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Daily life in Aphrodisias during the 2nd century CE

A grounded look at a Roman city of sculpture, where marble workshops, civic buildings, baths, markets, stadium events, and households shaped daily life.

Aphrodisias stood in the Morsynus valley of Caria in southwestern Anatolia. During the 2nd century CE, it was a medium-sized Greek city within the Roman province of Asia, renowned for the cult of Aphrodite. Its autonomy and exemption from Roman taxes had been granted by the Senate in 39 BCE and were still being confirmed by emperors in the 2nd century. These privileges helped the civic community, but they did not make every resident prosperous. Marble monuments advertised the resources of leading families; daily life depended on farming, quarrying, craft, water management, markets, and household labor.

Housing and Living Spaces

A late Hellenistic orthogonal grid continued to organize the city. Its blocks measured about 35.5 by 39 metres and were divided by streets only about 3.5 metres wide; individual house plots have been tentatively reconstructed as squares of 60 Roman feet. The grid is clearer than the homes within it. Most houses excavated at Aphrodisias preserve their 3rd- to 6th-century form, so their mosaics, apsidal halls, and elaborate water installations cannot simply be projected backwards. The early imperial core of the Atrium House shows that at least some wealthy households already occupied imposing courtyard residences, while simpler 2nd-century housing remains much less conspicuous.

Domestic rooms could combine cooking, storage, textile work, sleep, worship, and income-producing work, but the surviving evidence rarely permits a room-by-room reconstruction for this century. Public amenities were better built and dated. The Hadrianic Baths, constructed in the early 2nd century, occupied two city blocks and used hypocaust floors to heat its bathing rooms. The 170-metre pool in the complex once called the South Agora was instead the centre of a colonnaded urban park: it made water and shade part of an impressive public landscape, rather than serving as an ordinary place to draw household water.

Food and Daily Meals

No household account or securely identified 2nd-century menu survives from Aphrodisias, and the site's first substantial published plant assemblages come from later phases of the urban park. Diet therefore has to be reconstructed cautiously from the agricultural hinterland and broader evidence for Roman western Anatolia. Cereals, pulses, wine, olive oil, fruit, vegetables, and products from sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, and poultry were available categories of food, but wealth, season, and rural connections determined their quantity and variety. Surveyed farmsteads show that the city was embedded in a worked countryside rather than supplied by monuments and markets alone.

For many households, turning crops into meals meant carrying water, grinding grain, tending a fuel-consuming hearth or oven, and guarding dry goods against damp and pests. Pottery vessels and organic containers made storage possible, while access to prepared food reduced some of this work for those who could pay. Festivals and stadium events drew visitors from the surrounding region and created bursts of demand; the stadium's capacity far exceeded the resident population. Fine serving vessels and formal banquets illuminate elite display, not a universal daily diet.

Work and Labor

The principal marble quarries lay 2–4 kilometres northeast of the city, with a relatively gentle downhill route to the building sites. Most of the main workings opened in the early and high imperial periods. Quarry workers detached blocks, cleared spoil, and moved heavy loads with ropes, sledges, rollers, carts, and draught animals; builders and carvers then turned the local white and blue-grey stone into architecture, portraits, reliefs, and sarcophagi. The quarries chiefly supplied Aphrodisias. Selected finished statues and sarcophagi circulated regionally and sometimes much farther, but the workings were not large enough to support wide export of raw marble.

Sculpture was a chain of jobs rather than the achievement of a lone master. The excavated workshop north of the Council House contained carving tools, unfinished statues, marble fragments, and practice pieces. It is valuable evidence for training and divided labour, but not a sealed deposit from the early 2nd century: the workshop was probably established no earlier than the mid- or late 2nd century and continued until about 400 CE. Farming, transport, construction, textile work, metalwork, retail, bath maintenance, temple service, and domestic labor sustained the city, although their workers were less likely than patrons and successful sculptors to be named on durable marble.

Social Structure

Wealthy families competed for civic office and honor by financing buildings, statues, festivals, and repairs. The roofed Council House built in the later 2nd century by the family of the senator Tiberius Claudius Attalos made this concentration of power visible in architecture and family statues. Priests, council members, merchants, landholders, craftspeople, farmers, freedpeople, wage laborers, servants, and enslaved people occupied unequal positions around them, and legal status, gender, and access to patrons affected security and opportunity.

Elite women could exercise public influence through wealth even though the council and magistracies were controlled by men. A 2nd-century statue base records that the council and people honoured Claudia Antonia Tatiane as a benefactress from a family of benefactors; the same monument carries the signature of its sculptor, Alexandros son of Zenon. This unusually direct pairing of patron and maker is revealing, but neither person should be treated as representative of women or workers generally.

The sanctuary of Aphrodite anchored civic identity and acquired an elaborate colonnaded court in this century. Festivals, sacrifices, theater, athletic contests, and public feasts brought crowds together while displaying carefully ordered rank. The city's inscriptions preserve an unusually rich record of patrons, officials, priests, performers, and some craftspeople, but they speak most clearly for those whom civic institutions chose to honour or who could commission durable texts.

Tools and Technology

Marble workers used picks, hammers, pointed and toothed chisels, drills, measuring tools, and abrasives. Tool marks and unfinished pieces reveal stages from roughing-out to drilling and polishing. More perishable everyday equipment is harder to recover, but pottery, lamps, hand mills, knives, spindle whorls, loom weights, needles, scales, coins, and locks connected household production with the market.

Infrastructure also required money and administration. Letters written by Hadrian between 119 and 125 CE confirm revenues that the city had assigned to bringing in water and authorize local supervisors to consult the imperial procurator. The same correspondence confirms exemption from a tax on iron and approves taking a payment from high priests in place of providing gladiatorial shows. Water supply, essential metal, public office, and entertainment were therefore linked to negotiated civic budgets; the documents reveal the council's decisions, not whether water reached every household equally.

Clothing and Materials

Wool and linen tunics and mantles, secured with belts, pins, or brooches, fit the textile traditions of Roman Anatolia; leather served for sandals and shoes. Organic cloth rarely survives at Aphrodisias, however, and the city's marble portraits disproportionately show affluent people in formal Greek mantles or Roman civic dress. They demonstrate how clothing communicated education, status, and public role more securely than they reveal the patched or hard-wearing garments of farm, quarry, and workshop laborers.

Daily life in Aphrodisias was therefore not made of marble alone. The sculpture industry was exceptional, yet it rested on farms, transport, tools, food sellers, water systems, households, and workers at every stage. Its surviving monuments reveal elite ambitions; unfinished statues, practice pieces, shops, and ordinary objects expose the labor behind them.

Sources and Further Reading

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