The urban landscape of the Greco-Roman world had traditionally emphasized the public and the monumental. By the sixth century, cities in the west were shrinking dramatically—they would eventually recover their commercial legs only when merchants set up shop outside the walls of the tiny communities that survived or replaced those cities. Old monumentality at the city center was threatened everywhere. At Rome in the 530s, in its most ancient heart along the Via Sacra, a few yards from the house where the vestal virgins had lived and tended the eternal flame, two bronze elephants were tottering to ruin. A short-lived ruler signed a letter about the elephants’ peril, dilating on the poignancy of how animals thought to live 1,000 years should be nearing ruination in the urban jungle.19 He offered advice on bolting them together and propping them up, cautioning that even live elephants often need help standing again when they have fallen. No sign remains of those elephants; most likely they were destroyed in the two decades of terrible warfare that were about to pound the ancient capital to a pulp.
The poor lived in huts, the rich in great houses: no surprise there. The old traditional Roman house had featured the atrium in front, and you walked through that to a courtyard A slave named Proiectus. Now it was the courtyard that welcomed you first; the reception and living rooms stretched beyond in no uniform pattern. In the secure city, you slept and dined on the ground floor, but out of town you more often chose to stay on the floor above, perhaps keeping your workshop or the like down below, with strong gates at the entrance.
Mainly in the dark
When the sun went down, you went home and stayed there, mainly in the dark, unless you were rich enough to afford oil to burn. Carthage and Antioch were probably the best cities for nocturnal lighting, because they were close to the olive-growing uplands of Numidia in Africa and Syria in the east. When we hear of an emperor or a philosopher who spent half the night reading and writing, what we should observe is not the studious one’s diligence but his prosperity.
For diversion you might play some of the games of dice that were popu¬lar, but if you were well brought up you did not snort when the dice went against you, as snorting was the conventional mark of the unmannerly dicer.20 Many gaming boards survive, including a famous one found in the forum in Timgad, ioo miles south of the Mediterranean on the plains of modern Algeria, with this inscription:
venari lavare ludere ridere occest vivere
Hunting, bathing, playing, laughing — THAT’s living!
Even the poor could agree with that.
