Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedKim Bowes: belief
15 Apr 2026 Conversations with Tyler Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent
“Every single surface of that house would have been covered in some sort of decoration in ways I think we would have found garish.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Kim Bowes
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 15 Apr 2026
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…I have many, many questions. Let’s start with houses. If I were back in time and I visited a Roman elite house, what is it you think I or, say, you would find most surprising? I think you would find surprising the extraordinary amount of color and decoration that surrounds you. Every single surface of that house would have been covered in some sort of decoration in ways I think we would have found garish. We would be astounded by how kitschy those houses were to our modern eye. The kitschy spaces, how were they treated? Say there were mosaic floors, is it like, “Oh, no, you can’t walk on this, it’s beautiful,” or people, the dogs would just trample on it, or how was it?…
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