by Molly

    Did you ever wonder about the ancient Romans? What they wore for clothing?  Maybe you wondered about the fights in the Colosseum?  Well,  read on. The ancient Romans had interesting jobs, clothing, entertainment and food. Their life style is in some ways very similar to ours.

    The Romans had a large variety of foods. The main food they ate was wheat and flour to make bread and porridge. At midday, an ordinary family may eat a main dish of savory wheat meal. Ordinary Romans ate little meat but would eat fruit, eggs, cheese, honey, vegetables, fish, nuts, herbs, bread, porridge, and occasionally small birds. The rich ate a lot more food than the lower classes would, and at a dinner party would eat up to seven courses. Their menu would include a lot more meat than the poor. The Romans had a beverage choice of milk, wine and water.

    The Romans wore a cloth shaped like a blanket called a toga. The togas were draped on the body in folds, and by the tunic (which was robe like with a belt)  they wore, a Roman could tell if the person wearing the toga was a plebian (the ordinary people) or a patrician (the rich people).  The Roman women wore a toga in the color of her choice by dying it with vegetable dye.  A man would wear a knee length tunic, either sleeveless or short sleeved.  The children wore tunics with wide sleeves and if you were a small boy, you would have a purple stripe on their tunic.

    The Romans had many  jobs similar to the jobs people have today.  Some jobs you could do could be to be a baker, butcher, and maybe work at a tavern.  Another job they could do would to be a builder.  If you were a builder you would build houses, arches, bridges, and water systems.  They used a lot of  materials to do their job.  Some materials they used were wood, straw, mud, and roughly laid stones.  The tools they used to work with those materials were saws for cutting stone into building blocks, hammers and chisels for sculpting, huge cranes for lifting heavy loads, and for lighter loads, they used pulleys.  If you were a woman looking for a job,  you weren't allowed  to  train for a career. Since women had to have simple jobs, they usually had jobs like child care, cooking and weaving.

    The Roman's entertainment took place in a large stadium called a Colosseum that could seat 45,000 people! Exciting and brutal, the entertainment held there was dangerous and many were killed competing there.  There was chariot racing and gladiator fights.  The chariot racing was a sport that men would stand in chariots, and would be pulled by two to four horses and race against other competitors.  Gladiator fights had only two combatants, and they would fight against each other, and whoever died first or was unarmed would lose.  The gladiators were given different weapons to make the fight more interesting to the audience.  There was not just racing and fighting for entertainment, there were also persecutions.  The Roman audience also loved watching prisoners or people who had committed a terrible crime have their heads chopped off in the Colosseum.  On occasion  they would fill the stadium up with water and have people try to kill each other in boats!

    The ancient Romans did many similar activities to ours like dinner parties and their jobs,  but also did several different things than we do today, like chariot racing and gladiator fights.  So as you see, the ancient Roman's daily life is very similar to ours, and also very different.

Sources 

McDonald, THE ROMANS 

PAMELA ODIJK, The Romans

R.J. UNSTEAD, SEE INSIDE A ROMAN TOWN