15 things in ancient Rome that feel surprisingly modern

Daily life in a Roman city involved a set of problems that would be recognizable to anyone renting an apartment today. Tenants on the upper floors of insulae had no kitchen, so they bought hot food from counters that opened onto the street. Landlords let buildings decay and collected rent anyway. Delivery carts rolled through the night because a law kept wheeled traffic out of the center during the day, and residents complained about the noise. People wrote on walls: jokes, insults, endorsements of candidates for local office. They followed athletes by name and spent whole afternoons at complexes that housed bathing pools, exercise yards and libraries.

This list gathers 15 features of ancient Rome that feel modern, each grounded in a surviving structure, an inscription or a documented law. The evidence is visible in Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia and Rome itself. Some entries are technological. The concrete holding up the Pantheon's dome needs no steel reinforcement, hypocaust systems heated villa floors from below, and public latrines ran on the same aqueducts that supplied the baths. Others are bureaucratic. The cursus publicus moved imperial messages across the provinces, and a permit controlled who could use it. A few are social, including the painted campaign notices signed by bakers and cloth workers, and the patron networks that determined who got a legal defense or a job.

None of this made Roman cities comfortable or fair. Slavery, rigid hierarchy and lethal public spectacle ran through the same society that built heated floors and organized sanitation. Fires were frequent, and most residents had no claim on the engineering that made the city famous. The point here is narrower. Much of what reads as a modern urban invention already existed in recognizable form 2,000 years ago. The list includes takeout meals, rental housing, traffic rules, sports fandom, political advertising, logistics networks and the calendar on the wall. What follows are 15 examples, each tied to archaeological or historical evidence.

Illustration: Quartz

Romans bought hot meals from street-facing counters called thermopolia, the ancient equivalent of a takeout window. The counters were masonry blocks with large ceramic jars, or dolia, set into the stone surface to hold food and drink ready for quick service.

Dozens have been identified at Pompeii, clustered along busy streets and near public squares where foot traffic was heaviest. Herculaneum preserves them too. Both towns were buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, which is why their street-level commercial architecture survives at all.

One of the best-preserved examples sits in Pompeii's Regio V, uncovered in 2019 and fully excavated the following year. Archaeologists recovered food residue from the jars, including duck bone and traces of pig, fish and snail. The front of the counter carried painted decoration, including a sea nymph on horseback and images of animals, which worked as signage for anyone passing by.

These were not restaurants in the seated sense. A customer stopped, paid for a portion, and ate standing or carried it off. Some thermopolia had a small back room or a few benches, but the business model was turnover rather than lingering.

The jars did not all work as warming vessels. Several held dry goods, nuts or wine, with cooked dishes prepared elsewhere on the premises and transferred in. Heat came from small braziers rather than from the counter itself.

The number of these operations points to a structural fact about Roman housing. Many city residents had no kitchen, or only a brazier in a cramped rented room. Cooking over an open flame in a timber-floored building carried real fire risk, and plenty of people avoided it. Buying a prepared meal was cheaper and safer than making one.

That logic has not changed. Dense cities with small apartments still sustain large takeout economies for the same reasons Rome did, and the thermopolium is the oldest well-documented version of the arrangement.

Illustration: Quartz

Most people in ancient Rome rented rather than owned, living in insulae — multi-story apartment blocks that stacked dozens of households above street-level shops. Retail below, rental units above: the arrangement needs almost no explanation to a visitor standing in the ruins.

Height was a problem from the start. Before regulation, builders pushed insulae to five or six stories using cheap materials on the upper levels. The structures came down often enough that emperors intervened. Augustus capped new construction at about 20 meters, and Trajan later brought the limit down to roughly 18. Those caps amounted to a building code written in response to collapses.

Value ran the opposite direction from a modern penthouse. The ground and first floors held the largest, best-built units, sometimes with water access and private entrances. Rents fell with every flight of stairs. Top-floor rooms, called cenacula, were cramped and reached by narrow staircases. They used more timber in their construction, which made them the first to burn and the hardest to escape.

The satirist Juvenal described the experience in his third Satire. He wrote about tenants on the upper floors who learn the building is alight only after the lower stories are burning. He also described landlords papering over cracks in walls that were already sagging. His lines survive as some of the most pointed housing criticism from the ancient world.

Fire risk was structural rather than incidental. Oil lamps, charcoal braziers and wooden floor framing sat in close quarters, with no water supply above the ground floor. That combination is part of why the fire of 64 CE moved through Rome's residential districts so quickly.

The clearest surviving examples stand at Ostia, the port town at the mouth of the Tiber, where brick apartment blocks still rise several stories. The Casa di Diana preserves shared courtyards, light wells, staircases and ground-floor shop fronts in a layout that reads immediately as rental housing over retail.

Illustration: Quartz

Julius Caesar's Lex Julia Municipalis, passed around 45 BCE, barred most wheeled vehicles from the center of Rome during daylight hours. The law ranks among the oldest recorded traffic ordinances anywhere, and it existed to keep carts from colliding with the pedestrians, vendors and pack animals crowding the city's narrow lanes.

Roman streets were not built for volume. Many measured barely wider than a single cart, and raised sidewalks and stepping stones squeezed the usable roadway further. Hauling building stone, amphorae of wine and sacks of grain through that space by day meant gridlock, so the statute pushed the work past sunset.

The fix produced its own grievance. Iron-rimmed wheels grinding over basalt paving made a steady racket, and drovers shouting at mules added to it. The satirist Juvenal gave the problem a full passage in his third Satire. He wrote that carts crossing in the twisting streets made sleep impossible, and that only the rich, buffered by large houses, managed to rest. His account stands as one of the sharpest surviving descriptions of urban noise from the ancient world, written as a practical grievance rather than a literary set piece.

The law carried exemptions, which is the part that feels most contemporary. Carts carrying material for temple construction and public works could pass, as could vehicles tied to religious processions and certain ceremonial duties. Roman administrators were already sorting traffic into permitted and restricted categories — the same logic behind delivery permits, loading zones and restricted-access districts today.

The underlying conflict has not changed. Dense population, commercial deliveries and streets laid out centuries before current traffic volumes still force cities to ration road space by hour. Rome operates a zona a traffico limitato that closes much of the historic center to unauthorized vehicles during set periods, a direct descendant of the problem Caesar legislated against.

Enforcement records from the first century BCE are thin, and historians know far more about the rule than about how magistrates applied it. The statute's survival still shows something concrete: Roman officials treated congestion as a governable problem, not an inevitable condition of city life, and they reached for timing rules rather than wider streets as the solution.

Illustration: Quartz

Pompeii preserved roughly 11,000 graffiti inscriptions, scratched into wall plaster across the city before Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. They are cataloged in the fourth volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and they record what ordinary Romans wrote when handed a blank surface and something sharp.

The range is wide. Some inscriptions are jokes or insults aimed at named neighbors. Others are declarations of love, snatches of verse, tallies of debts, prices paid for goods, or boasts about romantic conquests. A few amount to a name and a date, the ancient version of marking that someone was here.

The writing turns up almost everywhere. It appears inside private houses, in taverns, on the exteriors of temples and basilicas, in stairwells and along shop fronts. Wall writing was not pushed to back alleys or disreputable corners, which suggests it carried little social stigma.

Several walls carry layers added over months or years, with newer messages cut beside or across older ones. In places one inscription answers another, producing exchanges between writers who may never have met. That trading of remarks on a shared public surface is about as close as the ancient world gets to an online reply thread.

The value of this material to historians comes from how unofficial it is. Monumental inscriptions were commissioned by magistrates, emperors or wealthy benefactors and composed in formal Latin meant to last. Graffiti came from shopkeepers, laborers, enslaved people, children practicing their letters and travelers passing through, none of whom wrote for posterity.

That makes it one of the better surviving records of spoken Latin. The inscriptions preserve slang, misspellings, abbreviations and grammatical shortcuts absent from the polished prose of Cicero or Virgil, giving linguists direct evidence of how the language sounded in a working town rather than in a library.

Pompeii's walls survive in such quantity because volcanic ash sealed them intact instead of letting weather and rebuilding erase them. What remains is an unusually complete snapshot of casual writing from a single first-century town, a kind of evidence that rarely outlasts the people who produced it.

Illustration: Quartz

Named gladiators in Pompeii had their own fan followings, recorded directly on the city's walls. Inscriptions call the Thracian fighter Celadus the "suspirium puellarum" — the sigh, or heartthrob, of the girls — and a net-fighter named Crescens is praised in comparable language. These were not official records but messages scratched by people who followed particular fighters.

The wording leans toward admiration rather than technical assessment. Fighters drew praise for looks and bearing as much as for skill with a net or a short sword. Other inscriptions kept tallies of individual careers, noting how many bouts a man had fought, won, drawn or survived. Spectators were tracking records across years rather than watching isolated matches.

That fame carried no legal standing. Most gladiators were enslaved people, prisoners of war or condemned criminals, and Roman law placed them among the infames, a category stripped of ordinary civic rights such as holding office. A fighter could be celebrated on a wall and still be someone else's property. Winning offered a narrow route out: prize money, gifts from wealthy backers, and in some cases the rudis, a wooden sword presented to mark formal discharge from the arena.

Training took place in schools called ludi, each run by an owner-manager known as a lanista, and fighters appeared under the name of their school. That gave audiences recognizable groupings to follow from one set of games to the next, much the way supporters now attach themselves to a fighter's camp or gym.

Commercial activity formed around the fame. Lamps, pottery and glassware decorated with gladiator imagery circulated across the Roman world, and Pliny the Elder recorded the belief that the blood of slain gladiators could be drunk as a treatment for epilepsy. Image, reputation and marketable association were already bundled together in the first century CE.

Illustration: Quartz

Candidates for local office in Roman towns campaigned with painted wall notices called programmata, lettered in red or black on whitewashed building fronts. Pompeii preserved them in the thousands. They remain the clearest surviving record of how municipal elections were actually contested in the Roman world.

A typical notice gave the candidate's name, the office he sought, and a short formula urging readers to elect him. The posts at stake were local ones. Aediles handled streets, markets and public buildings. The duumviri were the senior magistrates who ran the town. One surviving notice asks voters to make Gaius Julius Polybius an aedile, and his house in Pompeii has since been excavated.

Many programmata close with the name of a supporter, and some of those supporters were trade associations rather than individuals. The pistores, who baked and sold bread, turn up as backers. So do the fullones, the cloth workers who cleaned and finished wool. A trade group's collective name on a wall worked the way a union or industry endorsement works in a city race now. It signaled a bloc of voters and lent a reputation.

Execution set these notices apart from casual wall scratching. Professional sign painters called scriptores produced them, working with brushes, standardized letterforms and ladders to place text high enough to read from across the street. Individual hands can be told apart by their lettering. A few painters signed their work, among them Aemilius Celer, whose name survives on walls in Pompeii.

The density of notices along Pompeii's main streets suggests campaigning ran close to constant rather than clustering in a short season. Many were painted in the final years before Pompeii was destroyed in 79 CE. Frontages on the busiest thoroughfares were prime space. They were repainted and written over as one election gave way to the next.

Illustration: Quartz

Trajan's Market in Rome grouped roughly 150 rooms across six levels into a single planned structure of shops, offices and covered walkways. Built into the slope of the Quirinal Hill in the early second century CE, it is often called the world's first shopping mall — a label that overstates what it was.

Architectural historians who have studied the structure, among them Lynne Lancaster, read it as a mixed administrative and commercial site rather than a unified retail center. Some sections almost certainly housed imperial offices, storage and record-keeping work alongside the units used for trade. The mall comparison persists because it is convenient shorthand, not because the layout matches one.

What the building does show is Roman command of multi-story commercial construction. The individual units, called tabernae, were small vaulted rooms opening onto a corridor or street, each with a wide doorway that wooden shutters could close. Many had a mezzanine above for storage or sleeping space, reached by a short stair or ladder.

The engineering carried the design. Builders used brick-faced concrete and barrel vaults to stack levels against an excavated hillside. The complex curves in a hemicycle behind the Forum of Trajan, following the line cut into the slope. Internal staircases and two ancient streets connected the levels, including the Via Biberatica, which still runs through the site. The great vaulted hall at the upper level rises two stories and is among the better-preserved interiors left from imperial Rome.

The architect traditionally credited is Apollodorus of Damascus, who also designed the adjacent Forum of Trajan and the Danube bridge built for Trajan's Dacian campaigns. The complex worked as retaining wall, office block and commercial row at once.

Much of it still stands. It now houses the Museo dei Fori Imperiali and is open to visitors. Few places let a person walk a Roman commercial corridor and see the shop fronts in sequence, close to their original arrangement.

Illustration: Quartz

The hypocaust was a Roman underfloor heating system that warmed rooms from below, using a suspended floor set on short tile pillars with hot air moving through the cavity underneath. It is the closest ancient equivalent to radiant floor heating, and it held bath chambers at bathing temperature through a full day of use.

The suspended floor is the suspensura, and the supports beneath it, built from stacked square tiles or cut stone, are known as pilae. They typically raised the floor about two feet above a lower surface of brick or concrete. A furnace stoked from outside the heated room pushed hot air and smoke into that cavity, where it spread across the full footprint before venting out. In more developed installations, the air then rose through hollow rectangular clay tiles built into the walls, called tubuli, so the wall surfaces gave off heat as well. Warming floor and wall together produced temperatures that stayed steady across a large room rather than concentrating near a single fire.

Fuel and labor made the system expensive to operate. A furnace burning wood or charcoal needed someone feeding it continuously, and a large bath complex might run several at once. That cost kept the technology inside public baths, wealthy country villas and military bathhouses on the frontier. Tenants in Rome's apartment blocks relied on portable braziers instead.

Remains survive at the Roman Baths in Bath, England, where rows of stacked pillar bases sit exposed because the floor slabs above them are long gone. Similar structures turn up at villa and fort sites across Britain, Gaul and North Africa, which is how the construction sequence came to be understood in such detail.

The engineering logic outlasted the empire. Separating the heat source from the occupied room, then moving warmth through the building's structure rather than through an open flame inside it, is the same principle behind the hydronic floor heating installed in houses today.

Illustration: Quartz

Communal latrines were standard public infrastructure in Roman cities. Long stone benches, pierced with evenly spaced keyhole-shaped openings, sat above a channel of running water that carried waste out of the building. The best-preserved examples stand at Ostia, the port town at the mouth of the Tiber, where the seating rows and the drainage trench beneath them survive intact.

Privacy was not part of the design. Users sat shoulder to shoulder in an open room with no partitions between seats, and talking while seated appears to have been ordinary. Many latrines were finished with mosaic floors, painted walls or a small fountain, treating the room as a public amenity rather than a bare utility space.

Cleaning was handled with a tersorium, a sea sponge fixed to the end of a wooden stick. Seneca described one in a letter, in an account of a condemned fighter who used the implement to kill himself rather than enter the arena. Sponges were shared and rinsed in a shallow gutter of flowing water that ran along the floor in front of the bench, sometimes mixed with vinegar or salt water. That gutter is still visible at surviving sites.

The whole arrangement depended on a constant water supply. Latrines were typically fed by runoff from a neighboring bath or by aqueduct overflow, so the channel beneath the seats never stopped moving. Waste was flushed continuously into the city's drains and from there into the sewer network. That is why latrines so often sit next to a bath complex — the same water served twice, washing bodies first and the sewer second.

Capacity varied. Some neighborhood facilities held roughly a dozen seats, while larger installations attached to major baths could seat 20 or more at once. Access was generally open to ordinary residents, sometimes for a small fee.

The shared sponge and open bench differ sharply from modern sanitation norms. The civic logic does not — a water-flushed, publicly maintained waste system available to people with no plumbing at home is the same principle behind municipal sewers and public restrooms.

Illustration: Quartz

Augustus established the cursus publicus, a state-operated relay system that carried official messages, documents and personnel along Rome's road network. Ordinary citizens could not use it. Anyone sending a private letter still depended on travelers, merchants or a courier from their own household.

The network ran on two kinds of waypoints. Mutationes were small stations where a rider could exchange a tired horse for a fresh one and keep moving. Mansiones sat farther apart and were larger, offering overnight lodging, stabling, repairs and meals for officials on longer journeys. Placing them at regular intervals along the paved roads meant no courier had to carry provisions or spare animals for a full route.

Access depended on a permit called a diploma, issued under imperial authority and valid only for a stated period. Without one, a traveler had no claim on the horses, carts or beds at a station. The permit existed because the system was expensive to run and misuse was a recurring problem. Pliny the Younger, governing Bithynia under Trajan, wrote to the emperor about diplomata that had passed their expiration date, and emperors periodically tightened the rules.

The cost fell largely on communities along the routes. Local populations were obliged to supply animals, fodder, labor and facilities as a duty owed to the imperial government rather than as a service paid for in full from the treasury. Provincial towns petitioned against that burden repeatedly.

What the state bought was speed and predictability. Tax records, military orders, provincial reports and judicial instructions could move between Rome and the frontiers on a timetable administrators could plan around. That mattered for an empire stretching from Britain to Syria.

The underlying design — fixed waypoints, swapped animals, credentialed access, documented routes — is the same logic behind later postal relay services and the diplomatic courier arrangements governments maintain today.

Illustration: Quartz

Roman builders developed a concrete called opus caementicium that has outlasted most modern equivalents by centuries, and its best-known surviving example is the Pantheon in Rome. The building's dome, finished around 128 CE under Hadrian, remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

The mixture bore little resemblance to the Portland cement that dominates construction now. Roman builders combined lime with volcanic ash, often the pozzolana found near Naples, along with rubble aggregate. Marine structures took seawater into the mix as well. Chemical reactions continued inside that material long after it had set, producing mineral growth that strengthened the concrete rather than weakening it.

Research published in 2023 by a team including MIT materials scientist Admir Masic offered an explanation for part of that durability. The team examined small white mineral inclusions, known as lime clasts, long dismissed as evidence of careless mixing. They concluded the clasts react with water seeping into hairline cracks, depositing calcium carbonate that seals the gap — a self-healing mechanism built into the material itself.

The Pantheon's dome also relies on a graded recipe rather than a single mix. Heavier aggregate such as travertine sits near the base, where structural loads are greatest. Lighter volcanic pumice appears near the oculus at the top, cutting the weight the lower structure has to carry.

Modern concrete tends to deteriorate on a far shorter timeline, particularly in bridges, seawalls and parking structures exposed to salt, moisture and freeze-thaw cycles. That gap in service life is why materials scientists keep returning to Roman formulations, not as a historical curiosity but as a working reference for extending the lifespan of new infrastructure.

Roman engineers had no chemical analysis to explain why their method worked. They refined it through trial, observation and repetition across harbors, aqueducts, vaults and domes. The harbor concrete at sites such as Caesarea Maritima, on the coast of modern Israel, has held together after two thousand years submerged in seawater.