A Comm for Historymemes

For some bonus trivia, Pertinax was the son of a freed slave, and rose through the ranks of the military (starting as an officer, not an enlisted man), entered politics, had a reputation for high moral standards and conduct, and almost talked the Praetorians out of killing him just by appealing to their sense of duty and morality.

SIT TIBI TERRA LEVIS, IMPERATOR! You deserved better!

He paid 8000 soldiers twenty years pay? Goddamn that's a lot of money

I love your random tiny bits of history!

Sadly, no. The two big issues are that writing material wasn't cheap, and that most of what has survived only survived because it was seen as important enough to be copied and reproduced. Many of our sources for antiquity have survived with only a handful of reproductions - such as a collection of Cicero's letters, which survived to the 14th century AD in only a single copy, found by chance in a Church library.

That being said, we do have some records of everyday thoughts, but nothing so substantial as a diary. There's a lot of archeological material in the form of writing on pottery shards, curse tablets, and the like. The buried city of Pompeii, which was covered in volcanic ash during the 1st century AD, has some amazing tidbits in the form of graffiti, which was scribbled all over the town by common folk - everything from jokes, to ads, to insults, to conversations, to caricatures, to simple, everyday celebrations!

I always forget to post this on Bread Day