Explorables · episode 02 · one place, twenty centuries

Property. Pilgrim. Papers.

You are dropped into Rome wearing what you have on, carrying a knife. No papers, no money, not one word of the language. The city is the same city every time. Only the century changes.

How long do you last?

Begin at the year 1

The answer is not the one the wealth of the city predicts.

The terms of the drop

  1. You keep nothing. Clothes, a knife. No documents, no coin, no metal anyone recognises as money.
  2. You cannot speak. Not Latin, not the Romanesco of the 14th century, not Italian. You can point.
  3. You cannot catch anything from another person. Plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis: all off the table, in every century.
  4. Everything else is unchanged. An infected cut still kills you. So do sepsis, tetanus, a burst appendix, hunger, cold, water, and other people.

The clock stops when you die or when you become someone's property. In the first centuries the second one arrives first, and it arrives fast. Every duration on this page is a reasoned scenario, not a measurement; the figures behind it are cited, and the ones that are disputed say so.

Reading the model

Behind this column is the city, drawn as a diagram and not a map. Each block is about 300 people at the same exchange rate in every century, so the field thins and thickens with the real population. Where the blocks sit matters too: scattered across the whole walled area in late antiquity, packed into the bend of the Tiber from the 11th century, spilling outside the wall only in the 20th. The pale shapes that never disappear are monuments, because they never did. The wall itself does not exist until 271.

What the twenty centuries turn out to say

Survival does not track the city's wealth.
It tracks whether the city has a category for you.

above — inhabitants of Rome (log scale, midpoint of the cited range) below — months alive and free (log scale; the bar runs off the chart where the answer is "the rest of your life")

The two curves are close to a reflection of each other. The Rome that can feed a million people is the Rome most likely to sell you. The Rome with cattle standing in its Forum is the one that takes you in, feeds you and finds you work.

Two dates you walk straight through

The centuries famous for killing everyone are the ones that hire you

541

The Plague of Justinian reaches the Mediterranean. Nothing happens to you.

1347

The Black Death reaches Italy. Nothing happens to you either.

What follows a mass death is a labour shortage, and a labour shortage is the one condition on earth where a man with no kin, no guild, no letter and no claim on anybody can name his price. England passed the Statute of Labourers in 1351 for exactly this reason: to force wages back to their pre-plague levels, because workers were demanding more and getting it. Legislation is evidence. You do not write a law against something that is not happening.

Rome at a million people will own you.

Rome at seventeen thousand will feed you.