Rent Day in Trajan's Rome

Marcus Valerius

The stairs creak before I do. Come along, mind the third step, it gives way if you trust it. I'm Marcus Valerius, a freeborn citizen of Rome, and it's the reign of Trajan. Before the sun has found the tiles, I'm already awake, because today the man who collects for our landlord is due, and nobody in this building sleeps well on a day like that.

Marcus Valerius

First, the household shrine. A small niche in the wall of my main room, a little painted wooden cabinet, a few offerings of grain and a pinch of salt. I say my morning words to the spirits of my family and to the gods who watch the hearth. It takes a minute. A Roman does not begin a day without it, and a day that holds a landlord needs it more than most.

Marcus Valerius

Now smell the stairwell. Last night's lamp oil, somebody's boiled cabbage, and from far below, the bakery, warm and sweet. This is an insula, an island of apartments, floor stacked on floor. Here is something you should know about my city. Most Romans don't own the roof over their heads. Scholars who study the early Empire's rental market say the great majority of the city's residents lived in rented apartments. Only a privileged few had a house to themselves. I'm not one of the few. I'm one of the many, and so are most of the people you're about to meet.

Marcus Valerius

I sell wine near the Forum, and I'll tell you honestly, some months the wine sells like water in a flood, and some months it sits and sours in the jars. Rent doesn't care. Rent arrives all the same.

Marcus Valerius

On the landing below mine, a door opens. This is Brennus, who has the two rooms under me with his wife, his wife's brother, and three children whose names I'm still learning. He came to Rome from Gaul, years ago, with a cart and a good deal of hope. He's a big man with a red moustache, and he makes saddle straps. His hands are always cracked and stained with dye. He holds a coin purse in one fist, and he's weighing it, as if weighing it might add something to it.

Marcus Valerius

He doesn't say good morning. He says, "Marcus, if the collector asks, you haven't seen my brother in law." I tell him I haven't seen anyone. It's a Roman neighbor's oldest courtesy, and it costs me nothing. But I notice the purse is thin, and Brennus notices me noticing.

Marcus Valerius

We go down together, into the street, and the city hits you all at once. Carts, shouting, a vendor selling hot chickpeas from a steaming pot, a barber working on a customer in the open air. Brennus walks a little behind me, as if I might shield him. The collector is already there, standing by the doorway of the building with a tablet in his hand and a patient face. That patient face is the worst part. A man who's angry can be argued with. A man who's patient is only waiting for you to run out of excuses.

Marcus Valerius

I pay my share. I'm lucky this month. The collector marks his tablet, nods to me, and turns, slowly, to Brennus.

Marcus Valerius

What happens next I will not dress up for you. Brennus offers what he has. It's short. He says the saddle orders are late, that a customer owes him, that by the next market day he'll have it all. The collector listens. He says he understands. Then he says the owner does not run a charity. A few neighbors have drifted into the doorway to watch, and no one speaks. We all know the same thing: it could be any of us standing there.

Marcus Valerius

I'll tell you about a poem. A poet named Martial, a Spaniard by origin, a Celtiberian, who made a name for himself in Rome with sharp little epigrams, wrote one about a man called Vacerra, thrown out of his lodgings with his family for not paying rent. And it isn't kind. It laughs at him. Reading it, you'd think poverty was a joke the rest of us were all in on. A modern scholar, Lindsay Watson, argues that the poem draws on a long tradition of mocking the penniless, and that Vacerra and his people are drawn as Celts who had settled in the city. Watson reads some of the poet's glee as that of an immigrant who made good, laughing at one who didn't. That is his interpretation, and I'll leave it to the scholars. But I can tell you the poem is quoted at dinner parties, and people laugh, and then they walk home to apartments they rent.

Marcus Valerius

So when I stand in that doorway and watch Brennus, I don't feel like laughing. A Gaul or a Spaniard or a man born within sight of the Capitol, in this city the difference between you and him is a few coins and a good month. That's what a Roman insula teaches you. Everyone is one bad season from the street.

Marcus Valerius

Here is what I do. It's not heroic, so don't expect a speech. I step forward, and I tell the collector that Brennus's work is good, that I've seen his straps on half the mules between here and the Forum, and that I'll vouch for him until the next market day. Vouch, you understand, not pay. In Rome, your word, spoken before witnesses, is a kind of currency. It can be spent, and if it fails, it costs you.

Marcus Valerius

The collector looks at me a long moment. He writes something on his tablet. He says one more market day. Not two.

Marcus Valerius

Brennus doesn't thank me. He grips my forearm, the way Romans do, hard, and holds it a moment. Then he goes back inside to his saddle straps, and I go on to my wine jars, with the bakery smell following me down the street and the whole morning still ahead. Come on, now. The Forum is waking, and I owe you the rest of my day. But I'll be thinking of that next market day, and so, I promise you, will every soul in that building.