How Filthy Were The Romans?

Some of the key remnants of the Roman Empire are their public baths - huge complexes, multiple different rooms, the basis of many of our modern spas. But were the Romans clean? How regularly did they wash? Were they really using urine to wash clothes? And what's this about a communal wiping stick? Kate is joined by the wonderful Alexander Meddings for the first episode in a series where we are trying to find out just how smelly people were in history. Alex is a Rome-based historian and tour guide. Find out more about his work here: https://alexandermeddings.com/ This episode was edited by Nick Thomson. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. This is Betwixt the Sheets. Welcome back. Thank you for coming again. And to keep everybody safe and to keep everything just snuggly and untriggered, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering age-old subjects, and you should be an adult too. Oh, my God, I feel so much safer. Thank God for that. Right, shall we press on? I think so.

• 1:05Kate Lister?

  Ooh, a spa day. Plush, white dressing gowns with little cotton slippers, the smell of eucalyptus, soft, ambient music, stone walls and a bit of warm lighting, maybe a candle. At least, that's what you'd expect, right? Right? And we should probably thank the Romans for that one, shouldn't we? They were big on bathing, wasn't all of this their idea? Huh. Well, they might have been a bit muckier than we think.

• 1:53Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. When you think of the Romans, you think of baths. You do think of baths. All right, you probably think of some other stuff, too. You might think that they're a bit stabby and a bit rude. They did like to put penises on the floor a lot. But once you've done thinking of that, most of us think about baths. Rome, baths, that's what they did. So you might naturally assume that they were a very, very clean bunch of people. But were they really? Is the bath thing just Roman propaganda? Well, today I'm joined once again by the Rome-based historian Alexander Meddings to find out how often the people of the Roman Empire washed their bodies and their clothes

• 2:36Kate Lister?

  and their teeth, for that matter. In essence, we're asking the question, just how filthy were the Romans? Tweezers and mud packs at the ready, but Twixters, let's do it.

• 2:54Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixtersheet. It's only Alexander Meddings. How are you doing?

• 3:00Speaker 01

  I am great.

• 3:01Kate Lister?

  How's Italy?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Italy's lovely. Italy's lovely. It's getting a little bit colder now, but it's still sunny, still warm enough.

• 3:09Kate Lister?

  Still, still nice enough to be drinking a glass of wine in the evening on the veranda, that kind of weather.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  That's the plan for after, yeah.

• 3:16Kate Lister?

  Dammit, dammit. It's so miserable and horrible in the UK at the moment, but I'm not here to make myself feel bad about not living in Italy. We're here to talk about how filthy the Romans were and not necessarily, in a euphemistic way, literally, how mucky were they? Because they have a reputation as being incredibly clean, don't they?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a reputation that's not necessarily deserved.

• 3:41Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's interesting, because I was talking to Eleanor Yaniger about the medieval people and she got really angry, being like, "They weren't as dirty as everyone thinks." And now you're going to be like, "The Romans weren't as clean as everybody thinks." I love a bit of controversy.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  It's interesting, right? Because we kind of, yeah, we assume that medieval peasants are really kind of covered in mud and super dirty, probably from Monty Python and all of that. And then we assume the Romans are spick and span and really clean and that the baths are these kind of centres of sanitation. They're really not, as I'm sure we're going to dive into. There's no plumbing system, so.

• 4:12Kate Lister?

  Really?

• 4:14Kate Lister?

  We'll get to that bit. We'll get to that bit. Well, one of the things I asked Eleanor was like, where does the idea that the medieval people are really dirty come from? And it's all kinds of things. But there is some truth to the fact that the Romans were quite clean. Or is that a sort of a later invention of people projecting back on to them? Because we do, we think of them as like, they're bathing and they're lazing around and they've got slaves brushing their hair and they've got, you know, like oils and stuff and their perfume. That's what we think about when we think of Rome.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  We do. And they are cleaning themselves, but that doesn't necessarily equate with them being clean or hygienic in any modern sense of the word. Also, we always tend to talk about the Romans represented by the sources. So we're talking about kind of 0.05% of the population of the empire.

• 5:01Kate Lister?

  That's true. The rich people.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  The ones who have all of these slaves to attend to their every women, clean them whatnot. The vast majority, the Hoi Polloi, are proper dirtbags.

• 5:16Kate Lister?

  And that's that done. Thank you for listening to Betwixt the Sheets.

• 5:21Kate Lister?

  Well, let's, let's talk about baths then, because that has got to be something like a tick in their favour of like, they must have been reasonably clean. Because if there was one thing that they're famous for, it's the baths, right?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:34Kate Lister?

  Stabbing people and baths. That's Rome.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Conquering people, building baths, building stuff. Yeah.

• 5:41Kate Lister?

  Building stuff, stabbing people, having a bath.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And having absolutely appalling attitudes towards women, sex and basically anyone who's not a Roman male.

• 5:51Kate Lister?

  But they were clean when they were doing it.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So baths are ubiquitous in Rome and also across the empire. So according to a census done by Marcus Agrippa in the year 33 B.C., so this kind of the reign of Augustus, early Roman Empire, there are 170 public and private baths in Rome alone. And it was probably closer to about 1,000 by the fourth century. So by the time that the Western Empire fell.

• 6:16Kate Lister?

  That's a lot of baths, isn't it?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when we think of Roman baths, we probably mistakenly think that these are simply just places where you, you know, go jump into a pool, swim around a bit. But these are leisure centres. These are kind of gymnasiums mixed with spas, mixed with libraries, mixed with places where you go to socialise, plot, politic, work out, get some abs.

• 6:41Kate Lister?

  I'm trying to think of like, like a comparable thing. But there's a thousand baths in ancient Rome. Would that be like, like the equivalent of how many gyms that you might have in your local town today?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  I think that's a really good comparison. Yeah. And you also have different types of baths, just as you have kind of different types of gym, you know, virgin, virgin athletic chains and your local one down the road.

• 7:02Kate Lister?

  But you're not going to be too far away from a bath?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  No. And you can go very easily. Entry to the baths is basically free. It costs one quadrance, which is the lowest denomination of coin. It's just like a freddo prior inflation.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  But when they were tempe.

• 7:18Kate Lister?

  Okay. So you said that it's a social occasion. Can you talk me through like, what do you mean by this? This isn't people just running in, flinging off the toga, giving it a quick once over and then clearing off again?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Well, they're, they're big facilities made up of many different sections. There's no kind of standardised form. It's going to vary depending on where you go. But you're going to have, for example, a cold room, a frigidarium. You're going to have tepid baths, the tepidarium, and then you're going to have hot baths, the caldarium, which are having hot water essentially piped into them. Or you can have underfloor heating provided by a hypercau system.

• 7:56Kate Lister?

  Fancy.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  So we have like, smoke and kind of fire pits beneath the floor and that's heating the floor above, et cetera. You're going to have also the sudatio, which is where you go to sweat. The Italian word for sweat is sudare, still to this day. And you're also going to have gymnasiums, places where you can work out. In the baths of Caracalla here in Rome, there was a Greek and Latin library where you could go and consult whatever papyrus of choice you wanted to, if you can read, and probably very few people can, in the grand scheme of things. You can also go and get some food. We're told of sausage sellers and hot food sellers, pastry sellers at the baths. You can probably go and find yourself a sex worker.

• 8:38Kate Lister?

  Wow, they are really covering all bases here. Do you want a book or a blowjob or a pie? Pick your pick.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  And in Pompeii, I think you went to the suburban baths in Pompeii, right? And the graffiti in there is eye opening.

• 8:54Kate Lister?

  It's, yes, yes. It's, it's kind of reassuring to know that as, for as long as we've been around, given the chance to scroll something on a wall, we will go for a cock and bowl every single time.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yep, in the men's baths especially.

• 9:09Kate Lister?

  There's so many willies in there.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. And also loads of different sex scenes.

• 9:14Kate Lister?

  Were they erotic places? Cause that's something that, that Alan always talked about with the medieval baths. I suppose it's difficult to, to separate one from the other because it's, it's people being naked and people being close together and people stripping off. Or maybe that's a very modern projection. Maybe it was just like, hey, we're naked and?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Well, they're kind of sexualized in the sense that everything in Rome is, because there's no real concept of private, apart from if you're within the house, the domus.

• 9:42Kate Lister?

  Absolute horn dogs.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  They were.

• 9:45Kate Lister?

  Of course, the baths were sexy.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And it's also a privilege that very few people enjoy to have privacy, to have your own domus, to have your own private area. Most people are living in communal living. They're having to see and listen to sex, all of the kind of everyday things that people are doing. Going to the toilet, eating, getting rid of said food.

• 10:07Kate Lister?

  It's one of the things that, that we often don't think about the history of the past is just how piled in on top of one another, everybody would have been like, just talking about like shit and piss. You absolutely would have seen people like your friends and your family going to the toilet and they would have seen you. And that would have been completely normal. There is no privacy whatsoever. Sex would have been something that was happening pretty much all around you. It's very strange for us to try and get our heads around that level of, I guess intimacy is the word, but gross intimacy.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  I mean, it's maybe comparable to kind of Victorian London and the Jack the Ripper era. London, you know, when you've got people kind of just like going for it down in any kind of alleyway they can find. I think Rome is much the same in the East End.

• 10:52Kate Lister?

  Privacy is a very recent thing. You don't have to go back that far at all in our history and you can find records of people in tenement buildings and poor areas and their living just absolutely piled in. And you can still find that happening to this very day.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  You can. The baths, I mean, they're not necessarily equated with sex, but sex definitely takes place there. There might be rooms set aside for sex workers. We only have one brothel from the ancient world, but they would have been absolutely everywhere and they're probably cropping up in any kind of public, well-attended venue that you can imagine. Baths are also equated with sex in a meme from the ancient world. So we have this kind of, it's a meme, it appears on lots of tomb inscriptions. It essentially says that baths, wine and Venus, Venus being sex here, are all bad for the body. But baths, wine and Venus all make life worth living.

• 11:47Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's a good meme. That's a fun meme.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  It appears on a tomb on the Appian Way. I think it appears in tombs across the Empire.

• 11:54Kate Lister?

  I love that they've put it on their tombs.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:57Kate Lister?

  It's just basically putting it on your tomb. I am a massive slut.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I shagged around a lot and I also liked the occasional bath.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Hopefully the latter.

• 12:08Kate Lister?

  Oh, I love that. And they really owned that, didn't they? Okay, all right. So they are quite sexy places, but it sounds more like a modern day sauna that you might go into. You've got different heated rooms and you kind of wander around chatting with people.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a lovely description from Seneca, the tutor to the Emperor Nero, who lived above a bath house. And he was a proper grumpy old man and he's left us a letter, which he wrote to his friend in which he's complaining about everything that's taking place there. And anybody who goes to a gym these days will totally empathise with a lot of what he's saying. He talks about the guys who are there pumping iron and groaning obnoxiously loudly. He's talking about those who like to splash and kind of bomb into the pool rather than getting gracefully. This is one where we probably can't identify too much, but there were lots of armpit hair pluckers playing their trades in the baths. So they're screaming out for clients and the clients in turn are then screaming, having their armpits plucked.

• 13:04Kate Lister?

  Was that the picket trixes?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, I think so.

• 13:08Kate Lister?

  I was gonna say, I think I put that in one of my books, so I hope that's right.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Sorry, it sounds like a very plucky word, so.

• 13:15Kate Lister?

  It does, doesn't it?

• 13:17Kate Lister?

  This is like grooming, really. This isn't just getting yourself clean, it's grooming.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's male grooming, so it's been around since the beginning of time.

• 13:25Kate Lister?

  And it was it was gendered, wasn't it? You had male baths and female baths.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes. Some structures are gonna be designed so you can accommodate men when separately. In others, they might have mixed and mingled. You might have a kind of Budapest bath situation, maybe, where you have like a certain time where women can go, a certain time when men go. There's a certain time of day where the sick go, which is actually in the morning, which makes no sense. So in the afternoon, you can stew in all of their scummy skin.

• 13:55Kate Lister?

  Oh, yum. Oh, that's nice. Now, I know that the Romans were big on class. Was it segregated by class? Did you have like the pors can go at this time? Slaves can go at this time?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Not really. If you are very wealthy, you might have your own baths complex.

• 14:11Kate Lister?

  Oh, you have your own baths, yes.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  On the Appian Way, there's a bath complex, a private one, known as the Capo di Bovee baths. And they belong to a guy called Herodes Atticus, who was a Greek scholar, second century tutor to a couple of emperors. And he had his own ornate baths complex. But if you are a politician, say that you're running for office, it's probably in your best interest to also turn up now and then at the public baths and kind of show your face, show your power, show the size of your retinue.

• 14:39Kate Lister?

  Right, okay. Give it a flex. Now, you said that just because they're bathing doesn't necessarily mean that it's clean. There's a difference there. Why would you say such a thing? Because all of this sounds quite clean to me. They're going quite regularly. They're a bath house on every street. Why wouldn't that be clean?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Because there's no good way of recycling the water. Essentially, the best way that you're going to do it is you're going to just keep flooding the tubs and you're going to keep flooding the pools.

• 15:09Kate Lister?

  Oh, it's horrible.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  It's really bad. So all of the scum has got to essentially float to the surface and then it's got to make its way out of there. And this is where you have moving water. A lot of the baths are just going to have stagnant pools lying around, which are hot beds of malaria, cholera, all of the good ones.

• 15:25Kate Lister?

  It's so bad for you, that, isn't it? Just like warm vats of water that how, I don't even know how many people will be visiting these establishments in a day, but enough.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  A lot. Yeah. I mean, if you consider there are a few thousand bath complexes in the fourth century, a million people at the height of the Roman Empire, just in Rome alone, stewing.

• 15:46Kate Lister?

  Sweating and farting and pissing and just, oh.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a lot of kids, not just kids, in swimming pools today. Also, funnily enough, kids are not allowed in the Roman baths. It's only for adults. So, stinky kids at home having to be bathed in a pail of water.

• 16:04Kate Lister?

  It can't have been that they just put some water in and then that was it for a thousand years. We never bothered to change it again. Like, they must have had some kind of like, how often were they changing this water?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Well, the water's coming in on aqueducts. So the water, I mean, it's going to depend. Some baths are being fed by cisterns, but a lot of it's going to be aqueduct water. And this is going to be, in the case of Rome, it's going to be coming from really far away, up to 54 miles away from the mountains down to the southeast.

• 16:34Kate Lister?

  They did do a good aqueduct.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Hey, they loved a good aqueduct. They were really proud of them, too. They're immensely jingoistically proud of their aqueducts on their sewers. They're like, Greeks, what have you ever done?

• 16:44Kate Lister?

  I'll give them that, though.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. They're impressive structures. Yeah. Yeah, they're mightily impressive. It'd take a lot of calibrating.

• 16:53Kate Lister?

  But do you think they'd have been changing the water every day?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  No, it's going to take a really long time, isn't it, for a big pool of water to completely change, a big tub? It's going to take a long time. And you're also going to have to distribute water to the baths, to all of the different parts and all of the different rooms. It's going to take, it's going to take a while.

• 17:13Kate Lister?

  It's a big job, that, isn't it?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  It's a grim job, but not the worst. Wait till we get to the sewers.

• 17:20Kate Lister?

  Oh, God, of course.

• 17:25Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Alexander after this short break.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  What started the civil war? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?

• 17:51Speaker 02

  I'm Don Wildman and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 18:36Kate Lister?

  Yeah, we do have some sources, don't we, that talk about how, I mean, they didn't know about bacteria, but they talk about things like, don't go to the baths with an open sore because you'll be dead in a week.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, precisely. I mean, they're good at spotting some form of cause and effect. They didn't fare very well. They also sort of know that you shouldn't go to the baths on the lash. You shouldn't go there and just kind of drink your body weight in wine, not hydrate and then go to a banquet. They sort of have worked that out. But yeah, their medical knowledge is wanting.

• 19:07Kate Lister?

  It's not super hygienic, really. I guess if you're rich and you have your own bath, it's marginally better, isn't it? That you're just sort of sitting, at least you're stewing in your own juice.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  You're stewing in your own and your nearest and dearest's filth, rather than that of a million other people.

• 19:23Kate Lister?

  Right, okay, so they are bathing, but it's not super hygienic. What about just like general cleanliness? What about the clothes that they're wearing?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  So you can be washing these in a number of ways, can be washing them in water, much like we do today, but um, fulleries are a thing. So fulleries are where you're going to take your big, heavy bull and toga, if you need to get it, for example, dyed or cleaned. Problem with fulleries is that they are using ammonia to do the bleaching and the cleaning, and ammonia derives from urine.

• 19:58Kate Lister?

  I knew you were going to say that. I knew urine was going to show up somewhere.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  So these places really stink. And the way that they're sourcing the urine in these fulleries, well, it depends. In places like Ostia Antica, which is Rome's port city, they managed to kind of cleverly design it so the runoff from the latrines is going into the fullery. But for the most part, you're going to have terracotta jars lining either the side of the road or in the vicinity of public latrines that people are encouraged to piss into. And then someone at some point is going to carry this terracotta jar brimming full of piss to the fullery. Problem is that terracotta jars are kind of porous, and if they're not glazed, they break easily. And so it's entirely likely that you're going to be carrying this as some kind of poor enslaved person, and it's just gonna, he's going to get drenched in it. It's gonna just crack.

• 20:49Kate Lister?

  I think it's like one of those internet myth things is that there's this thing that comes around every once in a while that the Romans used to wipe themselves after they bent the loo on shards of pottery. That's always sounded like complete bullets to me. It sounds more like what you're talking about. They're using terracotta pots maybe to piss in in the street, and then they're throwing that away in the latrine, or they're using it to carry around.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really depends. I mean, some people will have definitely wiped themselves using shards or pebbles or whatever comes to hand. The military, when they're away on campaign, will be doing like anybody does. I'm not gonna say anyone does when they go camping.

• 21:23Kate Lister?

  Well, no, but you know, like, use your imagination. What would you use?

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Leaves, I guess, if you don't have any toilet paper. But in the latrines themselves, in the public toilets themselves, there's the communal sponge on a stick.

• 21:35Kate Lister?

  Now, that sounds delicious. Tell us about that.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Well, one person could actually tell you whether it is delicious or not, because we have one horrible anecdote from a, it's from Seneca, and it concerns a German huntsman from the first century AD who was condemned to death in the arena, fighting wild beasts, some leopard or whatever. And rather than face this a noble death, he retires to the public latrines, or just latrines of the arena. He takes this sponge on a stick and he rams it down his throat and kills himself, so that he doesn't have to die in public. And Seneca said, this was a good death.

• 22:09Kate Lister?

  No, I'll give me the leopard.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Right, right. Any day you take the leopard eating your face.

• 22:15Kate Lister?

  Leopard. Give me the leopard. That's, oh dear. I was gonna say, there is some debate around this sponge on a stick of like, whether this was to be used communally to wipe ourselves, or whether it was like, a toilet brush in a bathroom that it was used as a cleaning. I mean, either way, you don't want it down your throat.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  No, you really don't. But yeah, there is some debate. We're not entirely sure whether it's used to wipe bottoms, or whether it's used to wipe the rim of the toilet. But I mean, they're not flush toilets, so you're not going to be using toilet brushes in the same way that we do today. These are, for the most part, if they're public latrines, they're going to discharge into sewers. And if they're private toilets, they're likely going to just be cesspits. And situated in the kitchen, for the most part, toilets.

• 22:59Kate Lister?

  Oh. Okay, all right. I'm quite impressed that they've got sewers, though.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  They do, yeah. That's another one of their crowning achievements, of which they're particularly proud. In Rome, you have the Cloaca Maxima, the Great Sewer, which is built in the reign of Rome's fifth king, Tyquinius Priscus. And there's a pretty horrible story about its construction. Constructing it was the work of the very poor. And apparently it was such a grim job, having to excavate and dig out this great drain that lots of people were just killing themselves, rather than have to go to work. As punishment for this, and to ensure that his drain got completed, Tyquinius ordered that their bodies, or the bodies of anyone who had killed themselves, be crucified publicly naked, so it could be eaten by carrion.

• 23:45Kate Lister?

  Of course he did.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yes. Get back to work.

• 23:49Kate Lister?

  Of course he did. What, they are the only group of people I could know who could manage to work a crucifixion into internal plumbing systems somehow.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Got to get it in there. That's why we've got stabbing people, bathing, crucifying people, and having appalling attitudes towards anyone who's not an elite Roman male.

• 24:11Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about the latrines because that, whenever you've got people, this is going to have to be dealt with at some point. Did they have special areas that, like, this is the toilet area that you would go to, the sources that say how bad it was? Was it better than you might have thought that it was, or was it just wall-to-wall awful with a crucifixion thrown in?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  It's going to be pretty grim. I mean, you have them all over the city, you're going to have them in very densely populated areas, maybe even the ground floor of a Roman apartment building. It's going to be converted into public latrines, sponsored and paid for by a local benefactor, so one of the elite. There's no city council, to speak, so it's all kind of locally, locally funded infrastructure. They are going to smell horrendous. A lot of stuff is going to crawl up from them because there are no traps. And they're also going to explode quite a lot, so you're going to hear lots of explosions because you have a buildup of gases like hydrogen sulfide and methane. Unless you're sending people in, like slaves and convicts, to actually go and clean out the sewers, which they did,

• 25:17Speaker 01

  they're going to block a lot of the time. And so you're going to get explosions. And the Romans thinking, there'd be magic, there'd be magic and Drakenstark.

• 25:29Kate Lister?

  Do we know who was cleaning this stuff out? Like you said, they're like convicts and slaves. Like, was it, or was it like a job? Because sort of the other thing is, that job, called a night soilman in the UK, it could actually be quite well paid because it was a horrendous job and nobody wanted it. But what did the Romans do?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  So for cesspits, which is the usual setup in private residences, mainly because you don't want your house connected to a sewer, lest something crawl up from it.

• 25:58Kate Lister?

  Fair.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Or lest there be a flood. And you just get kind of...

• 26:01Kate Lister?

  Or an explosion.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Or an explosion. These are being emptied by, yeah, guys who are coming at night with a wagon and they are collecting all of the effluent. And they are usually transporting it into the countryside where it's being used as fertilizer.

• 26:18Kate Lister?

  Okay, that's quite industrious.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  It is, and they're paid okay. I think if I remember, it's 11 asses. That's the daily wage for being able to bring loads of effluent into the countryside. And that's the equivalent of maybe like, I don't know, it's hard to do ancient money in modern terms. Maybe like a dozen Fredo the Frogs, Cabri Fredo the Frog, chocolate bars. It's still not a massive amount.

• 26:42Kate Lister?

  No, it's not, it's not. I wouldn't do that for 11 Fredos. There's no way in hell.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  11 trips to the bath.

• 26:49Kate Lister?

  What?

• 26:52Kate Lister?

  What would the streets be like then? If you've got this many people in a built up urban area, people make mess. They make mess today. You only have to encounter a binman strike to go, oh bloody hell. Yeah, this, this builds up very, very quickly.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Damn, tell me, I live in Rome. Every year, there's a rubbish crisis where it just doesn't get collected. It's usually in the middle of summer.

• 27:14Kate Lister?

  And it's like, it's, it's amazing how quick that we go from quite a civilized group of people to just, oh, now we're living in our own filth. Like, very fast that can happen.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  That's fine. Yeah, this is fine. This is the new normal. It was really bad. It was really bad. We, we have a lovely description from Juvenal. He's a satirist writing in the first century AD. And I loved it because he describes a Rome that resonates with me a lot today. He talks about the endless traffic in narrow, twisting streets and swearing at stranded cattle. Not, not so much that, although you do get the occasional wild boars that make their way into the city these days. And he says, all of the noise, they would deprive even a Claudius of sleep. And the Emperor Claudius was a famous narcoleptic. But yeah, it's going to be full of mud. It's going to be full of shit. It's going to have rotting corpses of cattle, of slaves.

• 28:05Kate Lister?

  Oh god, of course.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Exposed children. It's going to be really horrible.

• 28:09Kate Lister?

  Like, things die, animals die. And then, of course, there's butchery as well that has to happen for people to eat meat.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Of course, which is probably next door to the public latrines. Yeah.

• 28:19Kate Lister?

  Oh god.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  It's bad.

• 28:21Kate Lister?

  You do get a lot of graffiti around Pompeii and it's amazing how much a variation on this turns up. Stop shitting outside my house. Like, it's just endlessly written all over the city. Not by the same person, I don't think it was by the same person, of just like people going, whoever's shitting outside my house, stop it.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  I'm still keeping an eye out in Rome today for something of this sort, because also modern day Romans are really into their graffiti. It's something that hasn't changed over 2,000 years. So much of it's shit related. It's incredible. My favourite one from Pompeii, there's one written by the doctor to the Emperor Titus, a guy called Apollinaris. It was found in a latrine. And he says, "Apollinaris, the doctor of Titus, shat well here. Hic cacabit bene." It's like, "He had a good shit here." And given that Titus died, I think, at the age of 41, from a perfectly curable fever, that might have been his crowning achievement.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  And as a medical profession, yeah.

• 29:18Kate Lister?

  But it's, it's, it is interesting, like, when you read, and there are books that you can get, really good books that just, that just list out all the graffiti around Pompeii, is how much shit features in it, which again, comes back to that, that point we're talking about early on, is that that would have been a very, very real feature. Now, we are lucky enough to have a system where we just go into a room by ourselves, flush, and it just, it's taken away. We don't have to think about it at all.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  We can use paper, wash our hands.

• 29:44Kate Lister?

  Wash our, yeah. Please wash your hands, for God's sake. But you do get the impression that, like, shit is a real issue. People are shitting on the floor, they're, they're proud of having a shit, they write it on the walls.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, Pompeii is a fascinating case too, because in Pompeii, there are those raised sidewalks, right? You've got the, the stepping stones that cross the roads, because the roads are going to be, at times, they're going to be literally flowing with shit and waste and dirty water from, from baths, from latrines, from everywhere. Incidentally, modern day Romans think that we're also barbarians, because we don't have B days in our bathrooms.

• 30:22Kate Lister?

  Oh, well, see, that's, that's fair enough, actually, that one. Is there's, there's not a lot of, like, criticism that the British will take, but I think we do have to fess up to that one. Is that, why do we think that just wads of dry tissue are acceptable? I, I think that that is gross, actually. I'm, I'm with the, the Romans on that one. I can only apologise on behalf of our people.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  I'm a convert too.

• 30:43Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Alexander after this short break.

• 30:56Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 31:38Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about something that you do see cropping up again and again and again in the sources. It's like when someone's trying to compliment someone, they almost always say that their breath smells nice, which suggests that that was quite a big issue for them. So the way people smelled seems to be very important.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  This is really bad. Are you ready? Apparently, the best mouthwash came from Portuguese piss.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Specifically from Portugal. So that's mixed in with charcoal and apparently crushed mouse brains. I have no idea what the science is behind this.

• 32:09Kate Lister?

  What on earth? That's not a thing.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  I know.

• 32:15Kate Lister?

  Who came up with that?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know. I should know. I should know.

• 32:20Kate Lister?

  No, no, you shouldn't. You shouldn't know. Nobody should know.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  I kind of don't want to know.

• 32:24Kate Lister?

  We should not research this any further.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got to that depth and I thought I'm gonna stop digging.

• 32:28Kate Lister?

  Jesus. But if you couldn't get Portuguese piss and mouse brains, apparently, what might you be using to try and make your breath smell better?

• 32:37Speaker 01

  I personally would be masking it with a lot of wine, I think. That's probably the way to go about things. You're gonna be masking it with wine and a variety of horrible... garam, of course, fish sauce.

• 32:47Kate Lister?

  That doesn't make it smell better though, does it?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  No, of course, no, no, no.

• 32:50Kate Lister?

  What's garam for anyone that's listening? What's garam?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  It's a fermented fish sauce which the Roma's essentially used to make things taste a bit salty. And it's, you've tried it in Pompeii, right? You tried it when you were over in Italy.

• 33:03Kate Lister?

  Yes, I did. And I've never forgiven them for that. Did you notice in that documentary that Dan Snow got to go and do the scenes in the baths where he was just lazing around in a jacuzzi? And I had to do the one where I tried rotten fish sauce. Oh, it was on. Honestly, it was horrendous.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  There's also something worse than the taste. It's the fact that fermented fish sauce contains lots of eggs, which then grow into tapeworms. And so they found.

• 33:31Kate Lister?

  Now, why did you say that, Alexander? You didn't need to say that. Now I'm gonna have to end the interview to go to a doctor.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  I hope this wasn't in your case, but yeah, they found from studies across the Roman Empire that people the Romans colonized tended to have lots of tapeworms, some as long as 25 feet, wrapping around their intestines. And this probably came from garam. Bad.

• 33:53Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Bad, bad, bad. So what did the Romans ever do for us? They've done garam intestines.

• 34:00Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Tapeworms.

• 34:02Kate Lister?

  All right. So they might have smelt, hopefully of wine. We can hope that they smelt of wine, if not something awful. What about like perfumes and soap and things? Like what would they like to smell like?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Well, in the baths, they're covering themselves with oil or kind of some kind of ground up powder. And then they're going to be using the strigil, that kind of instrument to scrape it off their bodies. That's their idea of cleanliness.

• 34:28Kate Lister?

  Nice.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  And in terms of perfume, god, yeah, kind of look no further than the New Testament, really. The stories of incense, frankincense and myrrh. So you're gonna have these kind of, these kind of smells are gonna be of an aristocratic Roman. They're gonna smell like a church congregation service.

• 34:46Kate Lister?

  Like quite a heavy incense smell is probably what the, yeah, musky.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Makes for the musty and musky.

• 34:53Kate Lister?

  If I could transport you back to the streets of ancient Rome at the height of the Roman Empire, what do you think it would have been like? Do you think it would have just been like an olfactory assault course? Do you think it just would have been wall to wall awful?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's pretty bad. It's also very, very dangerous. I mean, unless you are one of the elite and unless you have your own bodyguards, consider that also blades are banned in Rome. So you're gonna have bodyguards with clubs who are out to protect you if you have to make errands at night, although you're gonna generally try and avoid going onto the streets at night. But anytime when you're wandering around, it's gonna be dangerous. It's gonna be really stinky. And at some point, you're gonna encounter some horrible incurable disease, which is gonna lay you low. And you'll probably be dead by 25.

• 35:40Kate Lister?

  Oh dear. So not really as squeaky clean.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 35:46Kate Lister?

  As we like to think of it. Is there any records of any emperors who are known for being particularly cleanly or particularly dirty?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Ah, let's think. I mean, Tiberius, he liked to frequent the public baths with his retinue, but that's more a kind of show of power.

• 36:01Kate Lister?

  What about Julius Caesar? He was very vain, I know that much.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  He liked getting his armpits plucked, didn't he? He was big into depilation. But in terms of cleanliness, I'm not sure, because he would have also been seen as a kind of rough and ready soldier. He was out there getting a bit grimy.

• 36:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Down with the troops, digging ditches.

• 36:18Kate Lister?

  They think that like, too much preening and too much cleanliness would have been feminine? Is that might have been what they were thinking?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Precisely. I think so. You have to dedicate your energy and your attention elsewhere. So, you know, killing people and building stuff.

• 36:33Kate Lister?

  Would you rather be in ancient Rome? Or would you rather take your chances in the Middle Ages or Victorian London when it comes to cleanliness? Just, just for a comparison, who's, who's the cleanest?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  It's a really tricky one. I mean, in terms of my own personal amusements, I once got dysentery working at a bar at the festival as a student. So, so I don't think I've done a fair, very well in any of these settings. But, ah, gosh. I personally would take Rome, but not because of hygiene, just because I would maybe give myself a fair crack at being able to navigate the streets just based on geography and get out of the city really quickly and go to the countryside and then just be hopefully enslaved by some wealthy, some wealthy person who lives in a, in a sunnier climate.

• 37:19Kate Lister?

  Good point. Good point. You'd be a more familiar territory. Oh, Alexander, you've been so much fun to talk to again. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 37:29Speaker 01

  The best place might be my website, which is alexandermeddings.com, where I've got a blog and also advertise some tour services. I also have a domain, appiowithalex.com, through which you can contact me and join me on an Appian Way tour. I've actually taken a fair few betwixt us down the Appian Way this, this summer, which now I say that loud, that sounds really dodgy.

• 37:48Kate Lister?

  No.

• 37:52Kate Lister?

  It's not dodgy at all. Alexander can take you up the Appian Way if he wants to. You just have to pay for the experience.

• 38:00Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. You have been so much fun, as always.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Thank you, Kate.

• 38:07Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Alexander for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are going to find out if anyone else in history was more gross than the Romans. Can the Egyptians or the medieval people outdo them when it comes to filth? And if you would like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Nick Thompson and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.