Fear street lights out crack#

A man came down the street and pinched the lamp, and the man in the shop went after him, and a brawl ensued. The case concerns a shop-keeper who kept his business open at night and left a lamp on the counter, which faced onto the street. If you were a crime victim, it was a matter of self-help – as one particularly tricky case discussed in an ancient handbook on Roman law proves. But did they do more than that? There wasn’t much they could do, and mostly they weren’t around anyway. They might well give a young offender a clip round the ear. The firemen had inside knowledge of where to go and where the rich pickings were.Ĭertainly the vigiles were not a police force, and had little authority when petty crimes at night escalated into something much bigger. In the great fire of Rome in AD 64 one story was that the vigiles actually joined in the looting of the city while it burned. He had tried to rescue people stranded in a fire, had died in the process and was given a burial at public expense.

In fact, a touching memorial survives to a soldier, acting as a night watchman at Ostia, Rome’s port. But they had little equipment to deal with a major outbreak, beyond a small supply of vinegar and a few blankets to douse the flames, and poles to pull down neighbouring buildings to make a fire break. They were split into battalions across the city and their main job was to look out for fires breaking out (a frequent occurrence in the jerry-built tenement blocks, with open braziers burning on the top floors). Most rich people, I’m sure, didn’t go out – at least, not without their private security team of slaves or their “long retinue of attendants” – and the only public protection you could hope for was the paramilitary force of the night watch, the vigiles.Įxactly what these watchmen did, and how effective they were, is a moot point. After dark, ancient Rome must have been a threatening place. There was no street lighting, nowhere to throw your excrement and no police force. Outside the splendid civic centre, Rome was a place of narrow alleyways, a labyrinth of lanes and passageways. But how accurate was his nightmare vision of Rome at night? Was it really a place where chamber pots crashed on your head, the rich and powerful stamped all over you, and where (as Juvenal observes elsewhere) you risked being mugged and robbed by any group of thugs that came along? His self-presentation as a ‘man of the people’ was a bit of a journalistic facade. All Roman poets were relatively well heeled (the leisure you needed for writing poetry required money, even if you pretended to be poor).

Juvenal himself was actually pretty rich.

But to me, who am wont to be escorted home by the moon, or by the scant light of a candle he pays no respect.” (Juvenal /Satire/ 3)

Fear street lights out crack#

See what a height it is to that towering roof from which a pot comes crack upon my head every time that some broken or leaky vessel is pitched out of the window! See with what a smash it strikes and dints the pavement! There’s death in every open window as you pass along at night you may well be deemed a fool, improvident of sudden accident, if you go out to dinner without having made your will… Yet however reckless the fellow may be, however hot with wine and young blood, he gives a wide berth to one whose scarlet cloak and long retinue of attendants, with torches and brass lamps in their hands, bid him keep his distance. “And now think of the different and diverse perils of the night.