Flames in the Insula: Night with the Roman Fire Watch

Marcus Valerius

Come up the stairs with me. Careful, the fourth step is loose, and the landlord has promised to fix it since the reign of Nerva. We're climbing to my rooms on the third floor of an insula, one of those tall tenements of brick and timber where ordinary Romans live stacked like amphorae in a cellar. It's dusk. Down in the street, the bakery on the ground floor is banking its oven, and the smell of warm bread climbs the stairwell behind us. I love that smell. I also, if I'm honest, fear it.

Marcus Valerius

Because here is the secret of living in Rome. The senator on his hillside has a house of marble and brick and a garden between him and his neighbors. I have a charcoal brazier, a foculus, glowing in my room to keep off the chill. I have an olive oil lamp that spits soot onto the ceiling. I have a wooden floor, and below me a baker, a cobbler, and a wool dyer, all with their own fires. Every Roman in an upper room knows the same thing. If it starts below, it climbs.

Marcus Valerius

And that's why, at this hour, I hear boots on the stairs. Heavy boots. Someone is knocking on every door on this landing.

Marcus Valerius

It's the watch. The vigiles. There are about seven thousand of them in the whole city, in seven cohorts, and each cohort looks after two of Rome's fourteen regions. Augustus founded them back in the year 6 of our era, after too many fires and too many bad ideas. Before him, you could hire a gang of slaves to put out a blaze, and the story goes that the rich Crassus would first haggle over the price of your burning house. Refuse his offer, and he'd let it burn.

Marcus Valerius

The man at my door is broad, sweating, and carries a bucket woven from coarse rope and sealed with black pitch. We have a name for these buckets, and for the men who carry them. Sparteoli. The little bucket fellows. Tertullian will tell you that's what the crowd calls them, and it is not a compliment. They are mostly freedmen, you see. Men who were slaves. A freed man who serves six years in the watch earns full Roman citizenship under the Lex Visellia, and later a decree cut that to three. So a man like this one is working his way into the very citizenship I was simply born with. I'm ashamed to say that I've laughed at the buckets too.

Marcus Valerius

He doesn't laugh. He says, "Water. In the upper room. Show me."

Marcus Valerius

That's the law, friend. Every tenant must keep water standing in his cenaculum, his upper room. The watch is ordered to go door to door and remind us. And I'll tell you plainly, it irritates me to have a freedman in my doorway, looking into my jar. The jar is a third full. I used the rest this morning to wash my feet.

Marcus Valerius

He looks at it. Then at me. And here's the part you need to understand. This man does not just have a bucket. Behind him stands the Prefect of the Watch, who by law may deal with those who handle fire carelessly. The jurists Paulus and Ulpian say it outright: he can have them beaten with clubs, or flogged with rods. Or he can let them off with a stern warning, whichever he sees fit. The prefect is far away in his chair. But this man is here, in my doorway, and he knows exactly whose name he could carry back.

Marcus Valerius

I fill the jar. I fill it to the brim, and I tell him he's very thorough. He tells me he's tired, and asks if the next shift is on the way. Then he kicks my cooking pot back under the table, hard enough that I wince, and goes on to the next door. That's how it feels to be inspected. The law is the prefect's. The boot belongs to whoever is standing in your room.

Marcus Valerius

Night comes down. Out in the streets, the watch patrols with torches fed on animal fat, tallow, so the whole lane smells of burnt mutton. You hear them before you see them, the slap of sandals, the clink of hooks and axes. They are not allowed to sleep. They are listening for one thing: the crackle in the roof beams.

Marcus Valerius

And sometimes they hear it where it isn't. Ask anyone at a dinner party. Seneca and Petronius both tell the same joke: the host is roasting a feast, the smoke rolls out of the kitchen chimney, and suddenly the door flies in. Watchmen with axes and buckets, ready to save the house from the supper. The guests drop their cups. The cook screams. And the host, naturally, has to pay for the door.

Marcus Valerius

Tonight it isn't a joke. I smell it before I hear it, sharp and black, and not from any kitchen. The shout goes up from two streets over. A baker's oven, they're saying, a spark in the thatch of a shed against the alley wall. I go to my window, and there it is, orange against the underside of the sky.

Marcus Valerius

Now, I want you to see how the watch fights a fire, because it's not what you imagine. There are no pipes in the street. No hoses. The water-carriers, the aquarii, know where every public fountain stands, and they set up chains of men with buckets. A specialist, a siphonarius, works a force pump. The men throw blankets over the flames, heavy patchwork quilts they call centones, soaked in water and in vinegar, which they swear smothers fire better than water alone. All of it, Ulpian lists it in his law: the ladders, the picks, the long poles, the brooms, the mats.

Marcus Valerius

But a pump cannot throw water to a third floor. So the truest weapon they carry is not the bucket. It's the hook. They climb onto the neighbor's roof, and they tear it down. Beam by beam. They pull down the shed. They pull down someone's home, to save the rest of the street from the fire jumping the alley. That's the way it's done. Someone loses everything so the lane might survive.

Marcus Valerius

I stand in the street with a jar of my own water, useless, and I watch the man with the pitch bucket, the same one who kicked my pot, hauling a charred beam down off a roof. His face is black. He is shouting orders to the others, and he isn't laughing at anyone. The shed comes down. The flames hit the empty gap and starve.

Marcus Valerius

The poet Juvenal wrote that when a fire comes, the last to burn is the man who has nothing to shelter him from the rain but the tiles. The poorest, in the highest garret. He will be the last to notice the smoke, and the first to find the stairs gone. And I live two floors below him.

Marcus Valerius

The man with the bucket passes me at dawn, gray with soot, heading back to his post. I say, "Thank you." He says, "Keep your jar full." I never called him a little bucket fellow again.