What Did People in Ancient Rome Do at Night?

It's two in the morning in Rome and the city has never been louder. Caesar had banned carts from the streets for most of the daylight hours, because the place had completely seized up. Which meant a million people got fed after dark instead. Iron-rimmed wheels dragging over stone, all night, every night, twenty feet under your bed, with no glass in your window to stop any of it. Juvenal reckoned insomnia killed more Romans than anything else did. He was joking. Sort of. And the noise was the safest thing out there. No street lighting anywhere in the city. No police worth the name. Gangs working the alleys with clubs. Chamber pots coming out of fourth-floor windows hard enough to kill you. And according to one very unreliable Roman historian, an emperor who used to go out in a wig and join in. So this is one full night in ancient Rome. The traffic law, the dark, the seven thousand firefighters who'd all been slaves, why the place burned down constantly, who was still working at 3am, and where you went if you had no bed at all. And at the end, the honest part — because almost everything we know about Roman nights came from a handful of very rich men who were being funny on purpose, and I'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. CHAPTERS 0:00 Two In The Morning 0:25 Caesar Made It Illegal 1:35 The City Goes Black 2:10 What's Waiting In The Dark 3:15 The Emperor Went Out In Disguise 4:20 Seven Thousand Freed Slaves 5:25 Why Rome Kept Burning 6:35 Lamps, Lanterns And Status 8:00 Who Was Awake All Night 9:15 Where The Poor Slept 10:20 The Other Rome 11:40 The Honest Part 13:30 Listening To Your City Feed Itself ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ❤️ I make these on my own, after a long day bricklaying. Every one takes a few weeks of reading before I write a word of it. If you've got a second, a like really does help. If not, no worries — see you in the next one. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES Lex Julia Municipalis, c.45 BC — the ban on wheeled vehicles Juvenal, Satire III Martial, Epigrams Suetonius, Life of Nero Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae The vigiles — established by Augustus, AD 6; seven cohorts, fourteen regions ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #ancientrome #romanempire #history #rome #ancienthistory