Quattordicesimo Giorno - The Ancient Sebas in his Natrual Enviroment - Ostia Antica

Well, today was quite interesting. We went to Ostia Antica, which is an ancient roman city about half an hour from Rome. There were three major things I got out of the experience:

• The city was a huge place


• It is very dusty(when I got home my hair was literally covered in dust)


• Ancient ruins are basically a big kid playground

We saw 7 major types of structures, the necropolis(city of the dead), shops, the neptune baths, Insula, the theatre, a temple to Mithra, and a Salareum(as well as enough rocks and dust to last a long time.) The Necropolis was right at the beginning and it was like a domus except that the rooms were smaller than normal because it was just a place to go visit your dead loved ones. They were thought to be heavenly rooms, that allowed you to be closer to god and to your beloved dead long after they are gone. Next we came across the shops. You could tell they were shops because they had different little arches and there were many of them side by side. They also had stoa's where people could sit around and preach. For example the apostles, Peter and Paul would probably have done their leather works and then preached afterwards. The neptune baths were public baths that the whole city would use. They had serpents and dragons depicted in mosaics on the floor(it was beautiful and very ornate for a public bath.) Each room would have about 3 feet of water in it and there was a hot room and a cold room, as well as a room called a stringletta where the slaves would scrape your skin and take off excess dirt and oil. The Insula were basically houses and they would go up 3-4 floors, most had only a fire pit and no kitchen. The theatre was probably one the tallest structures in the city. I climbed up to the top of one of the side and had a great view of the entire area. It was similiar to the coliseum except it was a semi circle with the front side being open and the backside having up to 3,000 seats. Theatre was the ancient peoples form of entertainment so everyone would come to see it. Apparently the first two rows had stone chairs for the wealthy and they left spots for muses and gods in those rows as well. As we walked along we stumbled upon a rundown/roped off temple to mithra. Of course a bunch of us jumped over the railing to see inside and found it. The mithra is a god that is always depicted killing a cow. Next we saw a salareum were the ancient people used to lay on their side and on each side of the temple had 30 people eating a meal together. People would lay with their feet facing towards the wall like a sort of couch and the slaves would walk down the middle to serve everyone.

After we saw all these things we explored more and I don't know if it was a mixture of the heat, dust, lack of food and water and sleep or what, but Sebas as well as a lot of the rest of us started to get a little delirious. Sebas started treating Ostia Antica like a personal playground. He was jogging along the cobblestones and then jumping on top of things and jumping off things. It was so entertaining.