Actually, under Roman law, having soldiers within the city walls was a big no-no. Mind you not that this didn’t stop a few people.
All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?
Our reaction also. Ephesus doesn’t get the credit it deserves as being an awesome place to visit. I have the toilets as part of my screen saver photo display.
Lots of cities are bigger than Manhattan in area–L.A. for one. Our overall density of population is a lot less, but comes close to it in the more urbanized neighborhoods.
The fact that Manhattan is so small geographically is a big contributing factor to why it is the way it is–with the skyscrapers, comprehensive rapid transit, and all that cultural and financial action going on in one place.
Could the poor people afford to use them? They sound pretty nice-hot rooms, cold rooms, pools, and massages. Were they also centers of prostitution?
ralph124c, you’ve unfortunately wandered straight into to of the worst quagmires of roman history, meaning:
- Who were the roman poor, how many were they, and what could they afford?
and
- How did ancient roman prostitution work?
Neither of these has any agreed upon answer, but I’ll try my best.
One picture of ancient Rome holds that the city proper was surrounded by a shanty-town of starving poor and beggars, numbering in millions, whereas the people we hear about are the very few, lucky, rich people at the top, who lived in houses and ate every day and so one. You usually hear this from the same people who claim ancient Athens was not a democracy and Alexander the Great didn’t really conquer all that much.
At the other end of the scale you find the horribly reasonable idea that there really weren’t any roman poor, as we define poor, because people who had no means to feed themselves died before long. So the poorest of the poor would be those who were routinely going hungry, but not actually starving.
Getting back to the question of baths, we really don’t know if they charged admission, or how much if they did. Ancient Rome itself may well have had some system of free, public baths. Sponsoring baths was an easy way of gaining popularity, so some baths may well have charged entrance in theory, but in practice some up and coming politician or other may have always been keeping them free.
The best I can tell you is that most people had access to some form of baths. If there were some who could not afford it, it will have been the same people who could not afford regular food. I bet the average roman would rather skip meals than baths anyway.
As for prostitutes, theories are all over the map. There seems to be a link between baths and some form of seedy reputation in some ancient sources, but it’s mostly rumors; “I hear that there are unsavory things going on in baths in the provinces”, rather than “this goes on in my local bath”. So there may have been some baths, somewhere, doubling as brothels, but it’s by no means a common thing. That said, scratched messages in walls and other evidence seems to indicate that, in some places, freelance prostitutes hung around outside baths hoping to pick up some business (if they were more successful around the entrance or the exit is anyone’s guess).
All of this is clouded, because the Romans loved to decorate with sexual imagery, and early archaeologists tended to interpret every scrap of uncovered bosom to mean that the building was a brothel. In reality, there is probably a single brothel in Pompeii, and an unknown, but probably not terribly high number in Rome.
Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was bigger than any city Cortes and his men had ever seen. It had very good sanitation and was, by all accounts, a far cleaner and more livable place than any 16th century European metropolis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan. See Gary Jennings’s novel Aztec for a fascinating and detailed discussion of the city.
I don’t know about medieval London, but in Rome the foot traffic was very literal: horses and carriages and wagons were forbidden inside the city except at night or by special permit, AND they had the equestrian version of a pooper scooper law. (Source: All Roads Lead to Rome feature on HBO’s ROME DVDs)
What’s really amazing: about 2,000 of them were the same people.
The same All Roads Lead to Rome feature and a Terry Jones documentary on daily life in ancient Rome both go into some detail on this as well. The diet of the Roman laborer was mostly chick peas and cheese as protein with fish thrown in occasionally, poultry and eggs less rarely, and meat on the most special of occasions maybe once or twice a year. They had more greens in their diet than most ancient people and used garlic very liberally- in the Jones documentary he was actually surprised at how relatively tasty it was (as opposed to his documentary on medieval England where the food was awful).
Only the rich had ovens in their house due to fire hazard, fires being frequent and capable of spreading out of control in the insulae in a heartbeat. Bakers were one of the most common working class professions and a powerful guild and you’d find bakeries on pretty much all streets. Bread was a staple of the diet and grain was subsidized by the government so it was usually cheap enough for workers to afford.
The prostitutes (called luparia- she-wolves) ranged from very cheap girls who operated in tiny cells off the street (what the Old West called “crib whores”)- it’s not known if a prostitute rented the cell or if they were (no pun intended) first come first served like a park bench might be today. There were both men and women but the men were the lowest paid (not counting beautiful big butted youths who could attract a wealthier clientele). In some areas and times sexually graphic coinage was apparently issued with pictures of a sex act that particular coin would buy in what may have been an attempt to fix prices, and since most people were illiterate the sexual practices offered were often depicted on the outside of the buildings (literal pornography). Exotic prostitutes (African, Indian, Arabs, etc.) were particularly popular and more expensive. Something in debate is how many prostitutes were slaves v. how many were free; it’s known they had their own guilds that were referenced several times in ancient writings as well as patron goddesses.
That’s just it - most of what we know about roman prostitutes is a jungle of fascinating details, but no general knowledge. We don’t know what the “typical” prostitute was like. Take those prostitutes booths - they may have been exclusively for prostitution, or they may have been the ancient equivalent of a cheep flat, sometimes inhabited by working girls.
Was the average roman prostitute a street walker? A courtesan? A young, beautiful slave, or a middle-aged drunk? Did she have a pimp? Did she do freelance work at the local brothel, or did she do outcalls? Did she live in rooms above the brothel, or did she sleep where she worked? Was she roman born, or foreign?Was she, in fact, a he?We just don’t know. We have lot of single references to various practices, some of the decades or centuries apart, and none of them are talking about the same thing, or written in the same context.
I’d recommend the chapter on prostitution in “Pompeii: The life of a Roman town”, by Mary Beard, for an excellent overview. The rest of the book is fascinating as well.
That law was only introduced by Caesar, though. So, for most of the Republic, it’s not true.
Indeed, much bigger. L.A. is 498.3 square miles and that’s just the city proper. There are many incorporated cities in Los Angeles county which are associated in people’s minds as part of “L.A.” (even though they like to assert their independence) such as Santa Monica, Long Beach, Burbank, etc. And the whole of L.A. county is 4,752 square miles.
So yeah, Manhattan is just a tiny little island.
The United States was very much a rural nation at the time of its founding. It had a population of around 2,500,000 and the largest city in the country was New York with a population of only around 60,000.
Yes, they needed Legionsraum.
An estimated 10,000+ people came to George Washington’s inauguration festivities, so many that it not only filled up every tavern and rooming house but every private residence where people were willing to rent a room or bed as well as most of the churches and there were still people sleeping in tents in alleys, in the park, and renting space on docked boats and the wharves. Like Andrew Jackson’s “Party at my place!” shindig almost 40 years later it was an out-of-control nightmare.
J. Caesar and several of his successors promised soldiers their own land when their enlistment was over. This presented a problem as there wasn’t nearly enough land available to honor this in Rome itself (the city and its exurbs) or in all of Italy, so they started giving land in the conquered lands which caused a major uproar (“We were told it was going to be land in civilization!”) but it worked in helping to Romanize the provinces.
When Herod Antipas was removed as ruler of Galilee he and his wife were exiled to what’s now Lyon in France. By that time (39 A.D.) it was already a fairly large and thriving colony that had been there for more than 3 generations.
Interesting-did ancient Rome have some kind of street lighting? Supplying a city the size of Rome reqired moving a lot of food-and it is dark at night-I assme most of the grain that fed Rome came from Egypt-and was shipped in via the port of Ostia Antica-there mst have beena lot of carts to hal all that grain.
Not organized street lighting as such, but some main streets will have had some light by private initiative. And most wagons would have carried their own lamps and such.
A lot of food will have been carried in on donkeys laden with baskets. Or slaves. Or farmers.
Like all cities, Romes main problem was getting rid of stuff, rather than getting stuff in, since many things could be dragged up the Tiber on barges. But the city soon filled up with refuse, building rubble, excrement and dead bodies. People had a vested interest in bringing stuff in for sale, and managed on their own. Getting stuff back out was a major headache for city officials, since you had to force or pay people to do it.
Nicely done!! 
I am reading Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra at the moment. She was living at Caesar’s villa outside of Rome when he was murdered. It apparently had a nice view of the main part of the city, and after he was murdered, local vigilance committees arranged for campfires to be set in their neighborhoods because of the unrest the murder caused. The normal state of affairs was that Rome was completely unlit at night, so the book imagines a little scene with Cleopatra looking out at the sight of Rome and the campfires, and pondering her and Caesarion’s future. All of this in comparison to Alexandria, which was, at that time, the nicest, fanciest big city in the “Roman” world.