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High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building
- comrade1234 5mo agoI 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.
- nephihaha 5mo agoPlebs felt to me like the Inbetweeners set two thousand years earlier.
- vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago“ 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.
- swatcoder 5mo agoIt'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.
- senderista 5mo agoYou might enjoy Patrick Wyman's (Fall of Rome, Tides of History) new podcast "Past Lives": https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/new-history-podcast-past-lives https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/new-history-podcast-past...
- bluGill 5mo agoThat is what the source material is. We have to read between the lines to figure anything else out. That means we often have to guess.
- Danox 5mo agoThe only thing that has changed is the technology and the gods. Humans in particular their behavior in most things are the same unfortunately…
- everdrive 5mo agoSee 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!"
- josefritzishere 5mo agoThat's still very real in NYC. https://tribecacitizen.com/2026/04/27/rubble-falls-from-the-19-story-building-at-reade-and-broadway/ https://tribecacitizen.com/2026/04/27/rubble-falls-from-the-...
- warumdarum 5mo agoIts very much everywhere you have large swaths of people pasding through. I distinctly remember my aunt complaining that in the student dorms back in the day, two students bought a whole pig and roasted it in the iron bathtub
- lstodd 5mo agoWhere I studied there was a tradition to throw out the TV out of dorm room window at graduation. Now that were early nineties, ~21" CRT TVs and a 24 storey dorm.
- pastel8739 5mo agoSure, you might get killed just on the drive between your home and the grocery store by someone on their phone in a pickup truck, but at least you don’t have to share a wall with another human!
- everdrive 5mo ago>but at least you don’t have to share a wall with another human! If you ban loud bass I don't think I'd mind. Until then, no thank you.
- nephihaha 5mo agoThey 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.
- ableal 5mo ago> the harris end 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.
- Tangurena2 5mo ago> 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis
- legitster 5mo ago> 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.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5mo ago
- vintagedave 5mo agoI 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. https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco
- Aurornis 5mo agoI’m looking for new fiction to add to the queue but my reading time is limited (unless you count children’s books in which case I’m reading 100s of books per year). Do I need to read the first book in the series, or are they independent? If independent, can you recommend the best one for someone who only has time to read one?
- vintagedave 5mo agoIt's been several years since I read them, but I think starting with the first book is good. It's not quite as polished as the others, and I think not quite with the same tone, but it introduces the characters that will be throughout the series. My memory is the series is more lighthearted in general than the first book is. You make me think I should reread, and I will start at the beginning here too.
- Tangurena2 5mo agoThe earlier stories are mostly independent (the last few in the series build on previous stories). I would recommend starting with the first book, The Silver Pigs because there is a romance that starts and continues. The central character is what today we would call a "private eye". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Pigs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Pigs
- satvikpendem 5mo agoI mentioned this in another comment but The Forgotten City is a game with a similar setting, it's an ancient Rome first person mystery RPG where the player is supposed to figure out what happened.
- srean 5mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mansions_of_the_Gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mansions_of_the_Gods
- kjs3 5mo agoOne 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.
- romanzubenko 5mo agoI 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. Someone please make it real.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoFor ancient Rome there is The Forgotten City.
- devnulll 5mo agoThe Assassin’s Creed Odyssey game, set in classical Greece, has a feature like this. It works really well as a teaching tool, and the immersion is excellent. Even today, the overall quality of the graphics and the game still holds up. The “education mode” is officially called Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece. It removes all combat, enemies, and time pressure from the game and turns it into a large, interactive, open-air virtual museum. https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/discovery-tour https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/discovery... My kids have actually used this (without any prompting from me) in middle school history classes. There’s also a Story Mode, which lets players build their own narratives and share them. It can be quite a lot of fun. https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/story-creator-mode/en-us https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/story-creator-mode/en-us
- soperj 5mo agoI wish there was a "camping mode" for Breath of the Wild. Would be fun just to fish and hunt and camp.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoThere are discovery tours for the other modern AC games too included if you own the base game.
- bwv848 5mo agoI don’t understand why folks mention AC games first when this kind of thing is brought up, KCD is not perfect but much better for historical accuracy.
- totetsu 5mo agoAnother article written by Al
- thomasfl 5mo agoFor 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.
- Schiendelman 5mo agoYou 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.
- autoexec 5mo agoZoning is useful for keeping people from building apartments right next to paper mills, pig farms, and superfund sites because those places tend to become slums. Building height restrictions and density limits provide people with the ability to see the sky and get sunlight. They improve air quality. They're pretty useful around places like airports. They can help improve safety and limit the damage resulting from disasters like fires and earthquakes. It's important to strike a balance between over-restrictive zoning and dystopian people-warehouses in perpetual shadow.
- Schiendelman 5mo agoI strongly disagree - as do many scholars of land use law at this point. Zoning has nothing to do with separating uses. It never has. In Seattle, for instance, you absolutely can put an apartment building next to a pig farm. Nobody bothers because the market isn't interested in doing that. That also isn't atypical, zoning has never been used to pad uses away from each other like you see in Simcity. Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents. Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all. Except - where zoning prevents you from building new buildings, it preserves old unsafe buildings. Without zoning, more of those buildings would be replaced with new structures that are safe. There's no dystopia zoning is preventing. Most of the comments I see like this have very little understanding of what it does.
- tsoukase 5mo agoIn 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)
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoIt’s a shame the book is priced so ridiculously high for an ebook.
- cpncrunch 5mo agoI dont think $15 is ridiculously high.