The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City by Stephen Dando-Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

and litters of the “night livers,” and parties of revelers out on the town, eating, drinking, and whoring. Rome was the original city that never slept. Provincials coming to Rome for the first time would complain that they could not sleep for the din that filled the city from dusk till dawn.
     
    The Basilica Aemilia was not the city’s only shopping center. Rome possessed markets dedicated to the sale of livestock, produce, wine, clothing, footwear, and even markets specializing in the sale of herbs and flowers. Meanwhile, every winding street of old Rome was lined with businesses. Once their tall shutters were pushed back, all shops were open to the street, and a passerby could see the freedmen shopkeepers, their families, and their slave employees hard at work. Many shopkeepers slept on the premises, in cramped lofts above the store, with their families. In the ruins of Pompeii and Ostia today, a visitor might see four or five steps at the rear of typical Roman shops, leading nowhere. In Roman times, there would have been wooden ladders at the top of these steps, extending up to the lofts above the shops.
     
    Countless grimy workshops operated in back streets: tanners and leather workers, with the smell of ammonia thick in the air; carpentry shops; iron foundries, with slaves toiling over hot, smoky forges. Brothels, which were legal in Rome, were usually in the back streets. Some taverns offered prostitutes on the second floor, as their wooden signs decorated with erect phalluses advertised. Brothels, called houses of seduction by some Romans and disorderly houses by others, only operated by night. Many fronted the street. A description exists of a first-century Roman brothel that had a quilt hanging in the doorway, to dampen noise but encourage entry. Inside, where customers and naked prostitutes nonchalantly roamed about, the premises were divided by wooden partitions into small bed cubicles, with a sign outside each chamber naming the prostitute working inside.
     
    Surviving reliefs depicting shops at Rome show a butcher wielding a meat cleaver while various cuts of meat hang behind him; a green-grocer pointing out his fresh produce; a knife seller with his vast array of knives; and a pharmacist prescribing medicine for a patient, while an assistant pounds a pestle in a bowl. Another relief shows a store with fowl hanging by their feet; a woman hands fruit to a slave; wild birds occupy a closed wicker basket; cages contain live rabbits; a pair of chained monkeys sit forlornly on a counter. Wine bars occupied many city corners. More substantial taverns were also prevalent. Wine flagons were chained to columns outside, as advertisements. Large clay amphorae at the rear of the tavern were full of imported wine. When they were empty, these elegant amphorae, which look like giant cigars to modern eyes, were frequently smashed; there was no market for secondhand amphorae.
     
    Hot-food establishments sent tantalizing aromas wafting on the air. Rome’s bakeries and pastry shops offered everything from the standard Roman loaf—round, like a pie, and sliced the same way—to tempting pastry delicacies. In Pompeii, one of the towns that would be buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and which had a population of roughly twenty thousand, more than one hundred wine bars, twenty taverns, and forty bakeries have been identified. Multiply these numbers by at least fifty for Rome, whose first-century population exceeded a million people.
     
    In Rome, as elsewhere in the Roman world, shopkeepers displayed their goods outside their doors. Hairdressers and barbers sat their customers on stools on the pavement, working on them with razor and knife in full public gaze while exchanging gossip. A poet of the time would complain that Rome was one vast shop. The open doors of Rome’s small, street-side schools revealed young students on stools, reciting the Twelve Tables, Rome’s basic laws, or verses from Homer or