Traffic jams, slum landlords, waste, street crime, crowded apartments—these all-too-familiar blights of modern city life were not unknown to the ancient Romans.
During the reign of Augustus (27 B.C.–14 A.D.), Rome teemed with almost a million inhabitants, most of them living in multi-storied tenements called insulae. (Although nearly all traces of Rome’s insulae have vanished, ruins of insulae are still visible in nearby Ostia [above].) By 300 A.D., about 44,000 apartment blocks (see model below) housed almost the entire population of the city.
Shops were often located on the ground floor, with stone stairways leading to the apartments above. The living spaces got smaller as one climbed higher. Unlike Rome’s detached houses, insulae didn’t have running water, although there were occasionally group toilets on the ground floor. Although the apartment block’s central courtyard sometimes contained a cistern, tenants usually got water from public fountains.
Fire was a recurring problem. According to the Roman satirist Juvenal (c. 55–130 A.D.), “If the alarm goes at ground level, the last to fry will be the attic tenant, way up among the nesting pigeons, with nothing but tiles between himself and the weather.” Flames from oil lamps and open braziers sparked fires that destroyed entire quarters of the city. When a great conflagration consumed Rome in 64 A.D., the emperor Nero enforced new building codes that prohibited the construction of wooden ceilings and stipulated that adjacent structures not share common walls. Roads were also broadened to act as firebreaks.
Rome’s housing crunch led to numerous hastily—and therefore dangerously—constructed insulae, which sometimes came down like the proverbial house of cards. No less a figure than the great Roman statesman and orator Cicero, a first-century A.D. slumlord, complained to a friend: “Two of my buildings have collapsed … in the others the walls are all cracked; not only the tenants, but even the mice, have left.”
Traffic jams, slum landlords, waste, street crime, crowded apartments—these all-too-familiar blights of modern city life were not unknown to the ancient Romans.
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