Worrying about the rent is not a modern problem—one Roman’s fear of his landlord was found scratched onto a wall nearly 2,000 years ago.
His name was Ancarenus Nothus, and he was an ordinary person living in a crowded Roman apartment building, known as an insula, sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD.
Like many people today, he seems to have had anxiety about making ends meet. Historians, like Mary Beard, have highlighted his story from a piece of graffiti he left behind, which expressed his dread of the rent collector coming around.
It’s a powerful reminder that history isn’t just about emperors and great battles. It’s also about the everyday struggles of normal people.
Ancarenus was far from the only one leaving messages on walls. The walls of Roman cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum were covered in thousands of pieces of graffiti.
People wrote everything you could imagine: jokes, love poems, shopping lists, and insults. It was the social media of the ancient world.
These inscriptions weren’t just made by the poor. Archaeologists have found graffiti in the homes of the wealthy as well, showing it was a common practice across all social classes.
These small, personal messages, preserved by chance through the centuries, give us an incredible window into the real, unfiltered lives of people in the ancient world.
Sources: Mary Beard Documentary Meet the Romans, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Antigone Journal
