Daily life in Aizanoi during the 2nd century CE

A grounded look at a Roman Phrygian city, where plateau farms, wool, grain, stone workshops, baths, markets, bridges, and the sanctuary of Zeus shaped everyday routines.

Aizanoi stood beside the Penkalas River (the modern Kocaçay) in inland western Anatolia, near modern Çavdarhisar. At about 1,000–1,050 metres above sea level, it was the chief city of the Aizanitis district in north-western Phrygia and belonged to the Roman province of Asia. The 2nd century was a period of conspicuous investment: work on the Temple of Zeus continued into the century, a principal stone bridge opened in 157 CE, and construction proceeded on baths, markets, and the theatre-stadium complex. These remains, together with inscriptions and tombs, illuminate institutions and elite display particularly well. They reveal ordinary housing, meals, and the lives of poorer or enslaved residents much less directly, so some daily-life detail below is cautious reconstruction from the local economy and the wider evidence of Roman Phrygia.

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing in 2nd-century Aizanoi reflected the city's position as an inland Phrygian community with Roman civic ambitions, but published evidence for houses of this precise period is much thinner than that for public buildings. Stone footings, mud brick or masonry walls, timber, plaster, and tiled roofs are plausible local materials; courtyards and multipurpose rooms would have supported cooking, storage, textile work, sleep, worship, and reception. It is not yet possible to describe a single “typical” Aizanoi house. Better-off households could command more space, decoration, storage, and servants, while renters, dependants, and workers may have occupied much smaller rooms or premises associated with shops.

More modest residents may have lived in smaller houses, rented rooms, workspaces, or quarters attached to shops and yards. A potter, textile worker, food seller, mason, muleteer, or servant need not have separated home from work as sharply as a modern household might. Cooking, spinning, childcare, storage, sleeping, and repair could happen within the same few rooms. Privacy depended on wealth, legal status, and family size. Apprentices, lodgers, freedpeople, hired laborers, and enslaved workers could share quarters, while fountains, baths, ovens, courtyards, shops, shrines, and neighbours brought some daily activities outside the home.

The river and high-plateau climate shaped living space. Houses needed protection from winter cold, summer sun, damp, smoke, and roof leaks; fuel, food, bedding, and clothing required dry storage. Water supply within individual houses is poorly documented, and access to a fountain or carried water should not be confused with private plumbing. Public works nevertheless changed daily movement. Embanked stretches of the Penkalas and several bridges connected the settlement on both banks; the best-dated main bridge was financed by the local notable M. Apuleius Eurycles and formally opened in September 157. Such a crossing shortened journeys for residents, pack animals, carts, and produce, while its dedication made elite patronage visible in an ordinary route through town.

Food and Daily Meals

Meals in Aizanoi drew on the agriculture of the surrounding plateau and valleys. Ancient and archaeological summaries consistently identify cereals, wine, and sheep's wool among the products behind the city's prosperity. Grain therefore offers a firmer local starting point than a long reconstructed menu: it had to be harvested, transported, stored, milled, and baked or boiled, while flocks supplied wool and could also supply milk and meat. Pulses, vegetables, fruit, oil, and animal products are reasonable components of a Roman Anatolian diet, but the published site evidence does not sustain a precise “usual meal” for Aizanoi. Season, harvest quality, household wealth, legal status, and access to land or markets would have produced substantial differences.

Food preparation demanded time before any meal reached the table. Grain had to be cleaned, ground, kneaded, baked, or boiled; water had to be drawn and fuel gathered or bought. Hand mills, mortars, cooking pots, storage jars, baskets, and knives are the kinds of equipment required by these tasks, although the balance between household processing and purchases from specialists at Aizanoi is not known. Bread could be baked at home where an oven and fuel were available, bought from a baker, or prepared in simpler forms over a hearth. Storage tied diet to labour: grain, wine, oil, and pulses had to be protected against damp, pests, breakage, and theft between one harvest and the next.

The city market and surrounding roads affected what people could obtain. Farmers and herders moved produce, animals, wool, and fuel towards town, while traders connected Aizanoi with other parts of Asia Minor. The circular macellum, built in the middle or later 2nd century, was a purpose-built market conventionally associated with foods such as meat, fish, oil, and baked goods. Its small shops and central round structure show regulated selling space, although they do not identify every commodity or the people who used it. The famous maximum-price text carved on the building belongs to Diocletian's edict of 301 CE. It is important evidence for the building's later history, not a price list for the 2nd-century market.

Work and Labor

Work in Aizanoi was rooted in the relationship between city and countryside. Rural labor supplied grain, wine, wool, animals, fuel, and transport power; sowing and harvest, vine care, herding, shearing, storage, and carriage would have imposed different seasonal demands. The Temple of Zeus makes this relationship unusually visible. Greek and Latin texts displayed on its walls preserve an imperial dossier concerning the sanctuary's agricultural estates, their division into allotments, and disputes over leases or rents. They do not describe individual farm laborers, but they show that land, tenants, civic authorities, a major cult, and imperial decision-making were tightly connected. Temple building was funded from this landed income, turning rural obligations into urban stone.

Urban labor turned rural products into usable goods. The documented importance of wool implies repeated work in cleaning, spinning, weaving, finishing, mending, and selling cloth, much of it likely organised in households as well as workshops; it does not prove that every woman wove or that Aizanoi had a large specialised textile quarter. Millers, bakers, food sellers, potters, metalworkers, leatherworkers, carpenters, transporters, and retailers met other needs, though the surviving record rarely supplies their names. Markets and porticoes concentrated some exchange, while production could also take place in domestic or small workshop settings involving family members, apprentices, hired workers, and enslaved people.

Building and maintenance created another layer of work during Aizanoi's 2nd-century construction boom. Quarry workers, carters, masons, carpenters, lime burners, plasterers, and other labourers were needed to raise and repair the temple, bridges, bath-palaestra, market, tombs, and entertainment complex. The bath-palaestra, attributed to the prominent Claudii family and built around the middle of the century, included hot and cold rooms, water and heating installations, marble finishes, and a large exercise court. Its operation required a continuing supply of water and fuel as well as furnace workers, attendants, cleaners, and repair crews. Construction on the adjoining theatre and stadium proceeded in major phases after about 160 and continued into the 3rd century, so residents experienced these monuments as worksites as well as finished civic amenities.

Social Structure

Aizanoi's society was hierarchical, but daily relationships were more varied than a simple division between elite and poor. Civic families held land, funded public buildings, managed priesthoods, appeared in inscriptions, and competed for honour through benefaction. Eurycles' bridge dedication and his family's support for the theatre-stadium are unusually visible examples. Under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, disputes over the Zeus estate and Aizanoi's participation in the Panhellenion also reshaped which local elites held influence. Roman citizenship, Greek civic institutions, local Phrygian traditions, wealth, gender, legal status, and access to imperial officials did not form a single cultural ladder; they overlapped in different ways.

Beneath the elite was a broad population of farmers, shepherds, artisans, traders, shopkeepers, textile and building workers, transport workers, attendants, freedpeople, dependants, and enslaved people. Most are difficult to identify individually. Legal status mattered deeply: a free craftworker, a freed merchant, an enslaved domestic worker, a tenant farmer, and a wealthy citizen had different control over earnings, family formation, mobility, property, and legal protection even when they crossed the same bridge or entered the same market. Patronage connected unequal groups, but it did not erase those distinctions.

The necropoleis offer a broader, though still selective, view of families. Door-shaped grave markers were a particularly common Phrygian form at Aizanoi, while the wealthiest families increasingly chose more elaborate tombs and marble sarcophagi towards the late 2nd century. Epitaphs preserve women, men, and family relationships that civic honours often omit. Motifs conventionally associated with women include wool baskets and mirrors, while animals appear on many male monuments; these are choices made for commemoration, not simple inventories of a person's work or possessions. Recent study of personal names likewise finds Greek names alongside names with deeper Anatolian roots, cautioning against treating “Greek,” “Phrygian,” and “Roman” as mutually exclusive populations.

Tools and Technology

Aizanoi's everyday technology combined portable tools with costly infrastructure. Farmers and herders depended on cutting tools, plough and harvest equipment, ropes, baskets, carts, pack animals, and storage containers; textile production required spindles, looms, needles, and finishing equipment. These categories fit the work implied by the local economy, although not every item can be assigned to a securely dated 2nd-century Aizanoi context. The monuments give firmer evidence for the tools and organisation of stone construction: quarrying, measurement, lifting, transport, scaffolding, jointing, carving, plastering, and marble finishing all required trained workers and substantial unskilled labour.

Infrastructure was also technology. Quay walls and bridges controlled access across a river prone to flooding, while the bath's channels, pools, furnaces, and heated rooms converted water, fuel, and labour into a shared service. Neither system was self-operating: silt and drains had to be cleared, masonry repaired, fuel delivered, and fires managed. The market depended on agreed weights, measures, and coinage, even though its surviving price inscription is later. Such works reduced some difficulties but created continuing demands for taxation or benefaction, maintenance, supervision, and manual labour.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing in 2nd-century Aizanoi combined wider Roman provincial forms with local materials and preferences. Wool is the most securely documented fibre because sheep's wool was a noted regional product, and warm outer garments would have been useful on the high plateau. Tunics, cloaks or mantles, belts, pins, leather footwear, and head coverings varied by wealth, gender, task, and occasion; linen and costly dyes or jewellery were less equally accessible. Tomb reliefs and statues show idealised public appearance rather than an unfiltered record of everyday wardrobes.

Dress showed status but also had to survive use. Finer fibres, strong dyes, jewellery, and carefully arranged formal garments required resources, while work clothes needed repeated cleaning and repair. Because cloth embodied the labour of raising sheep, preparing fibres, spinning, weaving, and finishing, garments were valuable household property. They could be mended, altered, handed down, or reused before disposal. The precise division of this work by gender and legal status at Aizanoi is not recoverable; funerary wool-basket imagery associates textile virtue with some commemorated women, but should not be made to stand for every household.

Aizanoi in the 2nd century CE joined the institutions of a Greek-speaking city in the Roman Empire to the older sacred landscape of inland Phrygia. Its surviving monuments should not be mistaken for a complete social portrait. They show how plateau farms, sanctuary income, elite benefaction, river engineering, markets, bathing, spectacle, and commemoration fitted together; the routines of tenants, craftspeople, women, children, and enslaved residents must often be recovered indirectly and with less certainty.

Sources and Further Reading

UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Aizanoi Antique City,” Tentative List entry no. 5724. Site description and statement of significance.
Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism. “Aizanoi Ancient City.” Research summary of the temple, bridge, baths, theatre-stadium, market, and necropoleis.
Kütahya Dumlupınar University, Aizanoi Excavation. “Temple of Zeus in Aizanoi”; “Roman Bath-Palaestra Structure Complex”; “Theatre-Stadion Structure Complex”; and “Macellum.”
Türkan, Ahmet. “Relations Between Aizanoi and Rome in the 2nd Century AD: Epuration and New Order.” Archivum Anatolicum 15, no. 2 (2021): 513–537. https://doi.org/10.46931/ArAn.2021.15.2.8.
Kelp, Ute. “Grave Monuments and Local Identities in Roman Phrygia.” In Roman Phrygia: Culture and Society, edited by Peter Thonemann, 70–94. Cambridge University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139381574.005.
Aytaçlar, Pınar Özlem. “New Funerary Monuments from Aizanoi.” Adalya 27 (2024): 169–210. https://doi.org/10.47589/adalya.1608943.