A sanctuary in Rome of the domestic gods in an atrium of the House of the Vettii.WERNER FORMAN (UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY

Nero’s Rome was not so different from today’s world: Stratospheric rents, gentrification and chaotic traffic 

The historian Dimitri Tilloi-d’Ambrosi has published an essay on daily life in the imperial capital, which was home to a mix of nationalities, exclusive and run-down neighborhoods, and where citizens suffered from noise pollution

GUILLERMO ALTARES

Madrid - APR 08, 2024 - 16:08CEST

In the first century A.D., Rome became the first city with a million inhabitants. Until the 19th century, when Beijing and London achieved the milestone, no other city had reached such a population. Although the temporal and human distance that separates us from classical Rome is enormous — it was an extremely violent world, with slaves and emperors — the urban problems it experienced are repeated throughout the ages. Juvenal (60-128 A.D.) had already warned in his Satires that the cost of buying a sumptuous residence in a village south of Rome was equivalent to the annual rent “of a hovel in the capital.” French historian Dimitri Tilloi-d’Ambrosi picks up this anecdote in his essay 24 heures de la vie sous Néron (originally published in French in 2022 and recently translated to Spanish), in which he describes what distances us, but also what unites us with a world ultimately not so distant: Rome during Nero’s regime.

Poppaea Sabina (Patricia Laffan) and Nero (Peter Ustinov) in 'Quo Vadis

ANCIENT ROME

Castrated and forcibly feminized by Emperor Nero

In his book ‘Pax,’ Tom Holland reviews the period of splendor in Imperial Rome from Nero to Hadrian and tells of the terrible fate of Sporo, mutilated and forced to replace the deceased Empress Poppaea

Jacinto Antón

February 29, 2024

Tom Holland, the great chronicler of the history of Antiquity and especially of the ancient Romans, has returned. After a period of illness, he crossed a personal Rubicon with Pax (published July 2023), an exciting fresco about the era of splendor of Imperial Rome that lasted from Nero to Hadrian. And despite the book’s title, the period also included great military emperors such as Vespasian and Trajan.