Roman Society and Daily Life: From Senators to Slaves

For a long time, the history of Rome was written as the history of emperors and generals, of wars won and provinces conquered. But behind the marble columns of the Roman Forum and the thunder of the legions on the march lay a vast, complex, and often deeply alien society. Tens of millions of people — from senators in purple-bordered togas to slaves chained in mines — lived out their lives within a single political system that endured, in one form or another, for two thousand years.

This article is a comprehensive overview of that society. It explains the structure of the Roman family, the rhythms of the Roman day, the food that Romans ate, the religion they practiced, the entertainment they enjoyed, the laws they lived under, and the role of slavery in making the whole system work. It also looks at the lives of women, children, foreigners, and the urban poor, and at the private homes of the wealthy and the public baths where Roman life actually happened.

A Hierarchical Society

Roman society was, in theory, sharply divided. At the top stood the senatorial aristocracy, perhaps a few hundred families who had held high office for generations and who owned vast estates across the empire. Below them came the equestrians, the wealthy businessmen and tax collectors. Below them came the ordinary citizens, the humiliores and the honestiores, divided by whether they had reached certain legal thresholds of property and birth. Below the citizens, and outside the legal protections of citizenship, stood the vast population of slaves and freedmen.

In practice, the boundaries were far more porous than this schema suggests. Slaves could earn money, buy their freedom, and even become wealthy freedmen whose children would be full Roman citizens. Equestrians could rise into the Senate. New men from the provinces, especially from Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, could climb to the consulship within three generations. By the second century CE, the empire was governed by an aristocracy that was largely provincial, and the Italian heartland was no longer the source of its rulers.

The free citizen population of the empire at its height has been estimated at somewhere between 50 and 90 million people. The slave population is harder to estimate, but it may have been as high as a third of the total in Italy in the late Republic, declining substantially in the imperial period as conquest slowed and as the empire relied more on free wage labor.

The Roman Family

The basic unit of Roman society was the familia, headed by the paterfamilias, the eldest living male. The paterfamilias had nearly absolute power over everyone in his household: his wife, his children, his slaves, and his freedmen. In early Rome he could literally put his children to death, sell them into slavery, or disinherit them. In the imperial period, this power was gradually restricted by custom and law, but the family remained the central institution of social life.

Roman marriage was usually monogamous and usually arranged by the families. Upper-class girls married in their mid-teens, often to men considerably older. Divorce was relatively common and easy to obtain; a woman whose husband divorced her took her dowry and remarried, often within the year. Lower-class marriages were less formal and might involve the simple cohabitation of a couple who had set up house together.

Children were valued, but infant mortality was high. About a third of Roman babies died in their first year. Those who survived childhood were raised by their mothers until age seven, after which their father or a slave pedagogue began their education. Boys received a literary education based on the works of Homer, Virgil, Cicero, and other great authors. Girls were taught household management and basic literacy. Wealthy children might continue their education in Athens, Rhodes, or Alexandria.

The Roman House

The Roman house, the domus, was built around an atrium, a central reception room with a hole in the roof to let in light and collect rainwater in a pool called the impluvium. Around the atrium were the tablinum, the office of the head of the household, and the cubicula, the bedrooms. Behind the atrium was the peristyle, a garden surrounded by a colonnade. Walls were decorated with frescoes, floors with mosaics, and the most luxurious houses had private baths.

The very wealthy lived in domus in Rome, but most Romans in the early Empire lived in insulae, the multi-story apartment blocks that filled the city. The insulae were built of brick-faced concrete, sometimes seven or eight stories high, and they were notorious for their fire risk and structural instability. Augustus famously boasted that he had transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble; ordinary Romans, of course, lived in brick and concrete.

Outside the cities, the wealthy built villas, sprawling country estates that combined agricultural production with luxurious living. The villa of a senator might include farm buildings, slave quarters, wine and oil presses, a bathhouse, a library, an art gallery, a swimming pool, formal gardens, and several dining rooms. Some villas have been remarkably preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, especially those at Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Food, Dining, and the Roman Diet

The diet of ordinary Romans was simple. The staple was bread, baked from wheat imported from Roman Egypt, Sicily, and North Africa. With bread went olive oil, wine (cut with water, since drinking undiluted wine was considered barbaric), vegetables, beans, cheese, eggs, fish sauce (the infamous garum), and small amounts of meat, usually pork.

The wealthy ate far better. A formal Roman dinner, the cena, had three courses. The gustatio was a starter of eggs, vegetables, olives, and seafood. The prima mensa featured the main dish, usually a meat or fish preparation. The secunda mensa was the dessert course, often fresh and dried fruit, sweet wines, and elaborate pastries. The richest Romans served exotic foods such as flamingo tongues, peacock brains, and dormice fattened on walnuts, although most traditional Romans considered this sort of excess vulgar.

Meals were eaten reclining on couches, the diners supporting themselves on their left elbows. Men and women dined together, a custom that shocked Greeks. The host arranged his guests according to rank and friendship, and the conversation was often the most important part of the meal. For more, see the article on what Romans ate.

Religion: Gods, Household, and State

Roman religion was originally a practical affair. The Romans worshipped a vast number of gods, each responsible for a particular aspect of life. Jupiter was the king of the gods and the protector of Rome. Mars was the god of war. Vesta was the goddess of the hearth, served by the Vestal Virgins. There were gods for the boundaries of fields, the ripening of crops, the safety of crossroads, and almost every other human activity.

Roman religious practice emphasized ritual correctness rather than belief. The priest of a cult was concerned that the right words be said, the right sacrifices be made, and the right omens be observed, not that the worshipper feel devotion. This made Roman religion tolerant of foreign gods: the gods of conquered peoples were generally welcomed into the Roman pantheon. Greek gods were identified with Roman gods from an early date; Egyptian, Celtic, and Germanic gods were added later.

In the first century CE, however, a new religion arrived in Rome from the eastern provinces: Christianity. Christians refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods or to the genius of the emperor, and they were periodically persecuted, most famously under Nero and again under Diocletian. The persecution under Constantine ended in 313 CE, and by the end of the fourth century Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire. For more, see the article on Roman religion and mythology.

Entertainment: Games, Theater, and the Bath

The Romans were passionate about public entertainment. The most famous form was the gladiatorial games, held in amphitheaters of which the Colosseum is the best-preserved example. Gladiators were usually slaves, condemned criminals, or prisoners of war, although some free men volunteered for the chance at fame and prize money. The games were not mere blood sport; they were religious rituals, political theater, and the principal form of mass entertainment in the empire.

Chariot racing was even more popular. The Circus Maximus in Rome could hold perhaps 250,000 spectators, more than any modern stadium. Four teams, distinguished by color (red, white, blue, and green), competed in races of seven laps. The best charioteers, like the legendary Gaius Appuleius Diocles, became international celebrities, and their fans supported their favorite teams with the same passionate partisanship as modern sports fans.

The theater was less popular than chariot racing, and Roman plays were generally considered inferior to Greek. The most enduring theatrical form was the mime, a kind of obscene farce performed without masks. Pantomime, a solo dance performance accompanied by music, was also popular.

The public bath was the great social leveler of the Roman world. Every city had at least one, and the largest, like the Baths of Caracalla and the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, were enormous complexes with libraries, gardens, exercise yards, and shops. For the price of a small admission fee, a Roman citizen could bathe, exercise, read, and conduct business. The bath was where politics, gossip, and deals happened. For more, see the article on what a Roman bath was like.

The Legal System

Roman law was one of Rome’s most enduring gifts to civilization. The earliest Roman law, the Twelve Tables, was publicly displayed in the Forum around 450 BCE. As Rome grew, the law became more sophisticated. Praetors, the chief magistrates in charge of the administration of justice, issued annual edicts that effectively created new legal remedies. Jurists, like Gaius, Ulpian, and Papinian, wrote treatises that became the basis of legal education for centuries.

Roman law distinguished sharply between the law of citizens (ius civile) and the law of peoples (ius gentium). It developed sophisticated rules on contract, property, marriage, inheritance, tort, and criminal procedure. The Corpus Juris Civilis, the great codification of Roman law commissioned by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century CE, became the foundation of the civil law tradition that still governs most of continental Europe, Latin America, and many other regions.

Slavery: The Foundation of Roman Wealth

No discussion of Roman society is complete without an honest look at slavery. Slaves were everywhere in the Roman world. They worked in mines, on farms, in workshops, in private households, in the imperial civil service, and even in the imperial palace. The Romans had no concept of human rights, and a slave was, in law, a piece of property, with no more legal standing than a horse.

Slaves were acquired in three main ways. Some were born to slave mothers. Some were purchased from slave traders, who obtained their merchandise in distant wars or in the slave markets of the eastern Mediterranean. Some were enslaved as a punishment for serious crimes. The treatment of slaves varied enormously. Some were treated as part of the family and were eventually manumitted. Others worked in chains in silver mines or quarries and died in their twenties.

The Roman economy depended on slave labor in its most productive centuries. The latifundia, the great slave-worked estates of southern Italy, displaced the small farmers of the early Republic and dominated the agricultural economy until the empire’s manpower needs slowly shifted toward free labor. Christian teaching, which held that all humans had souls and that slave and free were equal before God, gradually undermined the institution. By the late Empire, slavery was becoming less common in the western provinces. In the east, slavery continued in various forms until the early modern period.

Daily Life: A Day in the Life of a Roman

A typical day for a Roman of the middle classes might begin at dawn, with a light breakfast of bread and cheese. The citizen would then walk to the forum, where business, politics, and social life were conducted. Senators attended the Senate. Merchants conducted deals. Orators gave speeches. Priests performed sacrifices. Slaves ran errands.

At midday, Romans broke for a light lunch, the prandium. The afternoon might be spent at the baths, the theater, the amphitheater, or simply walking in the gardens. In the evening came the cena, the main meal of the day, eaten at home with the family or, for the wealthy, in a formal dinner with carefully selected guests. After dinner, Romans might attend a late entertainment, a private philosophical discussion, or a banquet that ran well into the night.

The Legacy of Roman Society

The institutions of Roman society have been remarkably durable. The Latin language survives in the Romance languages of today. Roman law underlies the legal systems of half the world. The Catholic Church adopted the Roman model of the bishop as a kind of municipal governor. The concept of the citizen, with rights against the state, is fundamentally Roman. The very idea of a “civilized” society, with paved roads, running water, public entertainment, and the rule of law, is one that the Romans invented and that Europe has been trying to recover ever since.

Roman Art and Literature

Roman art and literature were deeply Greek in their forms but distinctively Roman in their purposes. The Romans admired Greek art and imported enormous quantities of it; the Roman nobleman, returning from a tour of Greece, was said to fill his house with statues of the gods and heroes, regardless of how well they would survive the journey. But the Romans also developed a literary and artistic tradition of their own, one that valued clear, practical, didactic expression over the elaborate ornament of Greek rhetoric.

The great Roman historian was Livy, whose 142-book history of Rome from the founding of the city reached Augustus and shaped Roman historical consciousness for centuries. Livy wrote in a vivid, dramatic prose that combined patriotic mythology with sober critical judgment, and his work is one of the foundation stones of European historical writing. His contemporary, Tacitus, wrote a sterner, more cynical history of the early Empire that has been mined by every subsequent student of tyrannical power. Sallust, writing a generation earlier, had already set the pattern for the moralizing Roman history that was, in Tacitus’s hands, to become one of the great forms of political analysis.

Roman poetry reached its high point in the age of Augustus. Virgil, the author of the Aeneid, was the greatest poet of the Roman world, an epic on the founding of Rome that combined Homeric heroism with a new, distinctly Roman sense of national destiny. Horace, friend of Virgil and of Augustus, wrote odes and satires that are still read for their perfect craftsmanship. Ovid, the third great Augustan poet, was a brilliant, witty, and slightly subversive writer whose Metamorphoses preserved the Greek myths in a form that has shaped Western literature ever since. Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea by Augustus for reasons that remain unclear, and his poetry from exile is among the most poignant in the language. For the imperial period, the Silver Age poets — Lucan, Juvenal, Martial, Statius — wrote with a darker, more satirical vision that reflected the anxieties of an autocratic state.

Roman prose at its highest was the prose of Cicero, whose orations, philosophical treatises, and letters remain among the great works of the language. Cicero’s career as consul and his death at the hands of Mark Antony’s soldiers in 43 BCE made him a symbol of republican liberty for centuries, and the humanist scholars of the Renaissance took his name as a watchword. After Cicero, the great imperial prose writers were Seneca the philosopher, Pliny the Elder the encyclopedist, Pliny the Younger the letter-writer, and Tacitus the historian.

Roman art was, like Roman architecture, practical and rhetorical. The Romans perfected the art of the portrait, the historical relief, and the mural fresco. The portrait busts of the late Republic and early Empire are remarkable for their unblinking honesty: Republican Romans were depicted with all their wrinkles and warts, and the imperial portraits traced the slow development of an official, idealized image. The Ara Pacis, the altar of Augustan peace, the Column of Trajan, the triumphal arches of Titus and Constantine, and the portraits of the Fayum, mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, are among the great works of ancient art.

The Roman Calendar of Festivals

The Roman year was a continuous round of public festivals, religious observances, and games that structured the lives of citizens and gave the year its rhythm. The official calendar, attributed to the legendary king Numa Pompilius, divided the year into twelve months, with intercalary months added at intervals to bring the lunar and solar cycles into approximate alignment. The year began in March (the month of Mars, the god of war) until the reforms of Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, when January became the first month, and the old Roman calendar of 355 days was replaced by the Julian calendar of 365¼ days, the basis of the modern Western calendar.

The major festivals punctuated the year. The Lupercalia, in mid-February, was a celebration of fertility and purification in which young men ran around the Palatine Hill striking women with strips of goat skin. The Parilia, on 21 April, was the festival of the founding of Rome, with bonfires, sheepsmearing, and ritual purification of the flocks. The Saturnalia, in late December, was the great festival of the year, a week of role reversal, gift-giving, and feasting in which slaves sat at table with their masters and the social order was briefly inverted. The Ludi Romani, in September, was the oldest and most prestigious of the public games, with chariot races in the Circus Maximus and theatrical performances. The Parilia, the Vestal Virgins ([/questions/who-were-the-vestal-virgins]), and the Lustrum, the five-yearly purification of the Roman people, were all parts of the same religious system.

In addition to the public festivals, the year was marked by the private observances of the family: the Parentalia in February, when the dead were remembered; the Lemuria, also in February, when malevolent spirits were propitiated; the Mundus Cereris, the opening of the pit that connected the world of the living with that of the dead. The calendar of the Roman army, of the imperial court, and of the local towns was even more elaborate. The feriae, the days of public rest, were roughly 150 a year, and the nundinae, the market days, occurred every eight days.

The religious calendar was a major administrative document, and the fasti, the inscribed calendars that survive in fragments from Rome and the cities of Italy and the provinces, are among the most important historical sources for Roman religion and public life. The fasti give the dates of festivals, games, and political assemblies, the names of the consuls, and the dates of important historical events. The fasti Antiates maiores, the oldest surviving Roman calendar, dates from the late first century BCE and is a remarkable record of the religious life of the late Republic. For the relationship between the public calendar and public life, see the article on Roman entertainment.