Daily Life in the Roman Empire: Slums, Baths, and Latrines

They told you Rome was marble columns, philosophical discourse, and military triumph.They left out the rest.The rest is this book.DAILY LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE: Slums, Baths, and Latrines is the unfiltered account of the city that actually existed — the one inhabited by the ninety percent who never appear in triumphal arches. The freedmen scrubbing grease from popina counters. The women hauling water up five flights of stairs before dawn. The children were pulled from school at age seven because the family’s arithmetic no longer worked. The porters, the fullers, the stercorarii — the people who built Rome's greatness and for whom Rome's greatness built nothing in return.Drawing on primary sources, archaeology, and two decades of scholarship in Roman material culture, this book reconstructs daily Roman life system by system: the insulae that killed their tenants by design; the thermopolia that fed a city of one million people who had no kitchens; the aqueducts that delivered water to the emperor first and the urban poor last; the medicine that couldn't see what was killing them; the baths that were spreading the diseases Galen was prescribing them to cure.The evidence is all here. It has always been here. This book is what happens when someone reads it.WHAT READERS WILL DISCOVER: • Why 46,602 Roman apartment buildings were death traps by design — and who profited • The real economics of the grain dole that fed only 20% of Rome's population • What the Edict of Diocletian (this book's primary source) was actually designed to do • How Roman women could earn legal autonomy — and what it cost their bodies • The graffiti that is the closest surviving voice of the Roman non-elite • Why the Roman baths were the most efficient disease-spreading mechanism in the ancient city • What Rome looked like from the fifth floor of a Subura insula when the empire endedFor readers of Mary Beard, Tom Holland, Mike Duncan, and Adrian Goldsworthy — but told from the street, not the senate floor. Read more