24 Hours in Ancient Rome: A Day in the Life of the People Who Lived There (24 Hours in Ancient History)

Edgar Allan Poe once declared that the great was Greece, and the grandeur was Rome. Rome was not built a day, and it lasted from Before Christ to His After for one thousand years. All roads led to Rome, and foreigners, colonials, and slaves from the foes all wanted to become the proud citizens of the Roman Empire. So, what then was it like living in Rome at its glorious prime? 24 Hours in Ancient Rome: A Day in the Life of People Who Lived There by Philip Matyszak comes and carries off the reader in a time coach to Rome's grandeur and invites to the daily lives of people there with magic of words. In terms of residential mode, there were more apartment buildings than villas and detached houses in Rome. Apartments called Insulas had 3 or 4 floors with no bathrooms, which means the residents dumped their bodily wastes in buckets out of their windows to the ground any time of day or night when unfortunate passer-byes would have unpleasant surprise showers from above. The apartment residents were city dwellers whose livelihood was arranged from a fish-stroll attendant to a nightguard, an unlicensed independent prostitute, and primarily others diligent and savvy waiting their time and luck to come. Rome was a practical society with shrewd politicians and powerful merchants/tradespeople. For instance, baking was a highly respectful and lucrative trade because not many people had well-equipped kitchens to cook or bake at home. Moreover, bakers had their representatives in the Senate who would lobby for the increase in the price of bread. Still, the Senate often rejected the proposal because the Senate knew that keeping the price low would maintain social stability lest the mass should not cause riots for a change of living cost. On the other hand, unless they were aristocratic or wealthy mercantile families, women had not many choices of working with desirable pay or respect. They worked in shops or stalls densely concentrated outside the walls of Circus Maximus for long, arduous hours, wrestling between the demands placed upon their tasks at work and home without due respect. Slave women's employment was mainly hairdressing and doing domestic chores. It was less rewarding and more demanding, contingent upon the mercy of their lustful masters and the whims and caprice of their mistresses, who often inflicted cruel punishment on their slaves if they irked their temper and nerves on a bad day. Rome was undoubtedly splendid in its dominance and influence consummate with the longevity, but only a few privileged basked in the sunshine of grandeur. Matyszak puts together tesserae in the mosaic of ordinary Ancient Roman lives in this leisurely entertaining and academically stimulating narrative of his part-fictional and part-actual characters. It becomes each vignette comprising a collective story of human life that still rings true to our modern life. Matyszak is an unlikely, uncommon historian whose erudition and humor put him on the same pedestal as renowned historians, such as Tacitus, Plutarch, Herodotus, and Paul Johnson. His narrative styles are engagingly knowledgeable but surprisingly personable, collapsing a great divide of time between the people of the past and the present reader. Rome was no fun when you had none. Nevertheless, Rome was a great city rich in ethnic and cultural diversity for all that's worth. The energy of urbanity made Rome all the more vivacious and vibrant, bustling with businesses and people, and created opportunities for better lives. So it is no surprise that Poe thought highly of Rome.

Histories are usually about kings and generals, wars and battles. Little is written about the common man because their deeds were not recorded as such. Still, these lives not only existed, but mattered, just as our lives are today. This is a light read that fills in some blanks and gives some insight into every day life. The twenty four chapters are loosely threaded together for continuity. This is for the history buff, not the academic.

Perfect for the history nerd as well as the casual reader, this book provides riveting one-chapter snippets into the lives of different characters living in ancient Rome. I devoured this in 48 hours because it was so easy to pick up and put down.

I enjoy this book so much that I bought a paperback copy as a gift.🎁

an interesting survey of ordinary life in Rome. Filled with unusual facts but marred by jargon. Nevertheless quite informative. Good diversion.

The author did a great job of setting the scene and bringing up what their society was like. I loved how things like the food and clothing were described, and the small sections talking about small, unexpected events in Ancient Roman history added a lot of depth to the world. The main issue I have with this novel is the tangents the author goes on. There were multiple times where the author went off on tangents that weren't super related to the point of view, and a good amount of them were fairly long. An example of that was the spice trader chapter, which was supposed to be an hour where the guy walked towards a warehouse and had dinner with someone. However halfway through the chapter the author goes on a tangent about how expensive pepper was for several pages. The author also halts the story to talk about what people in Rome thought Chinese roads looked like, and about a ton of different random stories the guy remembers other people telling him. It got so bad that the actual "hour" was only a few paragraphs of time and then the rest of the chapter was the guy reminiscing or picturing random stories others told him.

This gives the reader an appreciation of life for many levels of Romans. The author takes us through life as a slave, a tradesman, a tavern owner, the upper class, and even a gladiator. The text is liberally sprinkled with facts about Rome and what was considered normal and abnormal. A really entertaining read.

Bravo to Mr. Philip! A brilliant book; translates Roman every day reality into narratives that ring true with us today. I connected with the history presented here more than any I’ve previously read on the common people of Ancient Rome before. One of my all time favorites!❤️

I really enjoyed this book from beginning to end. Each chapter follows on perfectly from the one previously starting out at 6 a.m. when the slaves/servants are beginning their days' work, moving on to the baker, the inn-keeper etc. all in a well thought out chronological order. The style is easy to follow with interesting explanations of the origins for some words and phrases which we still use today. The whole book is written in a very relaxed and humorous style and is a real joy to read. I think I'll take a look at the book about a typical day in Egypt next.

Peppered with striking individuals from a variety of classes and occupations we are taken through an imaginary typical Roman day. There is humor, joy, grief, jealousy, as well as political and romantic assignations. This is a fine collection of anecdotes skillfully weaving authentic historical evidence and literary fragments with creative reconstruction. This text is a very enjoyable method of gaining some historical insight into the lives of long-dead, ordinary people. With the popularity of TV series set in ancient Rome this book adds a corrective balance to that scene by filling in some details of mundane daily activities and of personal relationships outside the well-known paths of the lives of emperors and their dynasties.

Avevo già letto quello sull'antico Egitto. Questo è per molti capitoli davvero divertente, l'autore ci fa vedere la vita di gente comune e scopriamo che moltissime cose non sono affatto cambiate. Non ho dato 5 stelle perché ho trovato alcuni errori nelle parole latine (probabilmente errori di battitura, ma chi ha studiato latino e noi italiani che alcune espressioni le usiamo ancora ce ne accorgiamo subito) e un errore piuttosto banale sulla mitologia egizia.

Todavía no lo he terminado pero me está gustando mucho. Describe la vida de personas normales, representativas de la sociedad romana con historias inventadas y además incluye extractos de escritos romanos. Genial

When most people think of Ancient Rome they think of legionaries, of great armies waging war on other civilisations and firmly grinding them beneath the sandals of Rome and the ever-watchful gaze of the Imperial Eagles. What we don't think of is the baker, the lawyer, the mother to a sick new born or even the prostitute. In this book we learn of all of these people and many more. It isn't a book that strives to tell you of Rome's great military might, it's a book that strives to tell you of the people that made Rome great, that kept it going whilst the armies were off doing their thing on the field of war. The book describes Rome as a heart and the people as the lifeblood that pumps through it and keeps it beating. Every chapter is an hour in the Roman day and is from the viewpoint of a different person with a different role within Rome. Each chapter is centred on one person and their daily duties and the aspects of life that affect their duties and are affected by them. Some of these characters are fictitious, purely for the point of showing you how that particular role may have lived. Others are based on real people from true accounts of the time. Throughout, the book is threaded with excerpts from Roman texts (be it satires, speeches, naturalist texts or even recipes complete with modern day equivalents for those near impossible to get Roman ingredients.) The writing is presented in an approachable way and I firmly believe that anyone, of any level of historical learning will be able to pick it up, enjoy and, indeed, take something away from it. If you have the slightest interest in Rome's past, this book is essential in broadening your understanding of that once great empire capital. Each chapter is presented in a way that sort of passes the baton on to the next, making them all feel connected. This is a great way of telling the daily life of Rome as, to some degree or another, everyone's lives were connected inside the walls of Ancient Rome. It also shows just how different classes of people within Rome were treated as opposed to others, and how some of the more powerful people were not quite as free to do as they pleased as many might think. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this and look forward to getting to the others in the series.