Surviving the Streets of Ancient Rome

Marcus Valerius

Mind your feet. Not the paving stones, though they're black basalt, uneven, and slick with last night's gutter water. I mean the feet in front of you and the feet behind. Cornelia wants lamp oil, and I owe a man near the Forum a few coins, so we're going on foot. Everyone in Rome goes on foot, and by the end of the morning you'll understand why I keep a short temper in my pocket.

Marcus Valerius

Listen first. Do you hear it? Nothing rolling. No axles, no iron rims. Since the days of Julius Caesar, the law has kept freight wagons out of the city from sunrise until the tenth hour of the day. It's cut into bronze, the Tabula Heracleensis, and emperors since have kept to it. There are exceptions. Timber and stone for the temples and public works may roll. So may carts hauling away rubble from demolitions, the sacred carriages of the Vestals and the priests, and empty dung carts heading out in the morning. Everything else has to move on someone's back.

Marcus Valerius

And what a crush that makes. The street's two or three paces wide, with the shop stalls spilling out into it. The crowd ahead of you stops, and the crowd behind you doesn't, so there's a hand in the small of your back, an elbow in your ribs, and somebody's carrying pole cracking against your skull. I've heard the poet Juvenal moan about all this. I don't usually trust a man who complains about Rome from the comfort of a patron's dinner couch. But on the pole to the head, he's right. A jar of oil swings by, a jar of wine swings after it, and your legs are spattered to the knee with mud. Then a soldier marches past and puts a hobnailed boot on your toe, and he doesn't even look down.

Marcus Valerius

Here, step in behind this fellow. That's Eutychus, a gerulus, a burden carrier. I knew him in my wine selling days. He's got a pair of amphorae slung on a yoke across his shoulders, and he's shouting. "Left, Marcus! Left!" And I go left, and a long beam being carried by two builders sweeps through the air exactly where my head just was. Eutychus laughs, hitches his load, and plows on. That's how you survive, friends. Not by being strong. By having a friend who shouts.

Marcus Valerius

Now, here comes the other Rome. Do you see it, over the heads? A litter, a great curtained thing, carried by eight tall bearers, Syrians by the look of them, shoulders level, never breaking step. Two men run in front, shouting for room, and they don't ask politely. One of them shoves me into a doorway and the next fellow into the gutter. Inside, behind the curtains, the master is reading, or writing, or dozing. He will cross the whole city without touching a stone of it. Juvenal says a rich man's litter cuts through the crowd like a warship through water. I'll grant him that one. I just don't think he knows how the water feels.

Marcus Valerius

Now we come to the street I like least. Do you hear that groaning? That's the one kind of wheel you'll meet by daylight. Emperor Trajan is building, you know, a vast forum and a basilica, all to the designs of Apollodorus of Damascus, and public works are exempt from the ban. So here comes a dray, drawn by oxen, bearing a block of Ligurian marble the size of a small room. The drover's cursing the beasts. The wheels are juddering on the basalt.

Marcus Valerius

I take the far side of the street. Always. Juvenal wrote that if the axle of one of these wagons breaks under that marble, the stone comes down on the crowd like a mountain on its side. Nothing is left of the bodies, he says, not even a scrap. And the household sits at home waiting, with dinner cooling, not knowing their man has already crossed the river of the dead. I don't care for the poet's manners, but I've never known a man who walked under that load by choice.

Marcus Valerius

And of course the danger is above you as well. These apartment blocks, the insulae, rise five or six floors on either side, and the people up there have their own problems. A splash! Did you feel that? Just behind my heel. Dirty washing water, or worse, from a window high above. Others get an upended chamber pot, or a cracked cooking pot, or a roof tile.

Marcus Valerius

The law does care about that, I'll say that for Rome. The praetor's edict holds whoever lives in the room the thing was thrown from responsible. The injured man doesn't have to prove the tenant meant it, or was careless. It's enough that it fell. Break a man's goods and the tenant pays double. If a free man is killed, the fine is fifty thousand sesterces. If he lives, a judge sets a fair sum for his doctor and the work he can't do. Scholars call it an early case of strict liability. I call it a comfort to my heirs, and no comfort to me. That's why the old joke says a sensible man makes his will before he goes out to dinner.

Marcus Valerius

The oil's bought, the debt is paid, and the sun is leaning west. This is the part of the day I watch like a hawk. How early the tenth hour comes depends on the season. In midwinter it's about a quarter past two by your clocks, and in summer it's much later. But when it comes, the ban ends, and everything that's been waiting outside the gates, the wagons, the mule trains, the cattle herds, comes in at once. I intend to be sitting at my own table when they do.

Marcus Valerius

So I'm hurrying, the jar clutched to my chest, ducking elbows, past Eutychus again, who waves. Up our stairs. Cornelia takes the oil and says nothing, but she hears it too. First one wheel, iron on stone. Then ten. Then a hundred, shrieking on dry axles, and a drover bellowing at a stuck ox, and a whip cracking right under our window. Juvenal says it's enough to wake the emperor himself. I lie awake and listen to Rome change its voice. And tomorrow morning, we will go out and do it all again, on foot.