Antiquity
c. 800 BC – AD 476: Rome, Greece, Egypt, Persia and the Celts
Antiquity on the wheel covers roughly the period from the 8th century BC, when Rome was traditionally founded and Greek city-states were rising, to AD 476, when the last Western Roman emperor was deposed. It centres on the Mediterranean world: Rome, Greece, Egypt, Phoenicia, Persia and the Celtic peoples to the north.
Who you were born as mattered enormously. A senator or patrician could live in a villa with running water, while a large share of the population were enslaved, worked the land or crowded into multi-storey apartment blocks called insulae. Average life expectancy at birth was low, mainly because so many children died young; adults who survived childhood often lived into their fifties or sixties.
The entries in this section describe these roles as historians understand them from texts, inscriptions and archaeology, including the unglamorous and the brutal parts.
