# Ancient Rome was only 5.3 square miles **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 9, 2011, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713 "2011-02-09T00:14:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/41 "2011-02-22T14:33:52Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > But New York City 130 years ago was just lower Manhattan. Much of upper Manhattan was near wilderness. “The Age of Innocence” has a scene showing this. I recall a scene (apparently based on real life) in Gore Vidal’s historical novel _Burr,_ where, during the American Revolution, a whole regiment of the Continental Army gets lost trying to find its way from Greenwich Village to New York Village, or vice-versa; Manhattan was that wild, then. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/42 "2011-02-22T14:39:06Z")
> [@Septima](#): > > 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. N.B.: [From 58 B.C., there was a free grain dole.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_supply_to_the_city_of_Rome#Politics_and_the_grain_supply) You could live on it. But, it was only available to Roman citizens and it was only distributed in the city of Rome – you pretty much had to live there to collect it. This may have increased Rome’s population of idle-poor. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/43 "2011-02-22T15:03:58Z")
> [@BMalion](#): > > 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? Legal concepts which are still used within both the Civil and Common legal systems and a ton of vocabulary. Is that too long to work it in next time? ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/44 "2011-02-22T15:15:17Z")
> [@JoelUpchurch](#): > > Keep in mind that Rome had good _public_ facilities. The average Roman had a hike to a public fountain or toilet or bath. Only the rich had running water and even they probably wouldn’t be connected to the sewage system. Most of the sewage ended up being dumped in the streets. A lot of the pipe they did have was made out of lead. Disease was always a constant problem and epidemics would periodically sweep through the city. > > Even at that, it was better than what London or Paris had well up into the 19th century. Saragossa got its first [female mayor](http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luisa_Fernanda_Rudi) in 1995 (link in Spanish, I’d link her official webpage but I can’t reach it at work). One of the things she did was subject the city to the same treatment to which she would have subjected an ancient fixer-upper… she redid the electricity and the piping. At first, many people criticised the project, claiming it was a waste of money. When they heard what was being found they shut up, even before the actual data on the amount of water being saved (much higher than initially calculated) came to light. The sewers had not been redone in almost 2000 years. There was a large area (around the Basílica) where the pipes from 20th-century buildings went directly into the 1st-century sewers; the parts between the buildings and the main sewer could be anything from 1st to 20th century. The area covered by those ancient sewers is pretty much what the city was before its 20th century expansion. The walls which got teared down in the 19th century are within the area covered by the Roman sewers. People living “outside the walls” in either city would not have had access to sewers, but people in the city proper did. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/45 "2011-02-22T15:28:47Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > But New York City 130 years ago was just lower Manhattan. Much of upper Manhattan was near wilderness. “The Age of Innocence” has a scene showing this. That’s how Wall Street got its name. It was named after the wall that marked the northern border of the settlement. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/46 "2011-02-22T16:39:30Z")
I read that the Spanish city of Cordoba 9while under the moors) had street lighting. This must have been a very expensive proposition, in the days of oil lamps.I think that modern street lighting dates from the mid 1800’s-when gas pipes were laid and town gas was used to fuel street lamps. ---
**Author:** ![Septima](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dc4da7/32.png) [@Septima](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Septima)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/47 "2011-02-22T17:38:52Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] N.B.: From 58 B.C., there was a free grain dole. You could live on it. But, it was only available to Roman citizens and it was only distributed in the city of Rome – you pretty much had to live there to collect it. This may have increased Rome’s population of idle-poor. [/QUOTE] Well, yes and no - precisely how this grain ration was controlled is unclear, but there were several attempts at regulation. You couldn’t just show up, stand in line and stick your hand out for a portion of grain. There were lists of eligible citizens, and people were given chits to display at the distribution point. There are theories that the lists of those eligible for grain handouts were somehow tracked to the membership lists of the voting tribes, which all male romans were enrolled in. You were written into the lists by your father when you came of age, if you were a boy. It is unclear were girls fir into all this, but one must assume arrangements were made somehow. How immigrants from outside the city were integrated into this voting system when they moved to Rome is not entirely clear, but you had to live there for some time. Which presumably means that there was considerable delay before new arrivals were eligible for grain handouts. Of course, corruption and fraud was rife, as in any age, but it wasn’t a free-for-all. So, no, there were no hoards of starving vagrants descending on Rome for the grain, but the unemployed poor already living there didn’t starve, that’s true. ---
**Author:** ![E-Sabbath](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e19adc/32.png) [@E-Sabbath](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-Sabbath)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/48 "2011-02-22T20:56:07Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > That’s how Wall Street got its name. It was named after the wall that marked the northern border of the settlement. I should point out that the wall was not built to protect against the natives, but against the British. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/49 "2011-02-22T21:17:01Z")
> [@E-Sabbath](#): > > I should point out that the wall was not built to protect against the natives, but against the British. Good plan. Have you ever been attacked by British natives? They strip naked, paint themselves blue, cut their hair in those silly moptops, and come at you singing “Vindaloo”. ---
**Author:** ![Pantani](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/87869e/32.png) [@Pantani](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantani)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2011, 7:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/50 "2011-02-24T07:48:33Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > 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? Good question. We know there were public baths as well as private enterprises (oh, and baths in private homes if you were uber rich). Private comercial enterprises obviously worked on a pay for your visit basis. How many of them there were we just don’t know. Public baths could charge but could also be free. We know that from time to time emperors would for out the cash to make the baths free for all. This opens all sorts of issues as it looks like the social classes were all mixing at the baths which goes against many of our preconceptions of Roman society. There’s quite a lots of work going on at the moment that sugests that Roman baths were on the shiny clean places we imagine but must have been rather grotty. There’s some Roman medical texts that recomend bandages as being good to wear in the baths. Mmmm yummy. And then there’s the whole mixed bathing debate… ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2011, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/51 "2011-02-24T13:58:21Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > For comparison, [Manhattan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan) is 33.77 square miles. Manhattan could hold 6.3 Romes. It depends on the era. When New York City had the approximate population of ancient Rome, it was only the lower tip of the island. ---
**Author:** ![Motorgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e36b37/32.png) [@Motorgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Motorgirl)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2011, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/52 "2011-02-24T17:08:38Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Hint we got from a guidebook which worked - buy your ticket at the Forum, not the Coliseum. The ticket is good for both, and the line is much, much, shorter. We did that too and were glad we did. It was fun walking down the line of people waiting to buy tickets at the Colisseum and waltzing in ahead of them. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2011, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713/53 "2011-02-24T17:15:39Z")
> [@Sampiro](#): > > 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). . Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-was-only-5-3-square-miles/570713.md?page=2)