A Day in Ancient Rome: What Romans Did from Dawn to Night

Hello, and welcome. Tonight, we are going back almost two thousand years, to the city of Rome, at the height of its empire.

There is nothing you need to remember, and nothing you need to do. You can let the story drift in and out, like voices from another room. If you fall asleep before the end, that is perfectly all right. That is what this is for.

We are going to spend one whole day in the city. Not the day of an emperor, or a general, or a famous poet. Just an ordinary day, in the life of an ordinary man. We will follow him from the darkness before dawn, through the busy morning and the long, warm afternoon, all the way to evening, when the lamps are lit and the city slowly settles down to sleep.

The year is around one hundred and fifteen, in our way of counting. The emperor is Trajan, a soldier from Spain, who has ruled for some seventeen years. The empire stretches from the cold hills of northern Britain to the deserts of Egypt, and from the Atlantic coast to the rivers of the east. And at its center, on its seven hills beside the river Tiber, lies the largest city the western world has ever known.

So, get comfortable. Let your shoulders drop a little. Let your hands rest wherever they are. And let's begin, the way so many Roman mornings began. In the dark, just before dawn.

For the Romans, the day did not run on minutes. It ran on light.

From sunrise to sunset, the daytime was divided into twelve hours. And the night, from sunset to sunrise, was divided into twelve more. Which meant that an hour was not always the same length. It stretched and shrank with the seasons, like a piece of soft wool.

In midsummer, when the days were long, a daytime hour lasted about seventy-five of our minutes. In midwinter, when the sun rose late and set early, a daytime hour shrank to around forty-five. Only at the two equinoxes, in spring and in autumn, were the hours of the day and the hours of the night the same.

This did not seem strange to anyone. People rose with the light, and worked while the light lasted, and rested when it faded. The hours simply followed the sun.

In the very earliest times, the Romans had not even bothered with hours at all. The old laws spoke only of sunrise and sunset. Later, an official of the consuls would step outside the senate house at midday, and look for the sun as it appeared between two particular landmarks in the forum. When he saw it there, he called out that it was noon. Later in the day, he called out once more, to announce the last hour, when the sun had sunk past another landmark.

The writer Pliny the Elder, following the older scholar Varro, tells a gentle little story about the first public sundial in Rome. During a war in Sicily, a Roman consul brought one back as a prize, from the city of Catania, and set it up on a column near the speakers' platform in the forum. It became the city's public clock. There was only one small problem. It had been made for Sicily, not for Rome, and it did not quite match the Roman sky. Its lines did not agree with the hours.

And yet, according to Pliny, the Romans went on following it for ninety-nine years, until a more careful sundial was finally set up beside it.

There is something rather comforting in that. A whole city, telling the time by a clock that was a little bit wrong, and getting along perfectly well.

Later, the Romans also used water clocks. A water clock was a simple vessel, with water dripping slowly through a small opening, so that the rising or falling level marked the passing hours. It had one great advantage over the sundial. It worked on cloudy days, and it worked at night.

A wealthy family might keep a sundial of its own, or a water clock in the house. Some even had a slave whose job was to tell the master what hour it was. Public sundials stood in the forum and in other open places. But many ordinary people, it seems, had no clock of their own. For most of the city, time was simply the color of the sky, the length of the shadows, and the sounds of the street.

The first hour began at sunrise. The sixth hour ended at midday. The twelfth hour ended at sunset. And between them, the long, slow rhythm of the day unfolded, in much the same way, year after year.

Let's meet the man we are going to follow.

His name is Gaius. He is not rich, and he is not poor. He is about thirty-five years old, with dark hair already turning a little grey above the ears, and ink stains on the fingers of his right hand. He works as a copyist, writing out books by hand, for a bookseller near the forum.

Gaius lives on the third floor of an insula. The word means island. It was the name the Romans gave to the tall apartment blocks that stood, like islands, between the narrow streets of the city.

Rome may have held around a million people at this time. Nobody knows the exact number, and historians still debate it. But it was certainly enormous, and most of those people did not live in grand private houses. They lived like Gaius. Stacked one above another, in rented rooms, in buildings of brick and timber and concrete, rising four or five storeys above the street, and sometimes more.

A description of the city written a few centuries later counted more than forty thousand of these apartment blocks, and fewer than two thousand private houses. Even if the numbers are not exact, the picture is clear. Rome was a city of tenants.

The emperor Augustus had tried to limit the height of these buildings, to about seventy Roman feet, a little over twenty meters. Trajan, the emperor in our story, lowered the limit further, to about sixty feet. Tall buildings could collapse. And they could burn. Fire was the great fear of every Roman who lived above the ground floor.

The ground floor of Gaius's building is given over to business. Along the street front, there is a row of small shops, each one a single room, open to the street by day and shut up tight at night. A baker. A seller of oil lamps. A little bar, where hot food is served across a stone counter. Some shopkeepers lived in a low mezzanine room above their shops, reached by a narrow inner stair.

Above them, the floors of the insula grow simpler as they climb. The first floor, just above the shops, often held the best apartments. They had larger rooms, and sometimes even glass in the windows, or painted walls. The higher you climbed, the cheaper the rooms became. And the smaller. And, quite often, the more cramped and the more dangerous.

There was no running water up here. Water had to be carried up the stairs in jars and buckets. What cooking there was had to be done with great care, over small fires, because a fallen coal could set a whole building alight. Light came from the windows by day, and from small clay oil lamps at night.

Gaius's home is two rooms. One for sleeping, and one for everything else. The walls are plastered and painted a plain, warm red at the bottom, and white above. There is a narrow bed, a wooden chest for his clothes, a small table, a stool, a few clay jars and cups. On a shelf, there is a little bronze figure of one of the household gods, and beside it, a clay lamp. Through the window, if he leans out a little, he can see a slice of sky between the buildings opposite, and far below, the stones of the street.

It is not much. But it is his. Or at least, it is his for as long as he can pay the rent.

Gaius is not, of course, his whole name. A Roman citizen usually had three.

The first was the personal name, the praenomen. It was the name your family and close friends used. There were very few of them to choose from. Gaius. Marcus. Lucius. Publius. Quintus. Titus. Only a dozen or so were common, and the same ones turned up again and again, in family after family, generation after generation. In writing, they were so familiar that they were usually shortened to a single letter or two. C for Gaius. M for Marcus. L for Lucius.

The second name, the nomen, was the family name. It told you which clan, or gens, you belonged to. Julius. Cornelius. Valerius. Claudius. Every member of the family shared it, men and women alike.

And the third name, the cognomen, began as a kind of nickname. It often described something about a person, or an ancestor, and then stuck, and was passed down the family. Some of them were not very flattering. Rufus most likely meant red-haired. Longus meant long, or tall. Naso probably meant the one with the big nose. Cicero is said to have come from the word for chickpea. Brutus is usually taken to mean dull, or slow. Strabo meant something like squinting.

Gaius's family name is Valerius, and his third name is Felix, which is usually translated as lucky. It came from his grandfather, who was born a slave, and was later set free.

When a slave was given his freedom, he usually took the first two names of his former master, and kept his old personal name as his third. And so, a great many people in Rome carried the family names of the great houses, without being related to them by blood at all. They had been their slaves, or their slaves' children.

Gaius's grandfather had been a clerk in a large household. He was clever with numbers, and good with his hands, and he could read and write in both Latin and Greek. His master set him free in his will, and left him a small sum of money, enough to begin a modest trade. The grandfather remained a client of his old master's family for the rest of his life. And so, out of loyalty and habit, did his son, and so does his grandson. That is the house where Gaius will go this morning, to stand in the atrium, and say good morning.

Women's names worked differently. A Roman girl was usually known simply by the feminine form of her father's family name. The daughter of a Valerius was Valeria. The daughter of a Julius was Julia. If there were two daughters, they might be called the elder and the younger. If there were more, they might be numbered. Secunda, the second. Tertia, the third.

Gaius has a sister. Her name, of course, is Valeria. She married a man who keeps a small farm in the hills, a day's walk from the city, and she lives there now, with her husband and their two children, among the olive trees. Gaius does not see her often. But he thinks of her, from time to time. And tonight, before he sleeps, he will write to her.

The night before has not been quiet. In Rome, it rarely was.

During the day, wheeled carts and wagons were not allowed on most of the streets of the city. A law of Julius Caesar's time had kept commercial carts out of the city by day, with only a few exceptions. The streets were narrow, and crowded with people on foot.

So, the deliveries came at night. Sacks of grain and flour for the bakers. Jars of wine and oil. Stone and timber and bricks for the builders. Much of it rolled through the streets after dark, on heavy, creaking wagons, rumbling over the paving stones, while the drivers called to their mules and to each other, and sometimes argued about who should give way at a narrow corner.

The poet Juvenal, who knew the city well, complained about this bitterly. In one of his poems, a friend of his is leaving Rome forever, and he lists all the reasons why. Among them is the noise. The wagons passing in the narrow, winding streets, he says, and the shouting of the drivers caught in a jam, would be enough to keep anyone awake. Only the very rich, he says, can get a proper night's sleep in Rome.

The rich, of course, lived in houses that turned inward, around quiet courtyards and gardens, with few windows onto the street. They did not hear the street. And if they had to travel, they could be carried through the crowds in a closed litter, with the curtains drawn, and doze on soft cushions all the way.

Gaius has no litter, and no garden. But he has lived above this street for many years, and like most people who live in busy places, he has grown used to its sounds. The rumble of the wheels. The bark of a dog. A door banging somewhere below. Someone singing on their way home, a little too loudly, after an evening at the tavern. He hears them all, faintly, and turns over, and sleeps again.

Now, in the last hour of the night, the wagons have mostly gone. The sky outside the window is still dark. But there is a different sound now, softer and closer. The baker downstairs is already at work. The low, steady grinding of the mill. The crackle of wood burning in the oven. The smell of warm bread, drifting up the stairwell, through the cracks around the door.

It is almost morning.

Gaius wakes before sunrise. Many Romans did. Daylight was precious, and lamp oil cost money, so it probably made sense to rise with the first grey light, and to make the most of every hour the sun was willing to give.

He does not take long to dress. He has slept in his tunic, a simple garment of wool or linen, a rectangle of cloth sewn into a wide tube, with openings for the head and arms. It falls to about his knees, and he belts it at the waist with a cord. In the colder months, he might wear two tunics, one on top of the other. The emperor Augustus, it was said, wore as many as four in winter.

He pushes his feet into his sandals, and ties the laces.

On the table, there is a clay basin, and a jar of water. He pours a little into the basin, and splashes his face, and runs his wet hands through his hair. The water is cold, and it wakes him up.

He carried that water up the stairs yesterday evening, from the public fountain on the corner of the street. Rome was a city of fountains. There were hundreds of them, simple stone basins along the streets, where the water ran day and night, and anyone could come and fill a jar.

The water came from far away. Long aqueducts carried it down from springs and rivers in the hills, sometimes many miles from the city. Most of the way, the water flowed through channels underground, sloping gently downhill, so gently that you could hardly see the slope at all. Wherever the land dipped, and above all on the last stretch across the plain toward the city, the aqueducts rose up on their famous lines of arches, carrying the water high above the ground.

In Gaius's time, Rome was served by about ten aqueducts. A few years ago, the emperor Trajan opened a new one, bringing water from springs around a lake to the north-west of the city. One of the great men of the previous generation, Frontinus, had been put in charge of the city's water supply, and he wrote a careful book about it. He was very proud of these aqueducts. He compared them, rather sharply, to the idle pyramids of Egypt and the famous but useless buildings of the Greeks.

The water flowed into great tanks, and from the tanks, through pipes of lead, to the public fountains, to the public baths, and to the houses of those wealthy enough to pay for a private supply. Even the used water had its uses. When it had served its purpose, the water ran on into the drains, and through the great old sewer of the city, and out into the river Tiber.

Gaius dries his face on a cloth. Outside, a cockerel crows somewhere, in a courtyard behind the buildings. It is still too dark to see much through the window. But the sky over the rooftops has changed. It is no longer black. It is the deep, soft blue that comes just before the grey.

He takes his lamp, and checks that the little flame is out. He does not want to leave it burning. And he goes into the other room, to see about breakfast.

Breakfast in Rome came early, at dawn. The Romans called it the ientaculum. The main meal of the day would come much later, in the afternoon. For now, something simple was enough.

For Gaius, breakfast is a piece of yesterday's bread. Perhaps he dips it into a little wine, to soften it. A few olives from a jar. A small piece of hard cheese. And, if the week has been kind, a spoonful of honey, spread on the bread with the back of the spoon.

He eats standing up, by the window, watching the sky slowly fade from blue to grey.

Bread was at the center of Roman life. For poorer people especially, it was the main food of almost every day. And in Rome, unlike in the countryside, most people did not bake their own. They bought it from the bakers, or had their own grain ground and baked there, and there was a bakery in every district of the city.

The baker downstairs has been working since long before dawn. In the back of his shop, there are two or three large stone mills, each shaped a little like an hourglass. The grain is poured into the top, and as the upper stone turns slowly around the lower one, the grain is crushed between them, and the flour trickles out at the bottom.

The mills are turned by donkeys. Each donkey is harnessed to a wooden frame, and walks round and round in a slow, patient circle, hour after hour. Sometimes, the animals were blindfolded as they worked.

The flour is mixed with water and salt and a little leaven, and kneaded by hand. Then the dough is shaped into round loaves.

The oven is a low dome of brick, heated by a wood fire inside it. When the bricks are hot enough, the ashes are swept out, and the loaves go in.

We know what Roman bread looked like, because some of it has survived. At Pompeii, the town near Naples that was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, archaeologists found loaves of bread in one of the town's bakeries. Like other food found at Pompeii, they had been sealed in by the eruption, charred, and preserved.

In Rome, the city made sure that bread did not run short. A huge fleet of ships brought grain across the sea, mainly from Egypt and North Africa, to the harbors near the mouth of the Tiber. From there, it was carried upriver in barges, and stored in vast warehouses along the riverbank.

And for many citizens, the grain itself was free. Under the system called the annona, a fixed monthly ration of grain was handed out to adult male citizens who were registered for it. In the time of Augustus, around two hundred thousand men received it. It was not enough to feed a whole family. But it helped. And it meant that, in the greatest city in the world, the threat of hunger was kept, most of the time, at a distance.

Gaius finishes his bread. He brushes the crumbs from his tunic, and drinks a little water from a cup. Outside, the sky is turning from grey to pale, and the city is already awake.

For a man like Gaius, the first duty of the day has nothing to do with work. It is the morning greeting. The salutatio.

Roman society ran on a web of personal ties, between patrons and clients. A patron was a man of wealth and influence. His clients were people of lower standing, who owed him loyalty and respect, and support when he needed it. In return, they could ask him for help. A small loan. A letter of recommendation. A word with an official. A little protection, in a city that offered very little.

These ties could be passed down in families, as an obligation from one generation to the next. Gaius's father had been a client of the same family, and so, in a sense, had his grandfather before him.

And so, every morning, clients made their way across Rome to their patron's house, to stand in his atrium, and wish him good morning. The atrium was the tall, open hall at the front of a Roman house, with an opening in the roof to let in the light and the rain, and a shallow pool beneath it, to catch the water.

Before he goes, Gaius has to put on the toga.

The toga was the formal garment of a Roman citizen. It was a great, curved sheet of white wool, many feet long, which had to be wrapped and draped around the body in a particular way. Over the left shoulder, and around the body, with the folds arranged just so. It was heavy, and hot, and difficult to put on alone. The grander the toga, the more help was needed to arrange its folds.

Gaius manages by himself. He has had a lot of practice. But almost nobody seems to have enjoyed wearing the toga. The poets complained about it constantly. Martial and Juvenal both wrote that, out in the country, hardly anyone wore a toga at all. In a great part of Italy, said Juvenal, nobody put one on except the dead.

Still, for the morning greeting, it was required. And so, wrapped in his white wool, Gaius sets off through the early streets, toward his patron's house, on one of the hills.

The house, when he reaches it, is large and quiet, with a heavy double door, and a little crowd of people already waiting outside it in the grey light. Some of the clients are poor. Some are quite comfortable. A few have come a long way. They stand in small groups, talking quietly, stamping their feet against the cold of the morning stones.

They wait. Then the doors open. A slave calls them in, and they file into the atrium, under the open square of sky.

The patron greets them, one by one. Sometimes by name. In a large household, there might be a special slave, called a nomenclator, whose job was to remind the master of the names of the people he met, so that he would never be caught forgetting. Some patrons were kind and attentive. Some were busy and distracted, and greeted their clients with barely a glance.

In many houses, each client then received a small gift, called the sportula. In name, it was the price of a supper. By Gaius's time, it was usually a handful of coins. The poet Martial grumbled, more than once, about how small it was. A hundred of the smallest coins, he says, which hardly bought a decent meal.

Some mornings, the patron would then go down to the forum, and his clients would walk alongside him. A little procession of followers in white togas, showing the whole city how important he was.

But today, the patron has no business in the forum. He thanks his visitors, and wishes them well, and disappears into the inner rooms of his house. And the clients drift out again, through the heavy door, into the brightening street.

On the way back from his patron's house, Gaius stops at home just long enough to take off his toga, and fold it over his arm. Before he goes to work, he has one small errand to run.

A Roman toga was meant to be white. The finest, worn by senators, were laundered to a bright, snowy white. An ordinary citizen's toga was a softer, natural off-white. But it still had to look clean. And after a while of wearing, in the dust and smoke of the city, it was not. So, every so often, it had to go to the fuller.

The fullers were the laundry men of the Roman world. They cleaned clothes, and they probably also finished new cloth, fresh from the loom, which made it a little thicker and softer. Every town had them. At Pompeii, archaeologists have found several of their workshops, with their basins and their vats still in place, and paintings on the walls showing the fullers at work.

Gaius pushes open the door of the fuller's shop at the end of his street. It is warm and damp inside, and it smells. It smells rather strongly.

Along the back wall, there is a row of small tubs, side by side, each standing in its own little niche, with low walls around it. In each tub stands a worker, with his tunic tucked up, treading the cloth. Stepping, and stepping, and stepping, with a slow, steady rhythm, as if he were walking along a road that never ended. The water in the tubs is mixed with cleaning agents. Alkaline substances, that loosened the grease and the fat in the wool. And something else.

Urine.

It sounds strange to us. But the Romans knew that old urine contained something that loosened dirt and grease from cloth. And so the fullers collected it. Jars were set out where passers-by could relieve themselves, like the one found by the entrance of a great hall in the forum at Pompeii, and in Rome the urine from the public urinals was sold to the fullers.

This trade was so well established that the emperor Vespasian, a few decades before Gaius's time, placed a tax on the collection of urine. His son, Titus, is said to have complained that it was a disgusting thing to tax. Vespasian, the story goes, held up a gold coin, and asked his son whether its smell offended him. Titus said that it did not. And yet, said Vespasian, it comes from urine. The Latin phrase that grew out of this story, money does not smell, is still used today.

After the treading, the cloth was rinsed in clean water, again and again, in a row of larger basins. Then it was hung up to dry, and brushed with the prickly heads of thistles, to raise the soft surface of the wool.

To make a toga truly white, it was hung over a frame of woven wicker, and bleached with the fumes of burning sulfur. Men standing for public office went further still, and had their togas rubbed with chalk, to a dazzling white.

Finally, the cloth might be pressed. The larger fullers' shops had screw presses. The cloth was folded and laid in the press, and the screw was turned, slowly, until the folds lay sharp and flat.

The fuller here is a broad, cheerful man, with arms as red as his face. He takes the toga from Gaius, and shakes it out, and holds it up to the light from the door, and clicks his tongue at a small stain near the hem. Wine, he says. Gaius admits that it might be wine. The fuller laughs, and says it will be ready in three days, as white as snow. Until then, Gaius will have to wear his old one, the one with the darned patch under the arm.

Fulling was hard on cloth. Sometimes clothes came back damaged, or mixed up with someone else's. There were laws about what a fuller owed you, if he lost or damaged your garment.

But Gaius has been coming to this shop for years, and he has never had a problem. He pays a small deposit, and says goodbye, and steps out of the warm, sour air, into the fresh morning street.

Behind him, the workers go on treading in their tubs. Stepping, and stepping, and stepping. The same slow rhythm, all morning long.

By the end of the second hour of the day, Gaius is free to go about his own business. In his plain tunic once more, with the toga safely left at the fuller's, he steps out into the street.

Like most Romans, he does his real work in the morning.

The shops along his street have opened now, the wooden boards that closed them at night taken down. A shoemaker sits on a low stool, stitching a sole to a leather upper. A barber shaves a customer just inside his open shop front, the man's head tipped back, his eyes closed, a cloth around his neck.

Barbers had not always been part of Roman life. Pliny tells us that, in the early days, Romans did not cut their hair or shave at all. Barbers were brought to Italy from Sicily, he says, almost four hundred years before Gaius was born. Now, there were barbers' shops all over the city, and you might have to wait your turn.

From somewhere nearby comes the steady tapping of a metalworker. A woman is selling vegetables from a basket. Two men are carrying a heavy amphora of wine between them.

The streets of Rome were narrow, and crowded, and loud. Many streets, it seems, had no name that anyone could agree on, and the buildings had no numbers. If you wanted to find someone, you most likely asked for directions by landmarks. Past the fountain, turn at the temple, look for the shop with the painted sign.

For a while, the shopkeepers of Rome had spread out so far into the streets that people could barely get past. They set up their stalls and tables in front of their doors, and chained their wine flasks around the columns. The emperor Domitian finally ordered them to pull back, inside their own doorways. The poet Martial celebrated the moment. Rome, he wrote, was a great shop before. Now, at last, it was a city again.

The paving stones are dark with water. The fountains overflow, and the spare water runs away into the drains, helping to keep the city clean. In towns like Pompeii, the footpaths were raised well above the level of the road.

Somewhere, a dog is barking. Somewhere else, a child is laughing. A teacher has set up his class at the corner, and from his little group of pupils comes the sound of letters being recited, over and over again.

The sun has climbed over the hills now, and the first warm light is falling on the upper floors of the buildings, turning the brick and plaster gold. Down in the street, it is still in shadow, and still cool.

Gaius walks on, at an easy pace, toward the center of the city. He has done this walk so many times that he hardly needs to look where he is going. And so, he can look at everything else.

Gaius slows down as he passes the little school at the corner, and listens for a moment to the children chanting.

A Roman school was often not a building at all. It might be a rented room, or a corner of a colonnade, or simply a space on the pavement, open to the noise of the traffic and the crowds. The children sat around the teacher, with their wax tablets.

There was no state school system in Rome. If parents wanted their children to learn, and could afford a small fee, they sent them to a teacher like this one. The first teacher a child met was usually called the ludi magister, the master of the school. Or sometimes, the litterator, the teacher of letters. He taught reading and writing, and simple sums. Many of the pupils were boys, but some girls went to school too, at least for the first few years.

Children of richer families were often walked to school each morning by a trusted slave, called a paedagogus. He carried their books and tablets, and kept them out of trouble on the way, and sometimes sat in on the lessons too, to make sure they paid attention. The word came from Greek, and it did not mean a teacher at all. It meant the one who leads the child.

The children are learning the alphabet. The teacher says a letter, and, it seems, they say it back to him, in a high, slow chorus. A. B. C. D. Then they write the letters in their wax, with their styluses, slowly and carefully.

For counting, they use their fingers, which the Romans used in a very elaborate way, to show numbers up into the thousands. And for harder sums, they use little pebbles, moved about on a board, or a table marked with lines. The Latin word for pebble was calculus. When a Roman worked out a sum, he moved his little stones. The Romans even spoke of doing a sum as putting down the pebble, calculum ponere.

When they are older, the children who can afford it will go on to another teacher, the grammaticus. With him, they will read the great poets, line by line, and learn them by heart. Homer, in Greek. And in Latin, poets like Virgil, whose poem about the wanderings of Aeneas, and the founding of the Roman people, had become the great national epic.

And a few, the luckiest, or the most ambitious, will go on to a teacher of public speaking, to learn how to argue in the law courts, and speak in public, and persuade a crowd.

Gaius had gone to a school just like this one, on a different street corner, when he was small. He remembers the hard bench, and the smell of the wax, and the long, hot afternoons. He remembers the teacher, an old man with a cough, who was strict but not unkind. And he remembers the day he first wrote his own name, all by himself, in clumsy capitals, and showed it to his father.

And now, every day, at his table in the bookshop, he writes out the words that other children will one day learn to read.

The chanting goes on behind him, as he walks away. A. B. C. D. Fading slowly into the sounds of the street.

By the third hour, Gaius has reached the Forum. The old Forum, the Roman Forum, in the long, low valley between the Palatine Hill and the Capitoline.

Centuries ago, this had been a marshy hollow, where the people of the little hill villages buried their dead. Then the marsh was drained, by a great channel that later became the main sewer of the city. And slowly, over hundreds of years, the valley filled with buildings. Temples. Shrines. Law courts. Meeting halls. Monuments to the gods, and to the men who thought they deserved to be remembered.

By Gaius's time, the Forum is crowded with marble, and with people.

At one end stands the speakers' platform, the Rostra. It took its name from the rams of enemy warships, taken from the defeated city of Antium long ago, and fixed to it as trophies. From this platform, for centuries, the great men of Rome had spoken to the crowds below. Not far away is the senate house, a tall, plain building, where the senators still meet, although the real power now lies with the emperor.

Along the two long sides of the Forum stand the basilicas. A basilica, in Rome, was not a church. It was a great roofed hall, with rows of columns inside, where people could meet, and do business, and hear legal cases, out of the sun and the rain.

One of them, the Basilica Julia, was begun by Julius Caesar and completed by Augustus. It is so large that it houses the city's civil law courts, as well as shops and offices. Gaius likes to look in as he passes. Lawyers in their togas are pleading cases, in front of panels of judges and crowds of onlookers, who murmur and cheer as if they were watching a play.

Some of the crowd, it seems, were paid to be there. Pliny the Younger, a senator and lawyer of Gaius's own time, wrote a letter complaining about it. Young speakers, he says, hired people to sit in the audience and applaud them, whatever they said. There was a man who led them, and gave the signal, and the whole hired crowd would shout out its praise on cue. Pliny found it all very undignified. In former times, he says, so his elders told him, even young men of the best families were not allowed to speak in court unless someone of consular rank introduced them.

On the steps of the basilica, idle men sit in the sun. Some of them have scratched game boards into the stone, little grids of squares, and they play with pebbles while they wait for nothing in particular. You can still see these boards today, worn into the steps, by people who had time on their hands almost two thousand years ago.

At the other end of the Forum, near the old royal house called the Regia, stands a small, round temple. It is the Temple of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth. Inside it, a sacred fire burns, and it has been kept burning, day and night, for as long as anyone can remember. It is tended by six priestesses, the Vestal Virgins, who live in a large house beside the temple. As long as the fire of Vesta burns, the Romans believe, Rome itself will endure.

Gaius walks slowly across the paving, between the monuments. The Forum is noisy, but it is a different kind of noise from the streets. It is the noise of voices, of business, of argument and conversation. Merchants haggle over prices. A senator passes by, the broad purple stripes of his rank running down his tunic, a line of clients trailing behind him. A group of tourists from some distant province stand looking up at the temples, with their mouths a little open.

Gaius smiles. He was born here. He has seen all this a thousand times. But even so, on a bright morning like this, with the marble shining and the whole city humming around him, he still finds it beautiful.

The bookseller's shop stands on a street near the Forum, in the quarter called the Argiletum, where many of the city's booksellers have their shops.

The poet Martial once told a reader exactly where to find his own books. Martial himself, he explains, lives a long way off, up three flights of stairs, and high ones too. So why not go down to the Argiletum instead? There, opposite the Forum of Caesar, you will find a shop whose doorposts, on either side, are covered with the titles of books, so that you can run your eye over the names of all the poets. Ask the owner, whose name is Atrectus, and from the first or second shelf, he will hand you a copy of Martial, smoothed with pumice stone, and finished in purple. The price, says Martial, is five denarii. And when the reader grumbles that Martial is not worth so much, Martial, with a wink, agrees with him.

Gaius's employer runs a shop much like this. The front room is lined with shelves and pigeonholes, where the books are stored. A Roman book was not like ours. It was a scroll, a long roll of papyrus, the paper made from the reeds of the river Nile, wound around a wooden rod. To read it, you unrolled it a little at a time, reading one column of writing after another.

Each scroll has a little label, a strip with the title written on it, so that the books can be found on the shelves without unrolling them.

The back room is where the copying is done. It is quieter here, and the light falls in from a high window, onto three tables. At each table sits a copyist, with a fresh roll of papyrus spread out before him, and a book to copy propped up beside him.

Gaius takes his place at his usual table, and lays out his things. A reed pen, cut to a fine point with a small knife. A little pot of black ink. The ink is made from soot, mixed with gum and water, and it sits on the surface of the papyrus, glossy and dark. If he makes a mistake, he can wipe it away with a wet sponge, before it dries.

Beside the papyrus, there is also a wax tablet. A small wooden board, hollowed out a little and filled with a thin layer of dark beeswax. Into the wax, you could write with a stylus, a pointed stick, usually of metal. The other end of the stylus was flat, so that you could smooth the wax over again, and erase what you had written. The tablets were used for notes, and accounts, and letters, and lessons at school. They could be used again and again.

Gaius picks up his pen, and dips it in the ink, and begins.

Today, he is copying a book of history. It is long and calm and full of names. He writes in neat, careful letters, one column after another. His hand moves steadily across the papyrus. Dip, write, dip, write. From time to time, he stops to sharpen his pen, or to stretch his fingers, or to look out of the high window at the small square of blue sky.

It is quiet, careful work. The kind of work where the hours pass without your noticing them. The sounds of the street come in faintly, through the walls, and fade into the background, like the sound of the sea.

Every single copy had to be written out by hand, which is why books were expensive. And in one way or another, the books of Rome traveled out across the empire. Martial was proud that he was known over the whole world, and that, so he had heard, even in the distant town of Vienne, in Gaul, old men and young men and boys were reading his verses.

Gaius finishes a column, and blows gently on the ink, and starts the next.

In the middle of the morning, the bookseller sends Gaius on an errand. A customer wants a particular book checked against a better copy, and the best copies in Rome are kept in the libraries. So, Gaius sets off, glad of a walk, to the newest and grandest square in the city. The Forum of Trajan.

It had been finished only a few years earlier. It was paid for with the treasure of a war, fought across the Danube against the kingdom of Dacia, in the land that is now Romania. To make room for it, the emperor's builders had cut away part of a hill. And on the open ground, they laid out a vast new forum, larger than any that had come before.

Its designer was an architect from the east, called Apollodorus of Damascus. The same man had built the great bridge across the Danube for Trajan's armies, and the emperor's great new public baths as well.

Gaius walks into the open square. It is huge, and bright, and paved with white marble. Colonnades run along its sides. In the middle stands a great statue of the emperor, on horseback. And across the far end of the square rises the Basilica Ulpia, a vast hall named after Trajan's family, its roof supported by forests of columns, inside and out.

Beyond the basilica, there is a small courtyard. And in the courtyard stands something that nobody had ever seen before.

It is a column. A single, tall column of white marble, standing on a high base, and rising more than thirty meters into the sky, with a statue of the emperor at the very top. And all the way around it, winding up from the bottom to the top, like a ribbon around a stick, runs a carved band of stone. On the band, in more than a hundred and fifty scenes, the whole story of the wars against Dacia is told. Soldiers marching. Bridges being built. Camps being made. Rivers being crossed. Thousands of tiny figures, climbing slowly around and around the column, toward the sky.

Nobody can see the top scenes clearly from the ground. They are much too high. But that doesn't seem to matter.

And on either side of the column, facing each other across the little courtyard, are the two libraries. One for books in Latin. And one for books in Greek.

Gaius climbs the steps, and goes into the Latin library. Inside, it is cool and quiet. The walls are lined with wooden cupboards, set into niches in the marble, where the scrolls are kept. There are tables, and chairs, and a few readers, sitting and reading in silence.

He finds the book he needs, and sits down at a table by a window, with his wax tablet and his stylus, and begins to compare the two copies, line by line. Here a word is missing. Here a name is spelled differently. He makes a small note in the wax, and moves on.

It is very peaceful. Outside, through the open door, he can see the column, white against the blue sky, and the pigeons circling slowly around it.

He stays longer than he needs to.

On his way back from the library, Gaius walks up the curving street behind the Forum of Trajan, through the great markets that the emperor's builders set into the side of the hill.

It is one of the most remarkable buildings in the city. A great half circle of brick, rising level above level up the slope, like the seats of a theater. On each level, there is a row of small, arched shops, opening onto a curving street or a covered hall. There are a great many of them, stacked one above another, with stairs and passages running between them.

Nobody is quite sure, today, exactly how all of these rooms were used. Some were shops. Some may have been offices, for the emperor's officials. But on a busy morning, with the shutters open and the goods laid out, it would have looked very much like a market.

Gaius walks slowly along the curving street, looking into the open shops as he passes. Here, a man is selling dried figs, and dates from Africa, and dried plums, from tall baskets. Here, jars of olive oil, and wine, and honey, and fish sauce, with little clay cups for tasting. Here, sacks of beans and lentils and chickpeas, scooped out with a wooden measure. Here, a man with a set of bronze scales is weighing out pepper, a pinch at a time, for a woman who watches him very carefully indeed.

Pepper came all the way from India, by sea and over land, through the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, and then across the sea to Italy. It was expensive, and yet it was common enough to turn up among the small presents people gave each other at the winter festival. The Romans used it in a great many of their dishes. There were even special warehouses in the city, just for pepper and spices.

There were many markets in Rome. The great meat and fish and vegetable market, the macellum, with its round pavilion in the middle, and its rows of stalls around the edge. Smaller markets, held every day, and fairs at regular times. And every eighth day, there was a market day, the nundinae, when people from the countryside came into town to sell their produce, and to hear the news and the public announcements.

The Romans counted these days in a cycle of eight, marked with the letters A to H on their calendars. In the countryside, the market day was a break from work in the fields. Children, it seems, had no school on market days. The rhythm of these market days ran all through ordinary Roman life, although by Gaius's time, it seems, the new seven-day week was beginning to take their place.

At the top of the markets, Gaius stops for a moment, and looks back. Below him lies the whole bright sweep of the new forum. The column. The great roof of the basilica. And beyond them, the older forums, and the temples on the Capitoline Hill, and the brown hills across the river, hazy in the morning light.

Back at the bookshop, the bookseller has one more errand for Gaius. A shipment of papyrus has arrived, and it is waiting in a warehouse down by the river. Gaius is to go and collect it, with a porter and a handcart, and bring it back to the shop.

So, he walks south, out of the crowded center, toward the Tiber.

The river comes into Rome from the north, winding in great slow loops, and runs out again toward the sea. It is not a clear river. It is cloudy and brownish, thick with the soil it carries down from the hills. In the wet months, after heavy rains, it sometimes flooded, and the water rose up into the low-lying parts of the city.

In the middle of the river, there is an island. Tiber Island. It is shaped, people say, like a ship. And according to an old story, it was a ship that brought the god of healing there, centuries ago.

During a terrible plague, the Romans sent messengers to a famous temple of the healing god, Aesculapius, in Greece, to ask for his help. When they sailed for home, they carried a sacred snake aboard their ship, and it curled itself around the mast. And as the ship came up the Tiber, the snake slipped into the water, and swam to the island. The Romans took this as a sign that the god had chosen the place. And so, they built a temple there, to Aesculapius. And for centuries afterwards, the island was a place linked with healing.

Downstream from the island, along the bank, lies the river port of Rome. Here, the barges come in, carrying everything the city needs. Grain, and oil, and wine. Marble and timber. Glass and cloth and spices. And papyrus, from Egypt.

The great sea-going ships could not sail up the river to Rome. They unloaded their cargo at the coast, at the harbors near the mouth of the Tiber. Only a dozen or so years before, the emperor Trajan had built a great new harbor basin there, shaped like a hexagon, surrounded by warehouses. From the coast, the goods were loaded onto river barges, which were hauled slowly upstream by teams of animals, or of men, walking along a path beside the river. The journey, some thirty kilometers upstream, was a slow one.

Along the riverbank at Rome, there are rows of long warehouses, built of brick, with heavy doors and small, high windows. Gaius finds the right one, and the right clerk, and shows him the bookseller's letter. The clerk checks a list on his wax tablet, and nods, and sends a slave to fetch the papyrus. It comes out in a wooden crate, the rolls packed tightly together, smelling faintly of reeds and dust.

Not far from the warehouses, a great heap of broken jars was growing, one that would in time become a whole hill. Not a natural hill, but one made almost entirely of broken pottery. Olive oil was brought to Rome in great clay jars called amphorae, mostly from Spain. And once they were empty, these jars, it seems, were hard to clean and use again. So, they were broken, and the pieces were stacked, carefully, in layers, one load after another, year after year.

The hill is still there today. It is called Monte Testaccio, and it is about thirty-five meters high. Archaeologists have estimated that it holds the remains of around fifty-three million amphorae. A whole hill, built from the empty oil jars of a single city.

Gaius and the porter load the crate onto the handcart, and set off back toward the bookshop, slowly, the wheels squeaking a little on the stones. Behind them, the barges come and go on the yellow water. And the draught animals plod along the towpath, in no hurry at all.

By the time Gaius gets back to the bookshop with the papyrus, the sun is high. It is nearly the sixth hour. Midday.

For many Romans, the working day was drawing to a close. Most of the city's work was done in the morning. Business in the law courts was done mostly in the morning too. By midday, a great many people stopped work altogether, and turned to other things. A meal. A rest. And then, later in the afternoon, the baths.

The sixth hour, in Latin, is the sexta hora. And some people believe that this is where the Spanish word siesta comes from. The short rest in the middle of the day, when the sun is at its strongest.

Gaius helps the porter carry the crate inside, and tells his employer what he found in the library. They talk for a while about the book, and about the customer, and about the price. Then the bookseller nods, and pays him for the morning's work, and lets him go.

He is hungry now. The midday meal in Rome was called the prandium. Like breakfast, it was usually light, and quick, and simple. Many people, it seems, ate it quickly, wherever they happened to be.

Gaius stops at one of the many little bars that line the streets of Rome. It is open to the street, with a long counter of stone. Set into the top of the counter are several large clay jars, sunk down so that only their mouths show. In the jars there is food, ready to serve. A stew, perhaps of beans or lentils. Chickpeas. Olives. Pieces of cooked meat, or sausage. On the counter there are jugs and dishes, and behind it, on racks, there are jars of wine.

Many Romans in apartment blocks had no proper kitchen, and these little bars were where they bought their food. Archaeologists have found dozens of them at Pompeii alone. Some still have the remains of food inside their jars. One, uncovered only a few years ago, still has its painted decorations, bright and clear. Pictures of the food on offer. And a dog on a leash.

Gaius buys a bowl of warm lentils, and a piece of bread, and a cup of wine, mixed with plenty of water, as the Romans usually drank it. He sits on a bench by the wall and eats slowly, in the shade, watching the street.

The street is quieter now. The light is bright and white, and the shadows are short. A dog lies stretched out on a warm doorstep, with its eyes half closed. Across the road, a shopkeeper is pulling his shutters halfway closed, to keep out the heat.

When he has finished, Gaius walks home, and climbs the stairs to his rooms, and lies down on his bed for a while. The room is warm, and dim, with the shutters closed. The noise of the city drifts up from below, softened and far away. He closes his eyes.

He does not sleep, exactly. He just rests. His thoughts wander, the way thoughts do in the middle of a warm afternoon. To the book he was copying. To the column, and its long spiral of tiny soldiers. To the pigeons circling in the sky. To nothing at all.

In the eighth hour of the day, somewhere across the rooftops, a bell begins to ring.

It is the bell of the baths. It tells the city that the water is hot, and the baths are ready. The poet Martial wrote a little poem about it, addressed to someone in the middle of a ball game. Give back the ball, he says. The bell of the baths is ringing.

Gaius gets up from his bed, and stretches, and takes a small bundle from his chest. A towel. A little flask of oil. And a strigil, a curved metal scraper, a little like a small sickle, with a handle at one end. Then he goes back down the stairs, and out into the warm afternoon.

For the Romans, the baths were one of the great pleasures of life. They were not just a place to get clean. They were a place to exercise, and to relax, and to meet friends, and to talk, and to pass the long afternoon. There were a great many bath houses in Rome, large and small. Some were private businesses, cramped and steamy and cheap. Others were vast public buildings, built by emperors, as a gift to the people.

The entrance fee was tiny. Often, it was just a quadrans, the smallest coin there was. Children, it seems, often went in for nothing. It was one of the few luxuries of the city that almost everyone could afford.

Today, Gaius is going to the newest of the great baths, and one of the grandest of all. The Baths of Trajan, on the slope of the Esquiline Hill. They were opened only a few years ago, and they are enormous. They were built partly on top of the ruins of an older palace, the famous Golden House of the emperor Nero, whose rooms had been filled in and buried to support them.

Gaius passes through the great doorway, and goes in.

First, there is the changing room, the apodyterium, with stone benches along the walls, and rows of niches, where you could leave your clothes. Wealthier bathers brought a slave to watch over their things, because thieves at the baths were a common complaint.

Then, before bathing, there is exercise. Beyond the changing rooms lies an open courtyard, with a covered walkway around it. Here, men are running, and wrestling, and lifting lead weights, and throwing a ball back and forth in a circle. Gaius is not one for wrestling. He joins an easy game of catch for a while, and then walks a few slow laps around the courtyard, in the sun.

Then he goes in to bathe.

There was, it seems, a common order to it, although people followed it in their own way. First, the warm room, the tepidarium. It is pleasantly warm, not hot, and here Gaius sits for a while, letting his body grow used to the heat. A slave rubs oil into his shoulders.

Then, the hot room, the caldarium. This is the heart of the baths. The floor here is raised up on short stacked pillars, and hot air from the furnaces flows underneath it, and up through spaces left inside the walls. The floor is very hot, and many bathers keep their sandals on. There is a pool of hot water, and the air is thick with steam. Gaius sits on a marble bench and lets the heat sink into him, and feels the day's tiredness slowly loosening in his back and his shoulders.

The Romans did not usually wash with soap, the way that we do. Instead, they used oil. The oil was rubbed into the skin, and then, after a while in the heat, it was scraped off again with the strigil, taking the sweat and the dust of the day along with it. Gaius scrapes his arms and his legs, slowly and carefully, in long, smooth strokes, and wipes the strigil clean on the edge of the bench.

Last of all, there is the cold room, the frigidarium, with its great cold plunge pool. Gaius steps down into the water. It is a shock, for a moment. And then, it is wonderful.

The baths were not quiet places. The philosopher Seneca once lived in rooms directly above a bath house, and he wrote a long and rather funny letter about the noise. He could hear the grunts of the men lifting weights, he says, and the slap of hands on shoulders as people were massaged. The splash of someone jumping into the pool. A man who liked the sound of his own voice in the bath. And the cries of all the sellers, hawking their wares. The cake seller. The sausage seller. The sweet seller. Each, he says, with his own particular call.

Gaius dries himself, and dresses, and walks slowly out of the baths, into the golden light of the late afternoon. His skin feels warm and smooth and clean. His muscles feel loose. His mind feels empty, in the best possible way.

On the way home, Gaius takes a longer route, through a garden.

Rome had great public colonnades, some with groves of trees and shaded walks, where people could stroll out of the sun. Here, in the late afternoon, all sorts of people are passing the time. Two old men sit at a stone table, bent over a game board.

The Romans loved board games. One of them was called the game of little soldiers, the ludus latrunculorum. It was played on a grid, with pieces of glass or stone, and the aim was to trap your opponent's pieces between two of your own. Another was called the game of twelve markings. It was played with three dice and fifteen pieces for each player, and it belonged to the same family of games as backgammon. Game boards like these have been found all over the Roman world, scratched into the stone of forums and bathhouses, into the marble pavements of public buildings, and at army forts on the far frontiers.

Gaius stands and watches the old men for a while. They play slowly, in silence, each move considered for a long time. One of them taps his piece gently on the board, then changes his mind, and moves a different one instead.

From far away, carried on the wind, there comes a sound like the sea. A long, rising roar, that swells, and falls, and swells again. It comes from the Circus Maximus, the great racecourse in the valley below the Palatine Hill, where the chariot races are being held today.

The Circus Maximus was the largest building in the city. A long, narrow track for chariot races, with rows of seats rising on either side. Ancient writers disagreed about how many people it could hold. Some said one hundred and fifty thousand. Others said even more. When the chariots came around the final turn, the roar of the crowd carried far across the city.

Gaius does not go to the races very often. He does not like the crowds, and he does not care much who wins. But he likes hearing the sound of it from a distance, like this. A whole city, cheering at once, far away. It makes him feel part of something large, and alive, without having to be in the middle of it.

The roar fades. The old men play on. A breeze moves the leaves of the plane trees over the path. Gaius sits on a bench, and closes his eyes for a moment, and listens to the fountain.

At the gate of the garden, as Gaius is leaving, a small dog trots up to him, and sniffs his ankle, and wags its tail.

The Romans loved their dogs. They kept strong dogs to guard their houses, and small, soft dogs as companions and pets. In Pompeii, in the house now called the House of the Tragic Poet, there is a famous mosaic of a dog, with a caption of just two words. Cave canem. Beware of the dog.

But not all Roman dogs were fierce. The poet Martial wrote a poem about a little dog called Issa, who belonged to a man named Publius. Issa, he says, is more playful than a sparrow, purer than the kiss of a dove, more loving than any girl, more precious than the jewels of India. She lies with her head on her master's neck, and sleeps, and breathes so softly that you can hardly hear her. Her master loved her so much that he had her portrait painted, so lifelike that you could not tell the picture from the dog.

The sparrow in Martial's poem was a little joke. Every Roman reader would have known why. A century and a half earlier, the poet Catullus had written two famous little poems about a pet sparrow, belonging to the woman he loved. In the first, she plays with the sparrow, and holds it in her lap, and lets it peck at the tip of her finger. In the second, the sparrow has died, and Catullus mourns it, gently, and a little playfully, as it goes down to the land of the dead.

The Romans kept all kinds of birds. Sparrows and doves. Nightingales, for their song, and little birds in cages, some of them made of ivory. Parrots, which could be taught to say a few words, even Hail, Caesar. Some people even kept a magpie, and taught it to speak.

Cats were rarer in Roman homes than they are in ours, though they were not unknown.

The little dog at the garden gate belongs to no one in particular. It is one of the many dogs of the neighborhood, fed a little here and a little there, by people who know it. Gaius bends down, and scratches it behind the ears. It leans against his leg for a moment, with its eyes closed. Then it trots away, along the street, with its tail held high, on some important business of its own.

When Gaius gets home, he does something that Romans had done in their homes for centuries.

On the shelf in his room stands a little shrine. In a grand house, it might stand in the atrium, where visitors could see it, or back among the kitchens and working rooms. In humbler homes, it was often just a niche in the wall, or a shelf jutting out from a painted background. In Gaius's two small rooms, it is just that. A shelf, with a painted panel behind it, and two little bronze figures standing on it.

They are the Lares, the gods of the household. They are shown as young men, with short tunics, dancing lightly on their toes, each with a drinking horn raised in one hand, and a small dish in the other. The Lares protected the home, and the family who lived in it. Every Roman household had them.

Gaius takes a pinch of incense from a little box, and drops it onto a glowing coal in a small dish before the figures. A thin thread of fragrant smoke rises up into the air. Then he takes a few crumbs from the end of this morning's loaf, and a drop of wine, and places them on a little plate in front of the figures.

He says a few quiet words. Not a long prayer. Just a greeting, and a request that the gods keep the house safe, and the family well. The same words, more or less, that his father used to say, and his grandfather before him.

Roman religion was full of grand temples and public festivals, of priests and processions and sacrifices. But it was also this. Small, quiet, daily things, done at home, by ordinary people. A pinch of incense. A crumb of bread. A few words, spoken to the little gods on the shelf.

The smoke curls up toward the ceiling, and fades away.

The main meal of the Roman day was the cena. Dinner. It began in the late afternoon, around the ninth or tenth hour, after the baths. And in a wealthy house, it could last for hours, long into the evening.

In those houses, dinner was eaten in a special dining room, called the triclinium. The name came from the three couches that stood in it, arranged in a U shape around a low table. Three people could recline on each couch. Nine guests, in all. They lay on their left sides, propped up on their elbows, on cushions, and reached out to the table with their free hand, while slaves brought in dish after dish, and kept their cups filled.

A grand dinner had several courses. First came the starters. Eggs, and salads, and olives, and shellfish. Then came the main dishes, of meat or fish or poultry. And finally, the desserts. Fruit, and nuts, and sweet cakes made with honey.

The Romans even had a saying, from the poet Horace. From the egg to the apples. It meant from the beginning to the end. Just as a dinner started with eggs, and ended with fruit.

Many dishes were flavored with a sauce called garum, made from fish that had been salted and left to ferment in the sun. It does not sound very appealing today. But the Romans loved it. It was used the way we might use salt, or soy sauce, and the best kinds were very expensive.

Tonight, Gaius has been invited to dinner by a friend. Not a rich man. A fellow copyist, who has two rooms on the first floor of a building nearby, with a small table and a single wide couch. There are four of them tonight. Gaius, his friend, his friend's wife, and an old man from the same building, who used to be a soldier, and who likes to tell stories.

The food is simple, and good. Hard-boiled eggs, cut in halves, with a little garum. A salad of lettuce and herbs. A dish of lentils cooked with leeks and coriander. Some grilled fish, from the river. Bread. And afterwards, a bowl of apples, and figs, and a little plate of honey cakes.

Most ordinary Romans ate like this, or even more simply. Many lived largely on a kind of thick porridge made from wheat, called puls, with beans and vegetables and whatever else could be found. Meat was a luxury, for special days. Bread, and oil, and wine, and vegetables were the heart of the Roman table.

The wine is mixed with water, and passed around in a jug. The old soldier tells a story about a long march, many years ago, through a forest on the far side of the Rhine, in the rain. The others have heard it before. They do not mind. They listen, and nod, and laugh in the right places.

Outside the window, the sky has turned to orange, and then to rose, and then to a deep, soft violet. The first lamp is lit, and set on the table. Its little flame stands up straight and still, in the quiet air of the room.

At dinner, the talk turns, as it often does at this time of year, to the festivals.

The Roman year was full of them. There were festivals for the gods of the harvest and the grain stores, and for the guardian spirits of the fields. There were days for the dead, when families went out to the tombs of their ancestors, and poured out wine for them, and remembered them. There were days of games, and races, and plays, that could go on for several days at a time.

But the best known of all the festivals, and one of the best loved, was the Saturnalia. The poet Catullus called it the best of days.

It fell in December, in the darkest part of the year. It began on the seventeenth of the month, and over time, it grew longer, until it lasted for several days. It was a festival of the old god Saturn, who, the Romans believed, had ruled the world long ago, in a golden age, when the earth gave its fruits without labor, and no one was a slave, and all things were shared by all.

And so, for a few days every winter, the Romans tried to bring that golden age back, just a little.

Schools closed. Courts closed. Businesses closed. People put away the toga, and wore the synthesis instead, a light, colorful outfit of dinner clothes, and a soft felt cap, the kind worn by freed slaves. Gambling with dice, which was usually forbidden, was allowed. In many households, the slaves were given special freedoms, and allowed to speak their minds, and sometimes even served at dinner by their masters. And everywhere, the cheerful shout rang out. Io, Saturnalia. Io, Saturnalia.

And people gave each other presents. Small ones, mostly. Candles of wax. Little figures of clay, called sigillaria. Nuts. Cakes. Little jokes. The poet Martial wrote two whole books of short poems, each one meant to go with a Saturnalia gift, from a writing tablet, to a toothpick, to a pair of slippers.

The old soldier at the table says that, when he was young, he spent one Saturnalia in a camp on the Danube, in the snow, and that it was the best of his life. They had nothing at all, he says. And they laughed for five days.

The friend's wife says that she has already begun to make the little honey cakes, and that she hides them on the highest shelf, so that her husband cannot find them.

Her husband says that he knows exactly where they are.

Everyone laughs. And on the table, the little flame of the lamp flickers for a moment, and then stands still again.

When Gaius walks home, it is almost dark.

The streets have changed. The shops have closed for the night. The crowds of the day have gone home. Here and there, light spills out from a doorway, or a window, or the open front of a tavern, where a few men are still sitting over their cups.

Light, in the Roman night, came from small clay oil lamps. A lamp was a little covered dish, shaped a bit like a teapot without a handle, with a hole in the top for filling it with olive oil, and a spout at the front, where the wick lay. They were made by the thousand, in molds, and decorated with pictures on the top. A gladiator. A chariot race. A god. A dolphin. A scene from a myth. Lamps were everywhere in the Roman world.

Their light was small, and warm, and flickering. Enough to eat by, or to read by, if you held the scroll close. Not much more.

As Gaius turns into his own street, he passes a small group of men walking the other way, carrying lamps, and buckets, and long poles with hooks on the end. They are the vigiles. The watchmen of the city.

The emperor Augustus had set them up, more than a hundred years earlier, when the old private fire brigades had failed to keep the city safe. There were seven cohorts of them, with each cohort looking after two of the fourteen districts of Rome. Most of them were freedmen, former slaves. Their main task was fighting fires. And at night, they walked the streets, watching for any sign of smoke or flame, and keeping an eye out for thieves and trouble.

One of them nods to Gaius as they pass. He nods back. They walk on, around the corner, and the light of their lamps slips away down the street.

At the bottom of his building, the baker's shop is dark and closed. The baker will be asleep already, upstairs. He will have to be up again long before dawn. The little bar is closed. The lamp seller's shop is closed. The street is quiet, except for a fountain, running softly into its basin on the corner.

Far away, from the edges of the city, there comes a faint, low rumble. The day is long over, and the wagons are allowed back into the streets. Soon, they will begin their long night's work again. But for now, they are still far off. Just a whisper of wheels, on the very edge of hearing.

Gaius climbs the stairs, slowly, in the dark, one hand on the wall. He knows every step.

In his room, Gaius lights his little lamp. The flame catches, and steadies, and the room fills with a soft, warm, golden light.

Before he lies down, Gaius sits at his little table, by the light of his lamp, and writes a letter to his sister.

He does not use papyrus for this. Papyrus costs money, and he handles enough of it at work. Instead, he uses one of his wax tablets. It is a double tablet, two small wooden boards, hinged together at the back, so that they close like a little book, and protect the writing inside.

He takes up the stylus, and begins, the way Roman letters usually began. With the names. Gaius, to his sister Valeria, greetings.

Roman letters followed a few simple customs. After the greeting, it was polite to say something like, if you are well, it is good. I am well. So familiar was this phrase that Pliny the Younger called it the good old style. And at the end of the letter came a simple farewell. Be well.

In between, people wrote about the same things that people have always written about. Their health. The weather. Their families. News from the city. Money. Requests for small favors. Thank you for the socks.

We know this, because some of these letters have survived. Most were lost, long ago. But in a few places, by a lucky chance, they were preserved. At a Roman fort called Vindolanda, in the north of Britain, close to the frontier, hundreds of small wooden writing tablets were found, buried in damp ground, where the air could not reach them. They were written a few years before our story, around the year one hundred, by soldiers and officers and their families.

One of them is an invitation to a birthday party. It was written by a woman called Claudia Severa, the wife of a commander at a nearby fort, to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina. Most of the letter was written out by a scribe. But at the end, Claudia added a few lines in her own hand. I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul.

It is one of the oldest known pieces of writing in Latin by a woman. Just a few words, in a friendly hand, on a thin slip of wood, on the edge of the world.

There was no public post for ordinary people in Rome. The empire had an official service, with horses and inns along the main roads, but it was only for the business of the state. Private letters went with friends, or with slaves, or with merchants and travelers going in the right direction. You gave your letter to whoever was going, and hoped for the best.

Gaius's letter will go with a carter, who passes his sister's village on his way to market. It will take a day or two to arrive. Perhaps a little longer.

He writes that he is well. That the work at the bookshop is steady. That he went to the new baths today, and that they are as grand as everyone says. That he heard the races from the garden, and did not care who won. He asks after the children, and the olive harvest, and whether the roof has been mended. He says he will try to come and visit, when the weather is better. Perhaps in the spring.

At the end, he writes, be well, my dearest sister.

Then he closes the tablet, and ties it with a cord, and seals the knot with a little wax, pressed with his ring. And he sets it on the table, by the door, ready for the morning.

He unties his sandals, and sets them by the door. He takes off his belt, and lays it on the chest. He drinks a little water from the jar. He looks for a moment at the household gods on their shelf, and the little dish with its offering of food.

Then he goes to the window, and leans out a little, and looks up.

Above the dark rooftops, between the buildings, there is a long, narrow strip of sky. And in it, the stars are coming out. One, and then another, and then many. The same stars that shone over these hills, long before there was any city here at all. The same stars that will shine over Rome, long after all of this is gone.

The Romans had names for them, and stories for them. The great bear, turning slowly around the north. The hunter, Orion, rising in the winter sky. The seven sisters, the Pleiades, whose rising and setting marked the turning of the seasons, and told sailors when the sea was open.

The city is very quiet now. A dog barks, once, far away, and then stops. Somewhere, a door closes. The fountain on the corner goes on running, softly, the way it has run all day, and the way it will run all night.

Gaius pulls the shutter half closed, and goes to his bed, and lies down. The wool of the blanket is rough, and warm. He blows out the lamp. A thin line of smoke rises in the dark, and drifts away.

He thinks, for a moment, about the day. The cold water in the morning. The crowd in the atrium. The bright marble of the Forum. The long, careful lines of ink on the papyrus. The column, white against the sky. The heat of the baths. The old men and their game. The roar of the circus, far away. The old soldier's story. The stars.

It was an ordinary day. One of thousands. In a long, ordinary life.

And tomorrow, the bell will ring at the baths again. The baker will be up before dawn. The wagons will roll through the dark. The sun will rise over the seven hills, and the first hour will begin, and the whole great city will wake, and stretch, and start again.

But not yet.

For now, the night hours are long, and slow, and quiet. The lamps are out. The streets are empty. The river runs dark and smooth under its bridges, on its way to the sea.

And Gaius is asleep.

So, let the city grow quiet around you, too. Let the voices fade, and the footsteps fade, and the sound of the fountain fade, softer and softer, and further away.

Goodnight from Rome.

And sleep well.