The Disgusting Reality of Daily Life for the Common People in Ancient Rome

Gregory S. Aldrete, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, who previously spoke about the cycle of civilization, explained through colorful whiteboard illustration by AfterSkool the disgusting reality of daily life in Ancient Rome for the common people, despite how the city is portrayed in movies and television.

We are often given images on Ancient Rome as a glorious, romantic, prestigious civilization, but there is a dark side to Rome that often gets overlooked.

Aldrete talked about the daily dangers of a city with almost one million people who lived in apartment buildings. There was a high risk of fire from cooking, floods from the Tiber River, famine, filth, and multiple plagues and diseases all caused by a lack of true sanitation. While the wealthy few lived on mountains away from this mess, the far more many who lived in the valley had to walk through streets littered with human and animal excrement, corpses, blood, and garbage.

Let us return to that image of ancient Rome as a beautiful and sophisticated city of shining marble and fabulous monumental structures. …In order to make that image completely accurate, we now know that we need to make a few additions. First submerge some of those monuments beneath dirty flood water, then set a few neighborhoods on fire. Next add a starving mob rioting in the forum. Next give everyone a couple of diseases and some parasites and finally smear mud garbage and excrement over everything and top it off by sprinkling around some corpses. That was the real ancient Rome.