Running the Roman Home

The first in-depth look at life on Rome's domestic frontier explores the effort required every day to run a Roman household This work considers the three elements of housework—supply, maintenance, and disposal. It is divided into sections on how the Romans collected water and fuel, milled flour, and produced thread; how they cleaned the house, illuminated it, did the washing up, cleaned their clothes, got rid of waste water and sewage, and threw out their garbage. The evidence is taken from literary, archaeological, and artistic sources, and often compared to historical or modern parallels from communities using the same methods.