I can highly recommend Lindsey Davis' Falco series, murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. She brings the city to life, it's remarkably vivid, and -- I promise this comment is on topic for this thread! -- Roman apartment living is threaded throughout the series and apartment building construction even forms a major plot point in one book.
I can't say more without spoilers. Excellent for "feeling" what Rome was like.
A similar one, although less a story and more a documentary, is Alberto Angela's A day in the life of ancient Rome. It too, talks about apartments in ancient Rome.
I’m looking for new fiction to add to the queue but my reading time is limited (unless you count children’s books in which case I’m reading 100s of books per year).
Do I need to read the first book in the series, or are they independent? If independent, can you recommend the best one for someone who only has time to read one?
The earlier stories are mostly independent (the last few in the series build on previous stories). I would recommend starting with the first book, The Silver Pigs because there is a romance that starts and continues. The central character is what today we would call a "private eye".
It's been several years since I read them, but I think starting with the first book is good. It's not quite as polished as the others, and I think not quite with the same tone, but it introduces the characters that will be throughout the series. My memory is the series is more lighthearted in general than the first book is.
You make me think I should reread, and I will start at the beginning here too.
I mentioned this in another comment but The Forgotten City is a game with a similar setting, it's an ancient Rome first person mystery RPG where the player is supposed to figure out what happened.
For thousands of years, people have seen the benefits of living in cities.What is really a city? Simply a place where people have a mutual interest in living close to each other. Urban sprawl and car centric society seems to be a really bad idea. Build better cities rather than self driving cars.
You don't even have to tell anyone to "build better cities". All you have to do is get rid of the arbitrary restrictions on upward city growth. Zoning was a really bad idea.
It isn't that simple. The most important thing about a city is the streets and blocks. Manhattan and Barcelona are good examples of cities that have been designed in a way that make them walkable and high density.
Zoning is useful for keeping people from building apartments right next to paper mills, pig farms, and superfund sites because those places tend to become slums. Building height restrictions and density limits provide people with the ability to see the sky and get sunlight. They improve air quality. They're pretty useful around places like airports. They can help improve safety and limit the damage resulting from disasters like fires and earthquakes. It's important to strike a balance between over-restrictive zoning and dystopian people-warehouses in perpetual shadow.
People lived in cities because they couldn't find a farm. Anyone who had a farm didn't leave because you controlled your survival. 95% of the people (numbers varied but this is good enough) lived on a farm. Cities were full of diseases and they didn't have good jobs.
Of course what you read in history is from the rich point of view. If you had wealth (slaves back on the farm) city life was really good.
Serfdom existed to prevent peasants from leaving those farms, people wanted to move to cities were wages and jobs were better but nobility wanted to force them to stay on those farms.
See how pots strike and dint the sturdy pavement.
There’s death from every window where you move.
You’d be a fool to venture out to dine,
oblivious of what goes on above,
without your having penned that dotted line,
of your last testament.
This feels very modern. "Sure, you might get randomly killed by a pot flying out a window, but there are _walkable_ restaurants!"
Sure, you might get killed just on the drive between your home and the grocery store by someone on their phone in a pickup truck, but at least you don’t have to share a wall with another human!
Its very much everywhere you have large swaths of people pasding through. I distinctly remember my aunt complaining that in the student dorms back in the day, two students bought a whole pig and roasted it in the iron bathtub
Where I studied there was a tradition to throw out the TV out of dorm room window at graduation. Now that were early nineties, ~21" CRT TVs and a 24 storey dorm.
I really really wish, there was a VR game/app where I can transport myself to different places/times in the past and just walk around to get the texture and feel for what it felt like living in that time.
Walking around a Roman town, hearing what people talked like, what they wore, what technology was around, what did they do most of the day.
The Assassin’s Creed Odyssey game, set in classical Greece, has a feature like this. It works really well as a teaching tool, and the immersion is excellent. Even today, the overall quality of the graphics and the game still holds up.
The “education mode” is officially called Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece. It removes all combat, enemies, and time pressure from the game and turns it into a large, interactive, open-air virtual museum.
It's coming. I actually imagine it will seem trivial in a few years. "Better Than Life" from Red Dwarf is the next tier of computer games I guess. They wrote that episode back in the late 80s or early 90s and here we are with Google Genie 3 and the models that will supersede it.
I really enjoyed the film Fellini Satyricon because it shows a couple of regular guys on a crazy adventure after their apartment building in Rome collapses in an earthquake. Most other stuff about Rome/Romans follows leaders, generals, aristocrats, etc. so it was refreshing to see regular people.
And completely not based on reality, I also liked the British comedy series Plebs that also follows regular people living Rome. But it's just a way to show modern issues satirically, not really historical.
“ Most other stuff about Rome/Romans follows leaders, generals, aristocrats, etc. so it was refreshing to see regular people”
A lot of history focuses too much on leaders and elites. I would like to see much more information about how regular people lived. Or for example, when a some king “built” something, maybe we should know how life was for the workers there.
It's not as widely promoted, but if you're genuinely interested, there are more of those histories written then you'll ever have time to read yourself.
There's a classic five volume series "A History of Private Life" that works through a breadth-first survey over time. It can make for a great starting point, and is a bit like an encylopedia in the way you can engage with it as essays on certain times and topics instead of being expected to read it through serially.
One of Mary Beard's documentaries ('Meet the Romans' I think) touches on Roman insulae. Literal death traps, and seemingly miserably uncomfortable at the best of times. At least you're out of the rain (except on the top floors).
And someone below mentioned 'Plebs', which is the humorous take on all this. Recommended.
They called them insulae meaning "islands". They had no concept of fire escapes, and barely any plumbing (despite this image of Roman engineering). They really were the harris end of Roman architecture.
> barely any plumbing (despite this image of Roman engineering)
Nobody in their right mind would have even wanted plumbing in their home at the time.
Plumbing of the time was not airtight - this was before cheap metal and S-traps. So any drainage would be a highway for noxious odors and gasses right into your home. Bringing in fresh water would only be marginally useful without some sort of drainage.
Outbuildings persisted in the West for a while after modern plumbing because unless you are acclimated to it, the very idea of bringing refuse facilities into the home goes against every natural human instinct.
I guess that's the rear (or arse) end, if anyone else is puzzled and doesn't have a couple of spare minutes to chase it down ...
>> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.
Some writers placed Julius Caesar's aristocratic but down at the heel family in the lower floors of a Subura tenement, but apparently it really was a house.
> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.
This remained true in Western cities until elevators became widespread in the late 1800s. In New York city, for example, buildings didn't reach above 6 floors because even the poorest people would not walk up more stairs. Street level was frequently retail space, next floor up might be office space, everything higher was residential. Until Otis showed how to make a safety brake.
I can't say more without spoilers. Excellent for "feeling" what Rome was like.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6505103-a-day-in-the-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Man_in_Rome
Do I need to read the first book in the series, or are they independent? If independent, can you recommend the best one for someone who only has time to read one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Pigs
You make me think I should reread, and I will start at the beginning here too.
Of course what you read in history is from the rich point of view. If you had wealth (slaves back on the farm) city life was really good.
If you ban loud bass I don't think I'd mind. Until then, no thank you.
Walking around a Roman town, hearing what people talked like, what they wore, what technology was around, what did they do most of the day.
Someone please make it real.
The “education mode” is officially called Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece. It removes all combat, enemies, and time pressure from the game and turns it into a large, interactive, open-air virtual museum.
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/discovery...
My kids have actually used this (without any prompting from me) in middle school history classes.
There’s also a Story Mode, which lets players build their own narratives and share them. It can be quite a lot of fun.
https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/story-creator-mode/en-us
There's an interesting small YT channel that did a series on ACB + History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hebq-fObdhY
And completely not based on reality, I also liked the British comedy series Plebs that also follows regular people living Rome. But it's just a way to show modern issues satirically, not really historical.
A lot of history focuses too much on leaders and elites. I would like to see much more information about how regular people lived. Or for example, when a some king “built” something, maybe we should know how life was for the workers there.
There's a classic five volume series "A History of Private Life" that works through a breadth-first survey over time. It can make for a great starting point, and is a bit like an encylopedia in the way you can engage with it as essays on certain times and topics instead of being expected to read it through serially.
https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/new-history-podcast-past...
And someone below mentioned 'Plebs', which is the humorous take on all this. Recommended.
Nobody in their right mind would have even wanted plumbing in their home at the time.
Plumbing of the time was not airtight - this was before cheap metal and S-traps. So any drainage would be a highway for noxious odors and gasses right into your home. Bringing in fresh water would only be marginally useful without some sort of drainage.
Outbuildings persisted in the West for a while after modern plumbing because unless you are acclimated to it, the very idea of bringing refuse facilities into the home goes against every natural human instinct.
I guess that's the rear (or arse) end, if anyone else is puzzled and doesn't have a couple of spare minutes to chase it down ...
>> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.
Some writers placed Julius Caesar's aristocratic but down at the heel family in the lower floors of a Subura tenement, but apparently it really was a house.
This remained true in Western cities until elevators became widespread in the late 1800s. In New York city, for example, buildings didn't reach above 6 floors because even the poorest people would not walk up more stairs. Street level was frequently retail space, next floor up might be office space, everything higher was residential. Until Otis showed how to make a safety brake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis