Friday 22 January

10 AM PST
1 PM EST
6 PM GMT
7 PM CET

With Dr. Eireann Marshall

While ancient Rome was a city of splendour, most of its inhabitants lived in relative squalour. Impossibly tall apartment blocks which threatened collapse, an overwhelmed sewage system and a polluted River Tiber which flooded periodically, made the every day lives of ordinary Romans precarious. Considering these difficult living conditions and that ancient Rome was a city of more than a million people, one can see how Roman emperors were perennially worried about unrest and the mobs rioting. It is no wonder, then, that emperors spent fortunes on offering the plebs Romana distractions, from magnificent bath complexes to mind boggling spectacles, as well as ensuring a constant supply of food. As Juvenal says in his Satire 10, people were all too easily made happy if they were offered bread and circuses.

In this tour, we will explore the extraordinary lengths Roman emperors went to feed its people. We will be considering the economics of getting grain and oil to the plebs Romana, exploring the statio annonae, now the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, where people received their portions of free dole, as well as the Montetestaccio, the hill made from discarded olive oil sherds. The tour will also explore the incredible engineering which went into constructing the many aqueducts which fed Romans and supplied their enormous bath complexes. A virtual tour of the imperial baths, which are still visible, will consider why they played such an important part in ancient Rome. We will end the tour examining the Flavian Amphitheatre, which still dominates the historic centre of Rome, pondering why the deaths of animals and gladiators were so popular. While life in ancient Rome can’t have been straightforward, its citizens were able to partake in public activities on a scale which weren’t seen again until the Industrial Revolution.