At the height of its greatness, Imperial Rome was the most amazing cityscape the world had ever seen: “seat of empire and gods,” as the poet Ovid put it.
The slogan would be perfect for any company specializing in time travel. The pamphlets would write themselves.
It’s no wonder, then, that ancient Rome came first in a recent poll of where and when people in the past would most like to travel if given the chance. Surprisingly, perhaps given its reputation for violence and excitement, medieval Britain took third place. In second place was the Wild West.
Imperial Rome, however, topped the charts with a whopping 14 percent of the vote. Anyone who has seen Gladiator will know why.
But for the adventurous tourist, transported back in time to 120 AD with easyJet’s time travel equivalent, how about arriving in the city of Caesars at their peak?
HAIL CAESAR!: David Robb as Germanicus in the 1976 classic television drama I, Claudius
MOURNING: Ray Stevenson as Centurion in BBC2 series Rome
The first impression would be overwhelming. Never in history had a metropolis been as vast as Rome at the beginning of the second century. It stretched for miles: a vast assemblage of marble and brick, noisy, foul-smelling, and shrouded in smoke.
Over a million people lived there, crammed into a few square miles at a time when Britain’s total population was perhaps twice that size.
Unsurprisingly, the challenge of finding adequate accommodation was immense. Any tourist from 2023 would find hotels notable for their absence. The demand for accommodation in Imperial Rome was relentless.
The city’s real estate market was a huge exploitation exercise. As one disgruntled renter put it, “A shabby room costs nowhere else.” The rates charged on the tenements that housed most people were graduated with unflinching accuracy.
The higher the floor, the more likely it was that tenants would shake their room when passing cars rumbled, or that it would collapse in the event of an earthquake, or be cut off from the street by fire.
The crash of collapsing buildings was one of the city’s most distinctive sounds. Taking a room in Rome meant living in the shadow of death. Perhaps not a detail that time travel companies would emphasize. Undoubtedly, it is better to focus on the attractions and sights.
But even going into the city would mean risking life for any tourist. The streets of Rome were greasy and slippery. The rich, carried in their palanquins above the throng, resembled ships tossing in a storm, while the poor, elbowed here, knocked over by transoms there, knew that any slip amidst the general throng was well worth it could prove fatal.
Even in the city’s most glamorous neighborhoods, it was not uncommon for people to be trampled to death. Traffic jams pose particular risks in unhealthier neighborhoods, where carts loaded with building materials have consistently struggled to negotiate winding streets.
“For if an axle were to break under the weight it was carrying,” warned the poet Juvenal, “and an avalanche of marble fell on the dense crowd, what would be left of the corpses?” What limbs, what bones would be recognizable?’
According to a survey, ancient Rome is the place people would most like to visit if they had the opportunity to travel back in time
COVERS: A Roman orgy scene from the controversial 1979 film Caligula
There were no laws against such accidents. Even though transport of heavy goods vehicles out of Rome was forbidden during the day, it was impractical to prohibit all transport of building materials. Both the preservation of the urban fabric and the employment of its workers depended on it. However, the restriction of the wagons to nighttime only brought its own problems. Their constant rumble, shaking the rickety skyscrapers, ensured that Rome was a city that never slept.
Of course, a vibrant nightlife is always something travel companies are happy to promote. Rome’s nightlife, however, brought both danger and excitement. As dusk fell and the shops were boarded up, the rhythm of the streets darkened in every way.
A tall man, cloaked in his scarlet cloak and guarded by a long train of heavy soldiers, all carrying flaming torches, need not worry – but not everyone could afford such protection.
The mood in Rome was often ominous, especially after sunset. The more remote areas of the capital, where gambling and prostitution thrived, were so notorious that Emperor Nero is said to have haunted them for fun, beating up passers-by.
However, robbers could be lurking anywhere; Street brawls were not limited to taverns and brothels either. At dawn, corpses inevitably came to light, lying in puddles of blood on the streets of the capital. Sometimes they were gathered by those who loved them to be mourned and cremated, and sometimes they stayed where they fell to be swept up with the rubbish.
All of this makes Rome seem like a truly hellish holiday destination — beyond Tripadvisor’s worst nightmares. Paradoxically, if the capital was the dirtiest of cities, it was also the cleanest.
Rome’s largest drain was built centuries earlier. Its aqueducts brought cool mountain water to the heart of the city. Even Greeks occasionally admitted to being impressed. “The aqueducts carry such volumes that the water flows like rivers,” wrote a Greek travel writer.
Russell Crow (right) in Ridley Scott’s 2000 film Gladiator, which sparked renewed interest in ancient Rome
Ray Stevenson as Soldier Titus Pullo in the TV series Rome, a co-production between HBO and the BBC
“There is hardly a house in Rome that does not have a cistern, a connecting pipe or a bubbling fountain.”
Admittedly, the aqueducts didn’t carry supplies everywhere in the city. The poor in their overcrowded tenements had no choice but to carry water to their attics and dump their waste into covered cisterns.
The urine was placed in jars to be used by walkers for cloth treatment. Excrement was transported nightly by state slaves to the fields outside the capital to be used as fertilizer by the farmers.
Still, the stench of human waste was never entirely banished from the city limits. Mixed with the dust, the sweat, the incense offered to the gods, the smoke from workshops and the scents of the numerous cooking fires, it was so much a part of the capital that you hardly knew you were living there.
It no doubt helped that even the poorest of citizens could take advantage of one particularly famous Roman attraction: the baths. These have long been a feature of the capital city, but the early second century AD would be a particularly good time for any time-traveling tourist eager to take advantage of them.
Trajan (AD 98-117), hailed after his death by the Romans as “the best of emperors,” had recently ended a brutal but extremely profitable war. A vast area beyond the Danube, in present-day Hungary, rich in treasure and gold mines, had been conquered by Roman arms.
Trajan had returned to the capital triumphant, laden with booty. The loot extorted from his vanquished enemies had flowed into the most magnificent bathing complex of all time, so vast that a new aqueduct had to be built to supply it with water.
But these baths were just a start. Full of loot, Trajan had commissioned the best architects in the empire to design a huge building project for him in the heart of the capital.
Libraries were counterpointed with statues, shopping centers with friezes, arches and triumphal columns. In fact, the project was so monumental and of such overwhelming impact that it laid the foundation for a building program that began more than a century ago.
Once before the rise of the Caesars to supreme power in 49 BC. BC, Rome had been the polar opposite of greatness. Compared to the beautiful cities of the Greek world, it seemed a backward and run-down place. Courtiers in Antioch or Alexandria giggled superiorly each time they heard the description of Rome.
But that had long since changed. A succession of emperors had transformed the center of the capital from a plain of brick to a plain of marble. It was Trajan who had completed the process. As the most magnificent city in the world, Rome now had no conceivable rival.
Around Trajan’s great new complex rose a wall as high as it was empty. Beyond, amid the smoke and noise, daily life went on. The contents of chamber pots were thrown out of attic windows. Slaves collected excrement from cisterns. The victims of muggers lay bleeding in run-down side streets.
Beggars sat crowded next to bridges.
Richard Burton as Roman General Marc Antony and Elizabeth Taylor as Egyptian Queen Cleopatra in the 1963 blockbuster Cleopatra
Nothing in Rome created more drama, nothing created more excitement than the spectacles of armed combat
No tourist could escape these disturbing sights. But Rome, for all its horrors, was like nowhere else in the world. horror and grandeur; misery and splendor; Humiliation and magnificence: Never before have such opposites coexisted in a single place. And maybe never since then.
Travel, it is said, expands the mind. Visiting Rome in the heyday of its empire would undoubtedly be a feast for the eyes of any 21st-century tourist. The Romans weren’t like us, but strange in ways that can often seem frightening.
One more building than any other in Trajan’s Rome would remind time travelers of this. The Colosseum was not built by Trajan himself, but some four decades before he came to power. Nevertheless, it remained the largest, most dominant and most symbolic building in the entire city. In AD 120, as in 2023, no visitor would have wanted to miss it.
But would the present-day time traveler want to witness the conversations that took place there? Boycotting matches at the Coliseum would be like denying a chance to see the Champions League final. Nothing in Rome created more drama, nothing created more excitement than the spectacles of armed combat.
As fans flocked to the Colosseum, they mostly watched matches between well-trained and experienced fighters, men sworn to endure fire, chains, whip and sword: gladiators. In some ways, the excitement of those who saw them wasn’t that far removed from the excitement that fans feel today when they watch elite sport. But of course there was much more at stake. Fatalities are extremely rare in modern sports. That’s exactly what the Colosseum was all about.
Not that it was all scriptless. If the Colosseum hosted the equivalent of modern sports competitions, it also offered viewers the ancient equivalent of CGI. There were many who were relegated to the arena and never given a chance to fight.
Criminals were tortured to death in amazingly ingenious ways. Stagecraft of unprecedented sophistication and precision was combined with a menagerie of beasts imported from around the world. Gruesome episodes from Greek mythology were vividly brought to life.
How about a 21st-century tourist witnessing these scenes? They are repulsive, yet the status the Colosseum still enjoys suggests that a latent fascination with them lingers.
Perhaps Rome’s popularity as a time travel destination hints at something similar. If we dream of seeing the Gladiator cityscape, maybe part of us also dreams of seeing real-life gladiators. About 250 years after Trajan’s death, a young man named Alypius settled in Rome. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was appalled by gladiatorial combat and repeatedly and vocally condemned it.
Then one day he joined a crowd of his fellow students. They swept him up and, despite his protests, herded him into the amphitheater. “Alypius,” it says, “kept his eyes shut, refusing to let his gaze wander over the scene of such wickedness.” But then there was a great roar from the crowd. Alypius opened his eyes. He saw that one of the gladiators had fallen in battle. He felt possessed by a bloodlust. “He was no longer the man he had been when he entered the amphitheater, but one of the crowd.”
This passage is one of the most disturbing in ancient literature. It begs a question that would surely hang like a shadow over any tourist who sets out to travel back in time to Rome. Yes, the city would be unsettling, disturbing, frightening. But what if it turned out to be something more? What if its very terrors were the source of a new and terrible excitement?
- Tom Holland is a historian, author, and co-host of The Rest Is History podcast. His new book Pax: War And Peace In Rome’s Golden Age is available now.