Being A Homeless In Ancient Rome

Temples weren't really about Charity
not until Christianity.

around 140 BC roman senate passed welfare laws giving out cheap bread and entertainment (bread and circus)

If being homeless was that bad, how did Diogenes and other Cynics give no fucks whatsoever and willingly chose to be homeless?

The Romans did have a welfare system of sorts where grain and later bread were distributed from the Grain Dole.

But the Roman religion was really not that interested in charity. There was some but Christianity is what changed things.

It all depends on the time. During the kingdom and empire it wasnt too bad. During most of the republic it was probably pretty shit. You see the first romans was ruled by kings who was black. Tarquinius superbus the last black king of rome was overthrown by the whiteys who ruled rome for a couple of centuries. Until sulla the great black general overthrew the whiteys and exterminated them in the social war. Now blacks was running rome again and a whitey wasnt seen in the region again until it was sacked by alaric and the whiteys eventually killed or sent the black romans to africa. Julius caesar was black

Some stuff browsing for "poor" in the Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome:

Public festivals were originally literally “feast days” when the local aristocracy paid for a meal for their poorer fellow citizens.

The civilization of the Roman world was enjoyed by the few at the expense of the majority. Wealth and resources were distributed unequally and there was relatively little social mobility. There was a large labor force of slaves and of poorly paid free labor, to some extent indistinguishable from slaves.

Other types of unfree workers, such as debt bondsmen and peasants who were tied to the land, did not fit into the category of slaves. Slaves and their children were not people, but the property of their owners, to be traded like any other commodity. They were sold or rented out by slave dealers, or they could be bought and sold between individuals.

Wine concentrate (must) diluted with water was also drunk. Posca was a particularly common drink among the poorer classes, made by watering down acetum, a low-quality wine very similar to vinegar.

For the poor, most meals consisted of cereal in
the form of porridge or bread, supplemented by meat and vegetables if available.

Slaves and the poor squatted or crouched while eating.

For the poorer classes, tableware probably consisted of coarse pottery, but there was also available a range of vessels in fine pottery, glass, bronze, silver, gold and pewter.

Eating and drinking as a recreational activity for the poor usually meant frequenting taverns, of which there was probably a large number in most towns. Their quality varied, some functioning as brothels and others as gaming houses.
Popinae were low-class fast-food places serving drinks and cooked food such as fish and sausages, as well as supplying prostitutes. The thermopolia were bars serving hot and cold drinks as well as snacks. A taberna was a shop or wine bar, while a caupona was an inn or tavern serving only drinks.

Prostitutes, including men and boys, were largely slaves, and it is known that they worked in brothels,as well as in places such as bathhouses or the tombs lining the roads into towns. Prostitutes were paid for sex, but there was disapproval for freeborn prostitutes. Slaves were not paid for sex by their owner, because they were his property and he could use them as he wished.

In rural areas hunting and fishing were leisure pursuits of the wealthy, but for the poorer classes such activities were more often a necessity than an entertainment.

lower-class funerals took place soon after death, and the corpse was taken from the city by the shortest route with a less elaborate procession of mourners. The poor could belong to funeral clubs (collegia funeraticia), so that the club paid the funeral expenses.

For poor burials probably only by a sack
or shroud was used.

Poorer burials had only a few grave goods, often one or two vessels, food and drink and a few personal items.

That was in ancient Greece you retard.

From Religions of Rome, as I suspected, Christianity really did target the poor, and affected them, and became popular with them:

A contrasting image Stresses the poverty of many professed Christians.
In addition to the 1500 widows and poor supported by the church in the
mid third century A . D . , Christian writers could claim that Christians in
Rome had to work hard to stay alive, and that even so the majority suffered
from cold and hunger. 1 5 1 And those who attacked the Christians readily
deployed this point in their polemic: Celsus, for example, assumes that
most Christians were ill-educated - humble artisans, or children and
women (both slave and free) in more substantial houses; while Minucius
Felix has his pagan Opponent characterize Christians as the dregs of soci
ety. 1 5 2 These two different images of Christianity do more than reflect the
wide social ränge from which adherents of this new religion were drawn.
Within the discourse of (and about) Christianity, poverty was clearly vested
with symbolic, religious significance just as foreignness'was in several of the
other cults we already have examined: there was, for example, a heavily
loaded clash between a Christian ideal of povetty (as reflected in some of
the teaching ascribed to Jesus) and the abomination of the poor and desti-
tute in élite pagan culture; in Christianity the poor were both a metaphor
and a reality. Precisely this kind of symbolic re-evaluation of poverty made
it a particularly attractive religion to the poor as a group; but it also makes
it peculiarly difficult for us to trace accurately the presence of the poor (in
strictly economic terms) in early Christian communities

Christians too had a set of procedures for new members, which varied
from group to group and over time. One common pattern, at least by the
late second century A . D . , had a transitional phase leading to baptism; peo
ple in this position, which could last for up to three years, were known as
'catechumens'. 125 A community of Christian initiates had a particularly
strong sense of group identity. It was only Christians (and Jews) who prac-
tised charity towards their own members (the poor, widows, prisoners);
and Jews and Christians alone had cemeteries specific to theit faiths (no
cemeteries in Rome were reserved for initiates of the other cults).

The Cynic tradition still carried on in Ancient Rome. Epictetus, a Roman philosopher, explicitly mentions present day Cynics throughout Discourses.

Sure Diogenes was homeless in Ancient Greece, and I may have gotten him mixed up with others but my point still stands.

about the religious perspective of the poor we can hardly
even guess.

The Bacchic cult was evidently very wide-
spread in Italy, north and south as well as in the Roman area itself. 79 It was
to be found not just in Roman and Latin communities, but allied ones as
well. 8 0 It cut across ali the usual boundaries between social groups, for we know of devotees amongst slaves and free, among Romans, Latins and
allies, men and women, country people and city-dwellers, rieh and poor [Country/town and rich/poor are both implied throughout Livy's account.]

the poor q u a l i t y of the terracottas suggests not an
official offering but a group of poor devotees of the cult. [of Attis]

the cult of the Lares Compitales (at local shrines
throughout the regions {vici) of the city) was a centre of religious and social
life for, particularly, slaves and poor (and was later to be developed by
Augustus precisely for its populär associations);

The clearest instance of the direct export of Roman religious forms can
be seen in the establishment and regulation of religious practices in the
coloniaeoi Roman Citizens, founded for the settlement of military veterans
and the poor in Italy and sometimes (at least from the late second centuty
B.C.) in provincial territory.

until by the mid third century A . D . the church in Rome had about 150 offi
cials and was able to support 1500 widows and poor - suggesting that the
whole community was to be numbered in thousands, making it almost cer
tainly the largest association in the city.

Rodolfo Lanciani's dig in Rome in 1888. I'm exaggerating for effect slightly, but the stink of corpse was apparently so bad as to be overpowering. Professor Snodgrass and Rostovtzeff corroborate the story with their own similar experiences.

It's on P209 of Death and Renewal: Sociological Studies in Roman History by Keith Hopkins, though I heard it myself independently from Dr Andrew Fear who told me about it a couple of years back.

Here's a good article on the subject of views towards the poor and destitute in Roman times.

academia.edu/15549505/Discarding_the_destitute_Ancient_and_modern_attitudes_towards_burial_practices_and_memory_preservation_amongst_the_lower_classes_of_Rome._In_B._Croxford_et_al._eds_._2006_TRAC_2005._Proceedings_of_the_15th_Annual_Theoretical_Roman_Archaeology_Conference._Oxford_Oxbow_pp._57_71

>There was also no widespread desire to help the poor with acts of charity, evidenced by a Pompeian graffiti which reads: ‘I hate poor people. If anyone wants something for nothing, he’s a fool. Let him pay up and he’ll get it’ (CIL IV 9839b). The grain dole was not means tested and was consequently available to rich and poor alike, and those who did receive any financial support would first have to prove their worth by displaying qualities of mind and character that could be appreciated by their upper class sponsors

>Regular experience of death has been used to support the theory that the corpses of the poor were thrown into communal graves; a theory derived, for the most part, from excavations conducted on the Esquiline by Rodolfo Lanciani during the 1870s (Lanciani 1874; 1891). Investigating an area immediately outside the Porta Esquilina, Lanciani unearthed approximately 75 stone-lined pits roughly 12 feet square and 30 feet deep, which he described as follows

>"‘In many cases the contents of each vault were reduced to a uniform mass of black, viscid, pestilent, unctuous matter; in a few cases the bones could in a measure be singled out and identified. The reader will hardly believe me when I say that men, beasts, bodies and carcasses, and any kind of unmentionable refuse of the town were heaped up in those dens. Fancy what must have been the condition of this hellish district in times of pestilence, when the mouths of the crypts must have been kept wide open the whole day"

Homeless today enjoy a kind of privacy and a social niche unthinkable in antiquity.
Then they would have been target of slaves and criminals, even being murdered. No one would have cared for free people without any social standing.
Even the poorest free Romans had some place to go to and enough food. Either as part of the criminal gang underground or as clients of some ambitious nobility.
There are lots of sources about street rabble being used to tout for elections, applauding teams in the circus or being sent to the colonies.
Combine that with decades of military service for the younger poor. The concept of poverty was no problem at all for these people. Debtors could always sell themselves into slavery, if even for a limited time span.

>Where did they get food and what were they eating?
Anything they could get, scraps, discarded meals, anything. Not all of it very nice

>How did Romans treat homeless persons that slept on the streets?
Ignored them, walked over them, knifed them, used them as cheap muscle or labour... or fuck toys

>Where did they bathe?
HAHAHAHA. They didn't. Maybe a public fountain

>How did they became homeless?
So broad an answer possible its effectively a meaningless question

>How much was their average life span?
We do not have this data

>Did the state help them or were they punished for being homeless?
If they were lucky they'd get a bit of money from a triumph or senator/emperor pushing for office. Same with food. If they were super lucky they got the corn dole.

>What was their cause of death most of the time?
We do not have the data, what do you expect? Disease, murder, starvation, all the good stuff.

>or fuck toys
Were ancient people psychopaths or something? Why would any reasonable person go and fuck a random homeless man/woman?

Rape and murder is still going on and affects the poorest of society the most. Nero supposedly went around shanking random bitches and picking fights "incognito"

Rich or even just bored young men have always been violent, put them in a society where victims cannot fight back and they'll do what they like especially when drunk.

Because they're horny, they can't find a mistress or wife, and those high-class prostitutes are offering way too much for their services. Sometimes a guy just gotta get his dick wet,

People like Diogenes were the ancient equivalent of today's hipster vagabonds that spend a few months on the streets to "find themselves" before going back to university. They were basically degenerate posers.

I guess the same egoistical tendencies that plague humanity today have always done so.

Depressing.

Alot of Cynics were attention seeking posers but Diogenes wasn't a poser, he was homeless for most of his life, although he lived in a different location and time period than Ancient Rome.

But so has the same beauty

From Pompeii
>I.7.8 (bar; left of the door); 8162: We two dear men, friends forever, were here. If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus.

>V.1.26 (House of Caecilius Iucundus); 4091: Whoever loves, let him flourish. Let him perish who knows not love. Let him perish twice over whoever forbids love.

We are a complicated species, full of black and white moments, its not all doom and gloom, even if its not glorious all the time.

Let this help you to realise the we are all the same and it is not the physical (that we lust for) that bonds us in sameness but the metaphysical affliction named human nature and our shared emotional experience that is equal for all

and remember we wish for a yesterday that never was.

Roman society was far more brutal than their own. I don't want to go ahead and pretend that society is on an inexorable movement upwards towards utopia and that "progress" is inevitable, but really having studied Roman social history a fair bit you do fairly quickly come to the conclusion that it was a harsh culture. All that shit about the Pax Romana is slightly overrated, just because you were less likely to be brutally killed by a raiding barbarian didn't mean more than 20% of the population was living above the breadline.

Thanks for informative answers Veeky Forums, have a good day guys!

Nero literally opened homeless shelters in his palaces.

Pompeii was a very rich city, practically a vacation/retirement resort. It was the same as today, some places are great, some are not-so.

In the context of the ancient world, even the worst squalor and misery you would see in Rome would be a much more stable, safe and promising life than outside. In the north, Germanic tribes desperately wanted to get in to escape hordes commiting every atrocity you could think of. In the east, there were the persian empires which were the same except with even less commodities, infrastructure or civic life. In the south, there was Africa and the eternal warfare of tribes.

Ancient life was just brutal and shitty and it made brutal and shitty people. The fact that Romans managed to acknowledge this reality and focus all that violence into games and a martial, militarized culture while simultaneously founding the principles of law and order is quite a thing to consider. The sheer juxtaposition of death by lions in the morning and solving a conflict in a courthouse by afternoon.

>There was also no widespread desire to help the poor with acts of charity, evidenced by a Pompeian graffiti which reads: ‘I hate poor people. If anyone wants something for nothing, he’s a fool. Let him pay up and he’ll get it’ (CIL IV 9839b).
Wouldn't this like future historians basing the entire attitude of America towards the poor off of a single shitpost on Veeky Forums while ignoring the entire welfare system? Anyone can write shit down on a wall, it doesn't mean that it's the entire civilizations attitude.

There are literally gangs of youth raping or killing homeless people and uploading the videos.

But, if you keep going east, you'll eventually hit Ancient India or China, which were comparatively less shitty civilisations.

I mean, there's been plenty of people who made trips from China to India then back to China to collect buddhist scriptures, so I don't see why a random dude can't do it.

It just boggles my mind why ancient people stayed in squalor when they can hedge their bets and get the fuck out to an area that's more accepting of the poor or homeless.

>It just boggles my mind why ancient people stayed in squalor when they can hedge their bets and get the fuck out to an area that's more accepting of the poor or homeless.
Ignorance of such places and fear they will end up having "You have died from dysentery" moments.

I guess so, the ancient world was pretty dangerous to travel in but having died trying to get to somewhere better is better than living in total misery for the rest of your lifetime, in my opinion anyway.

But the average homeless guy probably didn't have the knowledge of where the places were anyway, so they were fucked from start. At least they're in a better place now.

>At least they're in a better place now.
What did he mean by this?

>comparing a massive urban civilization with a polis

user, next time ask your thing correctly.

No that's literally one tiny slither of evidence. Do you really think that single inscription is the evidence they use? It's just an example you eejit.

They're dead, Jim.

you'd most likely just sell yourself into slavery or indentured servitude to make ends meet. That's how life was before industrialization

I know that they have other evidence, but just the fact that it is included as evidence annoys me. It's like when the news presents tweets by random people in stories. Literally anyone can write anything with no proof. Doesn't mean that it's true. Though I sure as hell hope that the time I carved "Warrant sucks dick" into a portashitter becomes proof in 2000 years that all Warrants Officers are in fact cocksuckers.

Veterans were actually cared for in Ancient Rome.

>which were comparatively less shitty civilisations.

for a nameless serf? no chance.

>homeless ppl on the street
>on a market slave society

yes, it is so much better to be a wageslave drowning in red tape and yearly menaced of going to jail if you do not pay some taxes

fucking idiot

it literally is.

>roman
>philosopher

Wow lad is time to stop posting.

Protip: learn to let go your stupid arguments.

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