I had to get up at 4:00 this morning to catch an early flight. This was pretty miserable for me as I’m a night owl, and I began to wonder if my preference for night hours was a symptom of modernity or if we know anything about night owls of the past.

Do we know of any individual night owls? Was this mostly the purview of the rich, who could afford to light their homes? Was staying up late considered weird or abhorrent? What did you do if you had to be up at a certain time before alarm clocks? Did you get a family member to wake you at dawn? Or was this mostly just not a thing because there was so little artificial light and people generally went to bed when it was dark and got up with the sun?