Something I've always been curious about is everyday life for Romans. I don't know where to find much information on it. I know we're aware of how they lived, generally, but being an average dude in a Roman City-do we know what it was like? Did they really just sit around eating olives and shit all day? Were the cities near as clean as they are always portrayed?
>On April 19th, I made bread
>Antiochus hung out here with his girlfriend Cithera.
>Would that you pay for all your tricks, innkeeper. You sell us water and keep the good wine for yourself
>Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this.
>Secundus likes to screw boys.
>Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Pretty much like today, but instead of facebook and instagram they just wrote on the walls
>>439117
>they just wrote on walls
That's really funny to me, for some reason. The idea that something would posses someone to just go fucking write something on a wall in the middle of the street is hilarious
>>439130
Shitposting is the most essential aspect of the human condition
This one isn't graffiti, it's a charm on the wall of a bakery.
>"Here lies good fortune"
>you will never, ever taste authentic Roman garum
>>439130
Ever been in a bathroom stall in a high school or gas station? It's pretty much the same thing.
>>439106
Things you may not have known
>most urban Romans lived in what are essentially tiny communal apartments in massive tower blocks
>they would go out and have most of their meals at the ancient equivalent of fast food restaurants
>if you were not wealthy you would be buried in a mass grave. One mass grave was discovered in Italy in the early 20th century and still stunk so badly 2000 years later the archaologist and his men had to evacuate
>they would use fish sauce on literally everything and absolutely adored it
>most Romans drank wine but in the northern provinces beer was still more popular
>Latin was mostly (at least initially) just an administrative language and local languages were still spoken by most, especially outside of the few cities. The language of the Carthaginians was still being spoken in the 6th century AD.
>dodging piss pots being thrown out of the huge wooden tower blocks in the city was a regular occurence
>many writers complain about having their shoes stolen at the baths, which was the main focal point of social life apart from the taberna. Most Romans spend much of their time there. It suggested by many scholars now that the reason the Roman upper class had such poor fertility was because they had boiling hot baths all the time.
>most people couldn't afford much meat and so would go to every festival they could where it would be handed out after the sacrifice
>>439151
SE Asian fish sauce is literally the same thing as garum.
>>439727
>Latin was mostly (at least initially) just an administrative language and local languages were still spoken by most, especially outside of the few cities. The language of the Carthaginians was still being spoken in the 6th century AD.
then how come Etruscan died?
>>439727
>Latin was mostly (at least initially) just an administrative language and local languages were still spoken by most, especially outside of the few cities. The language of the Carthaginians was still being spoken in the 6th century AD.
eh - more true in some places than others. It largely depended on how developed the local culture was before the Romans, how badly Rome fucked the place up when they conquered it, and proximity to Rome itself. The Greek speaking east never had much use for Latin outside of administration, due to the fact that Greek was a high-status language even in Rome. Places like Gaul and Hispania meanwhile, which were largely full of barbarians, became completely dominated by Latin. Britannia, meanwhile, although barbarian was not close enough to Italy to have a significant movement of people from Italy; southern Gaul was full of Italian traders even before the Roman conquest, whereas you only went to Britannia if you really had to.
And although theories on the development of Romanian aren't entirely agreed upon, the main hypothesis is that when Rome went into Dacia the destroyed so much of the local population that the only remaining population centres were the legionary camps, where survivors and colonists clustered, learning Latin from the legionaries stationed there and adopting it quickly since out of the dozens of different languages of the colonists it was the only one everyone had at least some knowledge of.
>>439929
There were exceptions, it was probably because they were pretty close. Latin has lots of Etruscan loan-words in it.
Aside from the well known garum thing;
>Romans' favourite spice was pepper
>Cumin would also commonly be sprinkled on food
>Honey was used as their main sweetener
>They had special ceramic pots to raise doormice in before eating them (often stuffed with nuts and pepper and marinated in honey)
>Meat from a butcher was such a luxury that even the wealthier citizens rarely indulged in it, if meat was available it was almost always game
>There is an artificial hill (Monte Testaccio) composed entirely of broken amphorae used by the ancient Romans to carry olive oil - to this day the hill has a circumference of a square kilometer and a height of 35 meters, although in Roman times this literal garbage heap would have been much larger
>>439130
Ready for a ride?
http://pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm
>Restitutus says: “Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates”.
>I have buggered men
>Take hold of your servant girl whenever you want to; it’s your right
And those are far from the best.
I have a family recipe that I obtained from a documentary about the roman empire
you need some white cheese / feta cheese, the more oily the better, mash some garlic and mix it with the cheese, add some olive oil and a pinch of either red or black pepper
it is seriously good
They were not as "degenerate" as people believe.
Some people think this because of later propaganda and because of murals, that are the equivalent of bathroom stalls of public places.
>>442951
No better nor worse than we are now, I would say.
>>439144
I though they had one in every city gate? Here in Tarraco they have one, the first you see before entering the city is a massive rock penis.
>>440192
>The Greek speaking east never had much use for Latin outside of administration, due to the fact that Greek was a high-status language even in Rome.
Also distance and what I suppose we could define as "regional pride/identity" as coptic, syriac, armenian and kartvelian languages continued to be spoken during and before the roman ruling by the majority of the rural people.
