Video: The five hazards of daily life in Rome

[guy]

 

Professor Gregory Aldrete provides an excellent video on life in the city of Ancient Rome. He examines the "five major hazards that characterized life in ancient Rome: floods, fires, famines, filth, and fevers." He nicely summarizes the grim realities faced daily by the typical Roman resident.

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to a grisly (and perhaps exaggerated) statistic from the professor, it is estimated that 1500 corpses were abandoned in the streets of Rome each year, left to rot or to be scavenged by animals.

 

 

(The above scenes were taken from the HBO series “Rome.”)

Edited February 1 by guy

[guidoLaMoto]

 

 

 

[caesar novus]

If so repulsive, what was demotivating folks from voting with their feet and moving to smaller towns or countryside? Rome on the other hand had an abundance of fresh water, the grain giveouts, and lack of local warfare etc: https://www.youtube.com/@ancient-techie/shorts

 

 

 

[guidoLaMoto]

Plebs flooded into Rome for the same reasons that Americans moved from the rural south to large industrial northern cities in The Great Migration-- not enough land for each farmer to earn a living in the South and good jobs in the North....

The episode of the Gracchus brothers and land reform was the biggest of several such conflicts of the classes in ancient Rome dating all the way back to the Kingdom.

https://ancientwarhistory.com/the-gracchi-brothers-and-the-agrarian-crisis-of-the-roman-republic/