Rome·AD 120

The City of Hadrian

Name: Daily Life in Ancient Rome at Its Peak, 120 AD: The City of Hadrian
Uploaded: 2026-09-01
Duration: 3 h 10 min 39 s
Description: Most Romans slept four or five floors above the street, in a room with no kitchen, no chimney and no water. The building might burn down. It might simply fall down.

3 hr 10 min·1 September 2026·17 chapters·28 sources

Rome, AD 120 — an illustration made for this film.

An illustration made for this film. Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.

Most Romans slept four or five floors above the street, in a room with no kitchen, no chimney and no water. The building might burn down. It might simply fall down.

This is a slow, sourced walk through the largest city the ancient world ever built — Rome in the year 120, at the height of the empire under Hadrian. The apartment blocks and the street counters, the baths and the brothels, the law and the games and the gods, the children, the countryside, the night. Everything in it comes from the record: Juvenal and Martial, Seneca’s letters, a water commissioner’s report on how much of the supply was being stolen, a physician’s instructions to midwives, a burial club’s rulebook cut into marble. Where the evidence runs out, we say so.

Three hours and seventeen minutes. One voice, no music, no sudden changes in volume — made equally for people who want to know how this city actually worked, and for people who intend to be asleep before the second chapter.

Chapters

17 · each opens the film at that point

0:00The Man Inside the Column 7:36The Top of the Stairs 17:38Eight Feet Wide 27:31No Uniform 38:40The Hour With No Number 48:06The Fuller’s Dance 58:42The Hill of Broken Pots 1:10:42What Was in the Drain 1:21:55A Bell Rang 1:33:05Who Was Protected 1:44:04A Fine or the Beasts 1:57:07The Interval 2:08:32Getting the Words Right 2:20:50Long Fingers, Short Nails 2:34:11Four Sardines 2:46:03Where the Noise Stops 2:58:56The Fourth Watch

Sources

as published with the film

Juvenal, Satires 1, 3 and 5 — Ancient
Martial, Epigrams — Ancient
Seneca, Letters 7, 56 and 70, and On Mercy — Ancient
Pliny the Younger, Letters — Ancient
Frontinus, On the Water Supply of the City of Rome — Ancient
Soranus of Ephesus, Gynaecology — Ancient
Pliny the Elder, Natural History — Ancient
Columella, On Agriculture — Ancient
Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory — Ancient
the Digest of Justinian — Ancient
the burial-club inscription from Lanuvium (CIL XIV 2112) — Objects and sites
the alimentary bronze of Veleia — Objects and sites
the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces — Objects and sites
the Insula dell’Ara Coeli — Objects and sites
the Cardo V sewer at Herculaneum — Objects and sites
Portus and the hexagonal basin — Objects and sites
Monte Testaccio — Objects and sites
Alex Scobie, “Slums, Sanitation and Mortality in the Roman World” (1986) — Scholarship
Gregory Aldrete, Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome — Scholarship
Robert Sallares, Malaria and Rome — Scholarship
Janet DeLaine, The Baths of Caracalla — Scholarship
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy — Scholarship
William Harris, Ancient Literacy — Scholarship
Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality — Scholarship
Saller and Shaw on Roman age at marriage — Scholarship
Simon Keay and the Portus Project — Scholarship
Kathleen Coleman, “Fatal Charades” (1990) — Scholarship
Masic et al., Science Advances (2023), on self-healing Roman concrete — Scholarship

Something wrong here? Tell us — corrections are made in public.