{"id":60439,"date":"2025-06-26T13:35:04","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T03:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=60439"},"modified":"2025-06-26T13:35:04","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T03:35:04","slug":"fear-of-the-landlord","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=60439","title":{"rendered":"Fear Of The Landlord"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fear<\/p>\n

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Worrying about the rent is not a modern problem\u2014one Roman\u2019s fear of his landlord was found scratched onto a wall nearly 2,000 years ago.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s a powerful reminder that history isn’t just about emperors and great battles. It’s also about the everyday struggles of normal people.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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People wrote everything you could imagine: jokes, love poems, shopping lists, and insults. It was the social media of the ancient world.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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Sources: Mary Beard Documentary Meet the Romans, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Antigone Journal<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Worrying about the rent is not a modern problem\u2014one Roman\u2019s 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 … <\/p>\n

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