what would the average civilian in the...Roman world...do to find a home to live for himself and wife?

To begin, it must be made very clear that by any reasonable definition of an "average person," whatever that means exactly, the "average" Roman citizen did not own his own home, did not own property of any kind, and lived distressingly close to sustenance levels. This is somewhat more true for urban inhabitants than it is for rural, but the generalization still holds. Free urban dwellers were predominantly semi-migratory unskilled day-laborers, who sought work where they could and, given the extremely high cost of living in the city, who could rarely could afford much more than their rents (often paid daily, according to Frier's estimation) and food. They lived in poorly-construction, often vastly overpriced insulae, tenement blocks into which the urban population was crammed as tightly as possible. Most people think of the rather extravagant insulae at Ostia, but the insulae at Ostia are unusually nice, conforming to late antique building codes that were never enforced in the city. "Real" insulae were much more ramshackle, often sharing their thin walls with structures around them (outlawed during the Principate for fear of fire). They often built mostly of rubble faced with brick or stucco, and buildings collapsed nearly as frequently as they caught fire--fire was a constant threat to these very vulnerable structures. A renter of a room in an insula rented just that, a room--here is a picture I took myself of the inside of one of the insulae at Ostia, which shows clearly that the apartment "units" were little more than single cells to sleep in, admitting little or no light and presenting the most spartan of living conditions.

The "average" rural inhabitant largely escaped this life, but that does not mean that he owned his own property either. Most rural dwellers were small-time farmers, working a small plot of a couple jugera and little more. While some actually owned their plots, many more rented them, either as part of the ager publicus or from landowning leasers. The life of a renting farmer was no less difficult than that of an unskilled day-worker in the city. Because of the dangers of drought and similar disasters to the harvest in a pre-Green Revolution economy, a single bad harvest could spell doom for a farmer, who needed to be able to pay off his rents or, if he owned his own plot, to cover the losses of the season. To this end he frequently had recourse to credit, but fortune often was against farmers, and what might have started out as a modest loan to cover a season's losses could, after a few seasons, explode into life-crushing debt, constantly being paid off even as it continued to grow.

The people, then, who were able to afford houses and their own permanent housing, especially in the city, were not "average" people. Nor did the Roman landowning class exist in middle-class America. Romans did not buy houses upon getting married as many Americans might expect to. A man of enough means to afford his own property would likely have difficulty finding a good marriage if all he could say to a potential father-in-law was that he had the capital necessary to purchase land--that's like the lamest thing ever. Urban houses, usually called domus by scholars to differentiate them from rented insulae (though urban villas, like those at Pompeii, also exist and should strictly speaking be considered distinct from domus), were not pre-built suburban American housing, but sprawling structures of magnificent aspect and often quite enormous size. Sallust spoke of villas and domus built in urbium modum, "as if they were cities," and the remains of the huge villas that cover the Bay of Naples, often constructed on concrete platforms extending over the water, are an excellent example of exactly what he means. Likewise in the city it was common to buy up several properties next to each other and connect the structures there, to create enormous sprawling houses wriggling their way across one's lots--Clodius' house, which bordered Cicero's famous Palatine house, was one such construction. Houses of quite that much extravagance were unusual, but the domus was an expression of economic luxury, not an expected asset of the Roman city dweller. The prices for such houses were enormous, and only increased over time as the propertied class, in constant competition with each other, vied to present themselves as more opulent than their rivals. Cicero's Palatine house, his prized possession, cost him some HS 3.5 million , and Sulla's daughter sold a villa for HS 10 million. These prices are rather on the high end, but an urban domus might sell for at least a few hundred thousand, or million, sesterces easily. The "average" urban dweller simply did not have that sort of economic luxury. Rome had no such thing as fixed wages, and for unskilled day-laborers the idea is more or less irrelevant, so figuring out "average" urban incomes is rather difficult. Still, even by the high-end estimate (from a passing comment in Cicero) of three denarii per day on average was, estimates Cherry, a distressingly insufficient yearly wage, especially after the wages lost when workers could not find work for the day are taken into consideration. Probably more reasonable are some of the estimates preserved at Pompeii--at Pompeii the relatively skilled staff of the duoviri made on average only about HS 300-400 annually, and at the most only made HS 1200 (by scribae, who were fairly highly trained). Food alone might cost nearly that much, and buying property was simply unrealistic except to the very wealthy. There was no such thing as an affordable housing market at Rome.

How, then, was property physically purchased? I'm afraid to say that property was bought and traded more or less like every other commodity, in a pretty pedestrian sort of way. Laying aside questions like distribution of the ager publicus and other more technical issues, property was bought directly from the owner. Often landholders would buy up many lots at once when prices were low, selling them off later without ever having set foot in them. This was especially common among members of the senatorial class, who were barred from having trades and could not own shops, and so provided themselves with ready cash through the sale of land. Cicero's letters are full of trade deals, either buying or selling the many rural villas he owned (though not the ones that he actually lived in). When not being traded, Cicero's villas--or, more accurately, the plots surrounding them--were rented off to small-time farmers. Land, in Roman law, was considered res mancipi, alongside slaves, livestock, and certain other types of property. Res mancipi could only be bought and sold by means of a peculiar, rather archaic ritual called mancipatio (or, in earlier authors, mancipium). Such sales could, strictly speaking, only occur between two adult citizens, in the presence of five witnesses and an extra dude carrying a pair of bronze scales, on which the buyer, after testifying that he now owned the property and had purchased it with bronze weighed on the scales, struck a bronze coin, which was given as a symbolic payment to the owner. This, at least, was the formal ritual necessary for legal transfer of the property--in reality landholders sold their property for more than a bronze as. A related ritual, the in iure cessio, could also be used for the sale of res mancipi. In the in iure cessio formula, the parties to the sale appeared before the praetor as if in a mock trial, whereupon the praetor awarded the property to the buyer, whose verbal claim to the property was met with silence from the seller. Again, the legal transfer of property was done without actual payment, but in reality payment had already occurred. It is important to note, however, that given the rather large sums involved, payment was not necessarily physical. The Roman economy relied on systems of credit, either through moneylenders or the IOUs constantly passed around by members of the propertied class. Senators and other propertied individuals did not necessarily have ready access to large supplies of cash, since their wealth was mostly locked up in land, and the promissory notes they wrote to each other were so common that they could quite literally be traded in their own rights, thereby passing the debt and the credit on to someone else. So, when Cicero bought his Palatine house mentioned earlier, he joked in a letter that he was so heavily in debt from the purchase as to be willing to join any conspiratorial sedition (this, soon after the Catilinarians had agitated for tabulae novae). Cicero certainly had the necessary HS 3.5 million, but not as cash on hand--his wealth was in his property, which could not be rapidly liquidated like that. Naturally landowners wished whenever possible to be paid in cash, not credit--that was the whole point of selling land, to turn landed, inaccessible capital, into liquid cash. For this there existed the complex network of moneylenders, and one's own senatorial friends and connections, whose loans even had political importance as formal ties between particular individuals. Thus Sallust mentions that many of those who protested Tarquinius' accusation that Crassus had been in on the Catilinarian plot were themselves Crassus' debtors, since Crassus was notoriously free with his loans as a political tool.

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