series Plebs that also follows regular people living Rome. But it's just a way to show modern issues satirically, not really historical.
Minor correction: Satyricon isn't really about an earthquake collapsing an apartment building -- that's a brief episode. The whole film is a picaresque loosely adapted from Petronius. IIRC the source text is fragmentary, which actually suits Fellini's surreal style perfectly.
“ Most other stuff about Rome/Romans follows leaders, generals, aristocrats, etc. so it was refreshing to see regular people”
A lot of history focuses too much on leaders and elites. I would like to see much more information about how regular people lived. Or for example, when a some king “built” something, maybe we should know how life was for the workers there.
It's not as widely promoted, but if you're genuinely interested, there are more of those histories written then you'll ever have time to read yourself.
There's a classic five volume series "A History of Private Life" that works through a breadth-first survey over time. It can make for a great starting point, and is a bit like an encylopedia in the way you can engage with it as essays on certain times and topics instead of being expected to read it through serially.
They called them insulae meaning "islands". They had no concept of fire escapes, and barely any plumbing (despite this image of Roman engineering). They really were the harris end of Roman architecture.
> barely any plumbing (despite this image of Roman engineering)
Nobody in their right mind would have even wanted plumbing in their home at the time.
Plumbing of the time was not airtight - this was before cheap metal and S-traps. So any drainage would be a highway for noxious odors and gasses right into your home. Bringing in fresh water would only be marginally useful without some sort of drainage.
Outbuildings persisted in the West for a while after modern plumbing because unless you are acclimated to it, the very idea of bringing refuse facilities into the home goes against every natural human instinct.
Well spotted. India is apparently going through that, and they have a joke - older people complain that new generations are lost: "They dine outside and shit inside!"
I guess that's the rear (or arse) end, if anyone else is puzzled and doesn't have a couple of spare minutes to chase it down ...
>> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.
Some writers placed Julius Caesar's aristocratic but down at the heel family in the lower floors of a Subura tenement, but apparently it really was a house.
> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.
This remained true in Western cities until elevators became widespread in the late 1800s. In New York city, for example, buildings didn't reach above 6 floors because even the poorest people would not walk up more stairs. Street level was frequently retail space, next floor up might be office space, everything higher was residential. Until Otis showed how to make a safety brake.
The fire risk was genuinely catastrophic. Augustus capped height at 70 feet partly in response to collapses and fires. Ostia Antica still has examples you can walk through - the Insula of Diana is four stories of exposed brick, and standing inside you immediately understand why upper-floor rents were so cheap. No way out if the ground floor caught.
In order to reach density living you need three things: space, water and food. The first was possible through the Roman cement, the second through the monumental Roman aqueducts and third due to the large share of slaves in relation to free people (it might be 10:1)
One of Mary Beard's documentaries ('Meet the Romans' I think) touches on Roman insulae. Literal death traps, and seemingly miserably uncomfortable at the best of times. At least you're out of the rain (except on the top floors).
And someone below mentioned 'Plebs', which is the humorous take on all this. Recommended.
Most of what we actually know about insulae comes from Ostia, not Rome itself. Ostia was a planned port town, probably more orderly than the capital. Does anyone know how much that evidence generalizes? The dangerous, chaotic insulae Juvenal describes feel pretty different from what the archaeology shows.
I can't say more without spoilers. Excellent for "feeling" what Rome was like.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco