Fire and insurances

Fires were common in ancient Rome and houses would be destroyed from time to time. One way to protect yourself was to get an fire and insurance.


A late upper-class house in Ostia.

"You had purchased a house, Tongilianus, for two hundred thousand sesterces; and a calamity but too frequent in this city destroyed it. Contributions poured in to the amount of a million sesterces. May you not, I ask, be suspected of having set fire to your own house, Tongilianus?"

Martialis - Epigrams III.52
Translated by Bohn