once a year, in the picture popular history has handed down, the most powerful city in the world ground to a 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 reconstruct, from suetonius and from a rental notice from pompeii, 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 the lease was not renewed, it was time to pack your bags. and since many contracts came due at once, it is easy to picture the city on the move.
and there were a great many islands. the regionary catalogues of rome, from the fourth century, give some forty-six thousand insulae against some seventeen hundred domus, the single-family houses; what exactly each word counted is debated, and they are probably not a census. they were tall and fragile: augustus forbade them to rise above seventy feet —some twenty metres— along the public streets, 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, the apartments, the cenacula: the word covered any upper floor, and was usually kept for the better ones. the sources suggest that the higher up, the cheaper, and in a satire by juvenal, umbricius, who is leaving rome, puts the last to burn under the roof tiles.
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 suetonius, from a notice from pompeii and from a novel by petronius, not from a chronicle describing the gridlock; and the million inhabitants attributed to the capital is the highest of the estimates. what the most cited modern model holds, for the early empire, is the substance: most people in rome lived as tenants, in buildings that were falling down.
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, if the reconstruction is right, 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.
