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eBook Category: History
eBook Description: Be a tourist in ancient Rome during the time of Diocletian. Savor the smells, the sights, the thrills of the ancient world capital as no standard history text can offer. First of two unforgettable parts crammed with detailed info and interesting explanations. Part 1 brings you from a rural villa to the outskirts of Rome. Part 2 (coming soon) walks you through the city itself. Infonana offers entertaining and informative nonfiction for digital readers on the go.

eBook Publisher: Clocktower Books and Far Sector SFFH (magazine), Published: Clocktower Books, 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: December 2002

This eBook is part of the following series:

• John T. Cullen's Walk Near Rome 300 A.D. Series

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [39 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [56 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [20 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [80 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [21 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [80 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [93 KB] , hiebook (KML) [66 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [69 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [18 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [23 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [59 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [32 KB]
Words: 6400
Reading time: 18-25 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Nothing can prepare you for what you are about to experience. We are about to become tourists in ancient Rome around 300 A. D. (or C.E., as we'll explain shortly). You'll savor the smells, the sights, the noise, the things that are exhilarating and scary and shocking and downright terrifying.

It's been remarked that the Romans sometimes seem incredibly modern, so close to us in so many ways, yet when we reach out to understand their society, they can suddenly seem quite alien. At some moments it's like looking at a parallel civilization to ours, and at other moments it's as though we have discovered a major, hitherto unknown continent on which thrives a civilization that has hallmarks of European and Asian cultures and yet is profoundly different in many details. We've studied their ruins, their writings, their history for centuries, and every time we think we understand them, that comprehension seems just around the corner, beyond our grasp.

The ancient Romans lived not only in a foreign country, as one might expect in journeying someplace many thousands of miles from home. They lived in a foreign time and a foreign culture. And it's a much farther trip from here to ancient Rome than the 10,500 miles between modern day New York and Melbourne, or the 12,000 miles between Shanghai and Buenos Aires.

No, they didn't disappear because they had too much sex or ate too much. Those are long-discredited opinions held by the primitive societies that sprang up in the ruins of the once-great cosmopolitan empire. The very fact that they lasted for over 1,000 years ought to suggest that they were doing more things right than they were doing wrong. What killed off the great Imperium? Inflation, for one thing. Same kind of thing that gives today's Fed Chairman sleepless nights, and they understood something was wrong when the value of their money kept dropping relative to the price of products in their economy, but they didn't have the benefits of studying the Dismal Science (Economy) and so did a whole bunch of things wrong, like water down their coinage with less gold and more base metals, to no real avail. Well, what brought the Romans down after 1,000 years? A huge bureaucracy, a huge military to constantly fight wars all over the edges of an empire covering most of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia, inefficient tax collection (guy comes to your house at 3:00 a.m. with a sword and says "Gimme all you got or else!"), lead in the water pipes leading to idiocy...there isn't a simple answer.

But who cares? We are going to take a trip to Rome, we're going to enjoy ourselves, and you'll be home soon to tell all about it. Sorry, no souvenirs.

Here are the rules. We have 24 hours. We leave on a special Infonana train, which slides sideways between time and space and lands just the other side of a thin sheet of space-time somewhere on the outskirts of Rome, and we walk from there. Your gender is immaterial because you'll be temporarily housed in the body of a healthy 30-year old male with good walking shoes named Marcus, who speaks fluent Latin. He should-he was born near the left bank of the Tiber and works as a bookkeeper in a grain warehouse in Ostia, Rome's port city to the Tiber and thence to the Med. Boring job. Nice chap. In his spare time he makes a few denarii lending his body to us, and he gets to nod off somewhere in the back of his head for 24 hours while getting paid. Call it sleeping on the job. To hear him tell it, that's what he does anyway with his styli and wax tablets all day at the Manilius Grain Company anyway. Take good care of his body-he has a wife, two boys, and one elderly slave woman to look after and he can't afford to have you wrench a leg or sit on broken glass or get thoroughly smashed in one of those roadside taverns and wind up in the slammer, or any of the other dumb things tourists do while away from home.

We arrive in a minute after midnight, a small party of six, including our own guide who is a Classics student from Ohio named Fred. We are to meet our local guide, Asconius, who, like Marcus, is moonlighting. Asconius, however, is a slave. He is a pedagogue, sort of teacher meets nanny, and his job is to walk the two sons of his upper middle class owner, a buyer and seller of real estate, to and from school. Now if the owner were wealthier, he'd own the teacher. Instead, he has Asconius (who is Greek by birth, as are many pedadogues, and has a reasonable grasp of writing and the Classics) walk the boys to a small stall near the Baths of Caracalla, where a rather mean little bearded teacher with a stick teaches them the basics they need to know so they can sound intelligent: grammar, rhetoric, Greek, logic, that whole ball of wax. Asconius hovers nearby, listening to the lecture, and takes the boys home where, after their nap and a snack, he helps them with their homework. Asconius, by the way, is lucky. He's got a wife and a daughter, and he looks forward to the day of his manumission-when his owner will bless him and his family and set them free with a small gift of money, to join the growing stream of freedmen on the Roman streets. It's been estimated that, by the later empire around 300 C. E. (same as A. D., kind of, minus the religious slant), something like seven out of eight persons walking the streets in Rome either were slaves, were ex-slaves, or had ancestors who had been slaves.