once a year, the most powerful city in the world ground to a complete standstill against itself. and the blame lay not with an enemy nor a god: it lay with its own rents.
it happened on a day like today, every first of july. historians of roman law reconstruct, from the legal texts, that the rental year tended to begin at the height of summer: around this date the contracts —the locatio conductio, the lease— on the insulae, literally “islands”, came due and were renewed: the apartment blocks, ringed by streets on all four sides, where the plebs were packed in. if you could not pay the new price your landlord imposed, it was time to pack your bags. and since the contracts all came due at once, half the city packed its bags on the same day.
and there were a great many islands. the regionary catalogues of rome, already from the late empire, count some forty-six thousand insulae against barely seventeen hundred domus, the stately single-family houses. they were tall and fragile: augustus had to cap their height at about seventy feet —some twenty metres—, as the geographer strabo recounts, because they kept collapsing. on the ground floor, facing the street, stood the tabernae, the shops and premises; above them, apartments ever cheaper, hotter and more shoddily finished. because the logic of the prices was the reverse of ours: the higher up you lived, the poorer you were. the top floor, the cenaculum, was the most wretched of all; the first to burn and the last to find out.
whoever rented in rome gambled each year on two things: the price, and whether the building would still be standing.
dangerous in earnest. the poet juvenal, satire to the fore, described the terror of living beneath the roof tiles, between fire and collapse. and it was not only literature: in a letter to his friend atticus, cicero himself recounts —with more of an accountant’s annoyance than a landlord’s remorse— that two of his tabernae, his rental premises, had come down on him and that in the rest the cracks were spreading. even the mice, he jokes, had already moved out. the letter is worth its weight in gold precisely for that: it is not a moralist denouncing a scandal, it is an ordinary property owner talking about his portfolio.
and here the historian’s caveat is in order. the image of the great moving day —tens of thousands of people dragging beds, amphorae and household goods through narrow streets, shouting, under the july sun— is a modern reconstruction, popularised by popular history from carcopino onward. the date of the first of july comes from the legal texts, not from a chronicle describing the gridlock; and the million inhabitants attributed to the capital is the highest of the estimates. what no one disputes is the substance: an overwhelming majority of romans lived as tenants, in buildings that were falling down, paying landlords who could raise the price every summer.
the ending has its irony. rome ruled much of the known world with the discipline of its legions, the engineering of its roads and the coldness of its law. but every first of july, that same law turned its own capital into a gridlock of beds and amphorae in the sun. the empire that subdued carthage never managed to subdue its landlords.
