:bruh-moment:
I mean, they also had a totally slave powered economy. And like slave slaves, not wage slaves.
Serious reply: they didn't. Only Romans and/or Constantinopolitans (citizens of the capital) got the bread and circuses and it was barely enough to survive on. The grain dole was means-tested, too. The only welfare available to the ~95% rural population was free burial.
ahem those ungrateful rurals have the government to thank for their border security, economic opportunity, and thermae. if they hate it so much they should go join the fuckin limitanei or work in a fabrica.
most roman cities woulda looked & smelled like shit. buildings that come down to us look nice but they were state-funded & rich people shit. regular buildings would be p disappointing. it would be super cool to live in a bustling hive like Rome when it wasn't having a plague tho, walkability + high density = good time.
aesthetic consistency was certainly more of a thing; today you can find dozens of beautiful buildings in a city but many are beautiful in different ways.
a whole city built in art deco or brutalism for instance could easily look better than palmyra, so its not like people forgot how to make things look nice. cities have just grown fast & art movements change fast so we get smatterings of good in basically every city along with tonnes of shit. places like Paris too have their share of ugly outside of the imperial bits.
Capitalism's a kind of circus, in that it's a complete shit-show
Yeah but not the fun kind though I want to see chariot races and shit by people named Chariotus Maximus not Sarah_Washington🌊🧢🐝#KHIVE💛🇺🇳🌎 subtweeting Bernie Bros who called them a lib (derogatory) and that means they’re racist and misogynist
Back to the days of chiselling your best jokes on the city walls, or sending a messenger to spout off some mad insults on your behalf.
You can still do this though and arguably it’s funnier now. Imagine a poet just dissing people and political policy publicly through a megaphone in Central Park. Imagine carving your name into the Washington monument saying you love cats.
What I’m saying is town criers should make a comeback in 2021
Looking forward to visiting my patron corporation daily and collecting my daily ration.
