rome

Most sick men die here from insomnia,’ Juvenal who was
living in Rome at the end of the first century wrote in one of his satires:
Rest is impossible. It costs money to sleep in Rome.
There is the root of the sickness. The movement of heavy wagons
through narrow streets, the oaths of stalled cattle drovers
would break the sleep of a deaf man or a lazy walrus.
On a morning call the crowd gives way before the passage
of a millionaire carried above their heads in a litter,
reading the while he goes, or writing, or sleeping unseen:
for a man becomes sleepy with closed windows and comfort.
Yet he'll arrive before us. We have to fight our way
through a wave in front, and behind we are pressed by a huge mob
shoving our hips; an elbow hits us here and a pole
there, now we are smashed by a beam, now biffed by a barrel.
Our legs are thick with mud, our feet are crushed by large
ubiquitous shoes, a soldier's hobnail rests on our toe…
Newly mended shirts are torn again. A fir-tree
flickers from the advancing dray, a following wagon
carries a long pine: they swing and threaten the public.
Suppose the axle should collapse, that axle carrying
Ligurian stone, and pour a mountain out over the people –
what would be left of the bodies? The arms and legs, the bones,
where are they? The ordinary man's simple corpse
perishes like his soul.