For over 2,000 years, stories have been passed down about the famous and infamous people from ancient Rome.

While many of these names are still familiar to most people today, it doesn't really tell us much about how the average person lived back then. What was life like for a regular

person whose names didn't make it into the history books? Learn more about the life of the

average person in ancient Rome and how we know what we know on this episode of everything

everywhere daily. I've done many episodes on topics from ancient Rome.

Usually it has something to do with

this emperor or that battle or some noteworthy event that took place. The reason why these

topics get covered is really no different than why certain topics are in the news today

and others aren't. Wars and emperors are things that historians bothered to write about. They didn't

tend to write about the average everyday goings on because the contemporary audience they were

writing for already knew all those things. Moreover, even if someone did

document those things there's a good chance that it was lost. 99% of all ancient Roman literature has disappeared over time.

We know a lot about Julius Caesar, for example, but we know very little about Antoninus

Pius. Antoninus Pius was one of the longest reigning Roman emperors in history,

and he oversaw one of the greatest stretches of peace in Roman history.

Yet, very little about him has survived.

So what we know about the lives of the common people in ancient

Rome comes from several sources. There were some things written down that did

survive that we can get some information from, but most of what we know has come

from archaeology. The Romans left a lot of ruins

for us to learn from. The Romans tended to build with stone, brick, marble, and concrete.

And moreover, they were all over the place, leaving behind entire cities well preserved in the desert, like

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