Credit: ZME Science.
In ancient Rome, relief from rent often came only after one’s death.
On a tombstone outside the city, an ex-slave named Ancarenus Nothus left behind what later scholars called “The Tenant’s Lament.” His epitaph reads: “My body knows no longer hunger . . . now it is no longer [paying] deposit on the rent, but enjoys for free an eternal lodging.”
Ancarenus had a hard life, but he chose to put a funny twist on it. His last words to the world are, however, strikingly familiar to most of us modern urbanites.
For most people in the capital of the ancient world, Rome did not mean marble villas, garden courtyards, and reclining couches. That was reserved for the 0.1%. Their living meant crammed quarters, noise, rent due, smoke rising from below, chamber pots above, and walls that might crack while the landlord assured everyone that all was well.
The Romans built one of the first societies of mass urban housing. Their apartment blocks, known as insulae, helped make Rome and its port city Ostia dense, walkable, commercially alive, and socially mixed.
They also made everyday life precarious in ways that feel startlingly modern.
Insulae, Ancient Slums. Credit: Youtube/latintutorial.
The Island in the Street
The Latin word insula literally means “island.” In the Roman city, the name made sense. These buildings often filled entire blocks, with streets flowing around them like water.
The form varied, but the basic pattern looks familiar. Shops opened onto the street at ground level. Above them rose rented rooms and apartments. Stairs led upward to reach the flats. The farther up you climbed, the cheaper and worse life usually became.
Reconstruction of the Roman insula. Outside view. Credit: Legio X.
That inverted the logic of the modern penthouse. Before elevators, height meant lots of sweat, all sorts of dangers, and raw inconvenience. The rich preferred the lower floors, where access came easily and escape remained possible. The poor climbed toward the roof.
Most tenants lived in tiny single rooms called cellae, meaning “small room” but also “cellar”. Entire families often shared this cramped space. In others, especially in Ostia, apartments could be spacious, well-lit, and arranged around courtyards. Some had several rooms. Some even borrowed features from elite houses, such as reception spaces and decorative mosaics.
In other words, the insula was not just one thing. It could be a cramped tenement, a mixed-use commercial block, or an upper-middle-class apartment building. Rome had its slums. It also had its prime real estate.
The scale could be astonishing. By late antiquity, catalogues listed more than 44,000 insulae in Rome, compared with fewer than 2,000 private houses.
The villa may dominate our imagination of Roman life, but it was the mass housing apartment that ordinary Romans — as many as one million by the 2nd century CE — called home.
Building Up Before Modernity
Insula dei Dipinti (Ostia) reconstruction. Credit: I. Gismondi.
Rome faced a problem that modern cities know well: people kept coming.
Migrants arrived for work, food, patronage, trade, and proximity to power. The free monthly grain (Cura annonae) starting with Augustus’ reign made Rome even more attractive to migrants. The city grew to a scale Europe would not see again until London in the 19th century. But Rome had no railways, no steel frames, no elevators, no modern plumbing, and no Portland cement.
Faced with such an incoming flux of people from all corners of their vast empire, the Romans saw it only logical to build upward.
In his new book, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home, architect and urban planner Sten Al quotes the Roman architect Vitruvius, who wrote: “With the present importance of the city and the unlimited numbers of its population, it is necessary to increase the number of dwelling-places indefinitely.”
“The case has made it necessary to find relief by making the buildings high,” Vitruvius wrote.
Like today, Roman concrete formed the bedrock of the insulae. Builders mixed lime with volcanic ash, especially the prized material from around Puteoli and the Bay of Naples. Seneca captured the wonder of it in a line: “The dust at Puteoli becomes stone if it touches water.”
The concrete, which wasn’t properly reinvented until 1824 when English stonemason Joseph Aspdin patented Portland cement, helped the Romans build harbors, baths, amphitheaters, domes, and multistory housing. Brick-faced concrete gave insulae strength, durability, and allowed buildings to raise them fast. S
The Landlords of Fire and Rent
Left: Ostia: Plan of Regio III – Insula IX – Case a Giardino (Garden Houses), Ostia. Right: map of Case a Giardino (Garden Houses (underlying map, Google)
Mass housing also created mass profit.
Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the richest men in Roman history, understood this better than most. According to Plutarch, he bought slaves trained as architects and builders, then moved in on fire-damaged properties when desperate owners sold cheaply. He acquired buildings at “a trifling price,” rebuilt them, and watched his fortune grow. “In this way the largest part of Rome came into his possession,” Plutarch noted.
The pattern sounds modern because the incentive has not changed much. Where land grows scarce and demand rises, housing becomes not only shelter, but also ripe for speculation. Huge fortunes could be amassed simply by owning a small piece of land. The same surface area could be essentially worthless just a few miles away from Rome in the countryside.
Cicero, the polished statesman, was among the patricians who drew income from rental property. However, he was better with words than with real estate. In one letter, he wrote: “Two of my shops have fallen down and the rest are cracking. Not only the tenants but the very mice have migrated.”
He did not linger in pity though, for he was extremely wealthy from his income as an elite lawyer and orator. “Other people call this a misfortune, I don’t call it even a nuisance.”
The ancient rental market offered tenants little protection. Poor residents often rented month to month, although they could sublet rooms, which helped ease some of the pressure. And legal responsibility could become a maze if something fell from an upper window and injured a passerby.
A City of Cracks, Smoke, and Stairs
Roman writers did not romanticize apartment life.
Juvenal, the great poet of urban disgust, imagined Rome as a city barely held together: “We live in a city shored up for the most part with gimcrack stays and props: that’s how our landlords arrest the collapse of their property, papering over great cracks in the ramshackle fabric, reassuring the tenants they can sleep secure, when all the time the building is poised like a house of cards.”
The collapse of decrepit and neglected buildings was not the only danger. Fire haunted the city, always lurking like a spectre since the Eternal City was first founded in the 8th century BCE.
Cooking flames, oil lamps, wooden beams, crowded rooms, narrow streets, and virtually no fire rules made every block vulnerable. Vitruvius hated wattle and daub for that reason.
“As for ‘wattle and daub’ I could wish that it had never been invented. The more it saves in time and gains in space, the greater and the more general is the disaster that it may cause; for it is made to catch fire, like torches.”
Augustus created the vigiles, Rome’s fire brigade, partly because apartment fires had become a public crisis. Nero, after the Great Fire of 64 CE, finally imposed building reforms: wider streets, fire-resistant materials, porches from which fires could be fought, and height limits. Later emperors tightened the rules further.
Juvenal put the terror of the upper-floor tenant with poise: “I prefer to live without fires and midnight panics.”
So do I.
He continued: “By the time the smoke’s got up to your third floor apartment (and you [are] still asleep), your heroic downstairs neighbour is roaring for water and shifting his bits and pieces to safety. If the alarm goes at ground level, the last to fry will be the attic tenant, way up among the nesting pigeons.”
Close Quarters
Apartment life also meant living without privacy. Roman insulae indeed had windows, but not the kind you might imagine. They rarely had glass. Most were open, unglazed holes in the wall fitted with wooden shutters or curtains to block the weather. Glass windows were expensive and mostly limited to the wealthy
Upper-floor units lacked running water. Because ancient Rome did not use mechanical water pumps to push water up multi-story buildings, the distribution of water was limited to the ground. Residents hauled water from public fountains or paid carriers if they could afford it. Cooking at home could be difficult or dangerous, so many people bought prepared food from thermopolia, the Roman fast-food stalls that served hot meals to passersby.
Laundry went out. Bathing often took place elsewhere. Shops, taverns, shrines, baths, and apartments formed one urban ecosystem.
That density made Roman streets lively. It also made them very filthy.
Tenants used chamber pots. Some carried them downstairs. Others couldn’t care less and threw the contents out of the windows. Roman law recognized the problem because victims could claim compensation if falling waste injured them. The legal action known as the actio de deiectis vel effusis (literally, “action for things thrown or poured out”) was designed specifically to protect pedestrians and keep public streets safe.
You did not have to prove who threw the waste. Because it was nearly impossible for a victim on the street to look up and see exactly which window a liquid came from, Roman law held the head of the household (the occupier of the room) automatically responsible, even if a guest or a slave threw it.
The Smell of Density
In his book, Stefan Al quotes Juvenal who turned the danger of deiecta et effusa (waste cast from windows) into dark comedy:
“See how pots strike and dint the sturdy pavement.
There’s death from every window where you move.
You’d be a fool to venture out to dine,
oblivious of what goes on above,
without your having penned that dotted line,
of your last testament.”
Public latrines offered a communal alternative, but not a private one. Users sat side by side, with no partitions. Water carried waste beneath the seats. A shared sponge on a stick served for cleaning. Even Roman sanitation, so impressive for its time in aqueduct and sewer, could be deeply unpleasant.
Noise completed the urban assault. Metalworkers hammered. Bakers shouted. Carts rumbled at night because daytime traffic restrictions pushed deliveries into the dark. Children played in streets all day long. Neighbors argued through thin walls.
Rome did not sleep easily.
Ostia Shows the Better Version
If Rome sounds like a nightmare, its port of Ostia was at least a bit more temperate.
At Rome’s port, many insulae survive well enough to show how sophisticated Roman apartment living could become. Brick-faced concrete walls still rise at some sites. Some buildings had names, almost like prestige apartment blocks today.
Regio I – Insula III – (House of Diana). Credit: Ostia Antica.
The House of Diana (named after the ancient Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and nature), one of Ostia’s best-known apartment buildings, shows the strength of the Roman urban model. It stood close to the forum, near the main street, and across from food shops. A resident could work, eat, worship, bathe, shop, and socialize within a short walk. Its residents, however, were probably upper class compared to those who languished in less affluent neighbourhoods.
The fountain in courtyard 28, House of Diana, seen from the north. Photo: Klaus Heese.
The relief of Diana in courtyard 28. Photo: Klaus Heese.
Room 30 seen from the north-west. Note the basalt blocks and the trough. Photo: Klaus Heese.
So, not all Roman insulae were worthy of pity. The insula helped create a dense, mixed-use city long before zoning codes and transit-oriented development. Insulae put homes above shops. They supported street life. And they gave ordinary people access to the city’s opportunities, even when those opportunities came wrapped in smoke, exorbitant rent, and all sorts of risks.
However, Ostia’s better-preserved buildings may skew our view because the shoddiest structures disappeared first. Archaeology often preserves the stronger bones of the past.
Even so, Ostia shows that Rome’s apartment experiment had range.
The Ancient Problem We Still Recognize
Rome pioneered mass housing because it had no choice.
A huge population pressed against finite land. Transport moved by foot, cart, animal, river, and sea. Workers needed to live near work. Shops needed customers. The state needed to feed, police, count, and control a vast urban population.
The solution was vertical, which proved profitable, dangerous, and perhaps ahead of its time.
The Romans did not solve urban housing. No civilization has. But they saw, earlier than almost anyone, that a great city cannot survive on individual housing.
For Ancarenus Nothus, eternal lodging finally came rent-free. For the billions who now live after him, the price of the city life is paid remarkably the same: one climb, one coin, one sleepless night at a time.
This article originally appeared in July 2026 and was updated with slight corrections for style before republishing.
