What Made You Ugly In Ancient Rome?

What was a Roman skincare routine like? Why did the beard make a comeback under Emperor Hadrian? And what did it mean to be ugly in this time? In this new mini-series, we'll be exploring the beauty standards - and ideas of ugliness - throughout time periods in history. Starting today with Ancient Rome, Kate is joined by historian and author Emma Southon https://www.emmasouthon.com/ to find out why Romans would have loved the recent bushy eyebrow trend. Find out more about Emma's work here: https://www.emmasouthon.com/ This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. 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.

• 0:38Speaker 01

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• 1:37Speaker 03

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• 2:37Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Betwixter Sheets. And I'm so, so glad that you are. And if you're new here, this is the first time you've ever listened to Betwixter Sheets, well, then we're extra, extra pleased to have you here. And we have something for you. This is called the Fair Doos Warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult, too. And we have to tell you that because you might just have wandered in here thinking Betwixter Sheets is some kind of podcast about interior design or bed furnishings. And it's not. It's a smutty, rude podcast. And if you listen to this and you keep getting offended, well, I'm afraid as tough tits, that one's on you because Fair Doos, we did warn you. Right, on with the show.

• 3:22Kate Lister?

  Speaking as a historian and somebody living in the year of our Lord 2025, one way that you can accurately, with pinpoint precision, measure time is with eyebrow trends. Just bear with me on this one. For instance, I have friends who are still in recovery from the pencil-thin eyebrow era of the 90s. Hashtag never forget.

• 3:46Kate Lister?

  And here, in a Roman bathhouse of all places, eyebrows are still a big deal. They still have their own fads and trends. Roman women used coal and black dye smeared across their eyebrows to enhance that look. And poets are marveling at their mono brows. Honestly, like a really black, thick mono brow, just like a line across the center of your face. That was like a whole thing for the Romans. And the trends don't stop there. Of course, they don't. Not when it comes to beauty, and so too when it comes to what is not beautiful, what we regard as ugly. So put those tweezers away, and the less said about concealer lips, the better. We have got some exploring to do.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  What do you call him, Anne?

• 4:31Speaker 05

  Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing it.

• 4:47Speaker 05

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 4:50Speaker 06

  Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.

• 4:58Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Beauty standards and sex history go hand in hand, or rather crotch in hand. If you want to have sex, you probably need to make yourself attractive. Or at least, put on a bit of deodorant and brush your teeth. Not if you're rich, obviously, then you can just look like whatever the hell you want to look like. People will want to have sex with you anyway. But this isn't a podcast about them, this is a podcast about trying to look beautiful. And the Romans were exactly the same, they were every bit as concerned about looking attractive as we are today. And in this new mini-series, we will be exploring ideas of beauty and ugliness through the ages.

• 5:40Kate Lister?

  And we will be starting with the absolutely fabulous and utterly appalling Romans. Have you ever seen a genuine Roman hairstyle? It's something to behold, I can tell you. How did they smell? What did a Roman smell like? And in what ways were enslaved people part of their beautifying process? Well, joining me today is longtime friend of the show, the always wonderful and always horrifying Emma Southon, who is an expert in all things ancient Roman, and she is going to help us get under the skin of Roman beauty standards. Are you ready for this one? I know I am, let's do it.

• 6:19Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, it's only Emma Southon and her cat is also here. How are you two doing?

• 6:27Speaker 07

  We're very well, we're very cozy, we're all curled up and ready to talk about some Romans. Livia is so excited for this one, she's named after a Roman, that she's come to join in. She's very beautiful, so she knows all about Roman beauty, so.

• 6:41Kate Lister?

  Perfect segue, look at that.

• 6:43Speaker 07

  A secondary expert, yes.

• 6:47Kate Lister?

  We are actually here to talk about Roman standards of of beauty, which is a fascinating topic as you go back through time. And I'm very curious as to know what on earth the Romans were doing, because every single time I speak to you, I lose even more respect for them than I had.

• 7:05Speaker 07

  That's how I know I'm doing my job. Yeah.

• 7:06Kate Lister?

  Keep lowering the bar and they keep smashing through it every single time. So if there was any kind of babies that were killed in the pursuit of this, or or mass strangulation to achieve a flushed glow of the face, I will not be surprised. But we'll start here for anyone who hasn't listened to you on the show before, which frankly would be bonkers. Can you give us a sort of a rough estimate of what time period are we talking here? If we say Roman, was it because the Romans are still with us? They're still around today? What do you mean when you say Romans?

• 7:41Speaker 07

  So when we say Roman, we broadly mean the period from about 500 BCE to about 500 CE, which is the Roman period or the High Roman period. But when people say the Romans or talk about Roman stuff, we're usually talking about a much smaller kind of 200 year period from about 50 BCE to about 200 ish, 250 CE. That's the period for which we have by far the most information. And virtually everybody that I'm going to mention in this episode and everyone that I have ever mentioned probably has come from kind of that period. So the fall of the Republic and then the rise of the Empire through to what we call late antiquity,

• 8:26Speaker 07

  which is when the Christians start getting involved.

• 8:28Kate Lister?

  Is that why everyone stays focused on this quite small chunk of time within 1000 years of history is because there's the most evidence for it?

• 8:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 8:36Kate Lister?

  Is there a re or is there? Yeah, it is. It's not just that those were the best bits.

• 8:39Speaker 07

  The most evidence for those periods, they're the periods when it's like the richest and has the most influence and therefore was doing the most of its writing and the most of its producing stuff. And when they even all of the stuff that we think we know about the periods before that, like all of the Old Wars and the what they imagined about the foundation of Rome, it's all written during that period. It's all written during the late Republic and the very early years, the early decades of the imperial system. So even when we talk about like the what the Romans considered to be ancient, we're really talking about what the Romans at the time of Cicero and Augustus thought about their own history, rather than any other period in that.

• 9:22Kate Lister?

  This is like peak Roman.

• 9:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:25Kate Lister?

  And it's still quite a big chunk of time. And if you think about like how much beauty standards change within our lifetime, I mean, I'm sure that you can recall things that you were doing as a teenager or a younger person, but now you look back on you're like, oh no, why were we doing the eyebrows? That was when I'm old enough to remember the pencil thin eyebrows.

• 9:47Speaker 07

  I'm also old enough to remember the pencil thin eyebrows. And yes, my sister's eyebrows have never grown back from over plucking. I thankfully was too much of a wuss to do it.

• 9:59Kate Lister?

  I had to, I had to grow mine back with, with regain that many of them are bolder.

• 10:04Speaker 07

  That's true. I didn't know you could do that. That's amazing.

• 10:07Kate Lister?

  Yeah, well, you turn neither did I, but it turns out you can, top tip, everybody.

• 10:12Speaker 07

  I'm gonna tell my sister, yeah.

• 10:14Kate Lister?

  Yeah, please do. There's a little message. Put a toothbrush and then just comb it through morning and night. And pretty soon, three more hairs will emerge.

• 10:22Kate Lister?

  Trying to think of like what other like beauty trend, I remember when you said, does my bum look big in this and that was bad.

• 10:27Speaker 07

  That was a bad thing. Yes. Rather than trying to emphasize it.

• 10:30Kate Lister?

  That was like the worst thing ever.

• 10:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:32Kate Lister?

  And now it's like, hell, yeah, yeah, it does.

• 10:35Speaker 07

  Um, and like we used to straighten the hell out of our hair when, um, like very poker straight hair was a thing. And then like volume came back and we were all doing overnight curls instead. I was thinking earlier, because I was reading, I was like making lists of all the terrible things that Romans did to their skin. I remember that walnut cleanser that everybody had that had walnut shells in it, that were like exfoliated your skin.

• 10:59Kate Lister?

  And that like scratched a layer of flesh off.

• 11:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was actively painful.

• 11:06Kate Lister?

  Like, like that just looked bad. Like, just a bit of your hair was a different colour.

• 11:12Speaker 07

  Was just like a big, thick chunk of hair. Yeah. And that was incredibly hot and cool. And yeah, and it all, you know, it changes, for now it changes so quickly, but it's always changed from generation to generation. You're always like rejecting what your parents were doing or being like, no, we don't do short skirts anymore. We do midi skirts now.

• 11:31Kate Lister?

  And everything, everything at the moment is very oversized, which I'm enjoying. Like big oversized trousers and big oversized jumpers and t-shirts and that'll change again and it'll look very dated. So you're thinking like two hundred years of history.

• 11:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:44Kate Lister?

  The Romans, like it must have changed a lot what was cool and what wasn't cool. Do we have any information on Roman eyebrows?

• 11:52Speaker 07

  We do actually. We do, yes. They loved a thick eyebrow. They were really like, that period about five years ago when really big eyebrows were in.

• 12:04Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 12:04Speaker 07

  And they would have loved that. They talk about how women would fill in their eyebrows with coal, with black dye. There's a couple of references to people having false eyebrows, like to make them thicker so that.

• 12:19Kate Lister?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:20Speaker 07

  And like, there's one reference to a very sexy mono brow and it's like how, it's a kind of poem about how beautiful someone is. And it says, you know, the gap between your eyebrows is so small, it's delightful.

• 12:35Kate Lister?

  See, that's what I'm talking about. It's the uniquely weirdly Roman things. So they loved a really bushy, like bushy to the point where the brows are touching. And what else? If like, you're thinking of like Roman beauty standards, like a massive eyebrow. I feel like I should go and like get a pencil.

• 12:52Speaker 07

  A massive eyebrow, big eyelashes as well, so they're mascara-ing.

• 12:57Kate Lister?

  What on earth are they using for that?

• 12:59Speaker 07

  They're using like lampblack and ashes um or just anything that you've got a lot of like, you know, fire and charcoal lying around, you can use that coal. So they love big eyelashes, like big eyebrows. They like very, very, very pale skin.

• 13:15Kate Lister?

  Another one with the pale skin.

• 13:17Speaker 07

  Another one with the pale skin. It's a classic of like pre um industrial societies. We only really like tans because it shows that you can travel and that you can be outside instead of having to be stuck inside at a desk. Whereas it like tanning shows leisure time because you can travel and sit on a beach in somewhere warm all year round. But for the Romans and kind of most pre-industrial societies, you have paleness means that you don't work outside and means that your leisure time is inside. And so they love this very, very, very white skin. And that never really goes away. They at all periods, they talk about white pale skin and using skin lightening and like white creams on their face. So you get the classic stuff

• 14:02Speaker 07

  that still continues where they're using white lead on their face, just pro just. And then they're putting other things on their face to deal with the like massive sores and peeling skin that they're getting from the fact that they're putting lead on their face. Uh the most famous, apart from the lead, which is pretty bad, is crocodile dung.

• 14:21Kate Lister?

  Oh, there you go.

• 14:23Speaker 07

  Bleaching property.

• 14:24Kate Lister?

  Okay, what on earth? How does crocodile dung make your skin white? Surely that would make it darker. I've never seen crocodile dung, actually.

• 14:32Speaker 07

  You'd think so.

• 14:33Kate Lister?

  Maybe it's white.

• 14:34Speaker 07

  Maybe it's white. Um but they they talk about crocodile dung as a all we have is men talking about women doing this, pretty much. And ninety nine point nine percent of the time, they're saying, aren't women gross and stupid for doing all of this stuff to themselves? And they don't realise that it makes them not hot at all, as if the only reason that women would do this is to make men happy. And so they, we have most of the evidence for this kind of thing comes from poetry, it comes from satires, it comes from plays, it comes from men making jokes about them and being. Like erg women, aren't they stupid? Or philosophers being like god women.

• 15:14Kate Lister?

  So stupid.

• 15:15Speaker 07

  Here's the evidence that they're less evolved than we are because they do all of this stupid stuff.

• 15:19Kate Lister?

  This is all sounding horribly familiar. Like this is, it's like, you still get this rhetoric today of like, once in a while, some man will be brave enough to venture forth on the internet with a picture of a woman. Who doesn't look like she's wearing much makeup, say something like, this is what real beauty is. And then all the women will come charging in going, that's actually quite a fucking lot of makeup. There, pal. Just a bit.

• 15:41Speaker 07

  Yeah. That's actually loads. And the no makeup makeup thing is totally something that the Romans are like as well, because a lot of the time. You will have the, like, these men will be writing about women who have, you know, they've got lipstick on, they've got blusher on. They're like, aren't they silly for putting like chalk on their faces so they look white? And then they go out in the, so chalk is something that they would use chalk dust and like mix it with some kind of. Oil or something and put it on the skin. And then if they sweated or if it rained, it would run. And so they make all of these jokes about women who, you can see their makeup running because it's cheap makeup.

• 16:24Speaker 07

  But at the same time, they'll be like barbarian women are so gross because they don't even put makeup on or do their hair properly. Like.

• 16:33Speaker 07

  And they don't enhance their prettiness and that's how we know and they will. They're kind of disgusted equally by women that don't do anything to themselves.

• 16:43Kate Lister?

  Yeah, that's them.

• 16:44Speaker 07

  Which is classic. They want this idea of women that enhance their natural beauty. But at the same time, with like delicate makeup that looks like they've put some effort in, but not too much effort. But if they have made it so that it is clear they're wearing makeup. Or they're wearing makeup that is unnatural in some way. So like coloured eyeshadow is something that they'll use, they'll grind up dye, they'll use the same dyes that they use on clothing and use them as eyeshadow. And they're doing it because it looks pretty and it's fun and makeup and changing your appearance can be fun. And then men are like, ugh, gross, what are you doing? That's not natural, how dare you? I have very clear ideas of what natural is. And those are the only opinions that we're left with really, apart from one guy.

• 17:29Speaker 07

  And we don't have any women's opinions, so we don't have like any bloggers who are like. I love doing my makeup. I find it really fun.

• 17:38Kate Lister?

  Do you know what's kind of mad about that is just like when, just when you said the only people that are writing about makeup are men. That's just thrown the entire thing into a very, very different perspective for me because I'm imagining these are mostly straight men writing about women being so this, if I went up to my dad and I said, who's Charlotte Tilbury, he'd think it was one of my mates. Do you mean like if I tried to like say eyebrow, eyelash curlers, eyebrow gel, a highlight, he would just look at me. I said, what, have you got a foundation? He'd think I wanted to like do something to the tiles in the bathroom or something. So the idea that men are going to be able to understand what women are doing, that suddenly makes it really difficult, doesn't it?

• 18:21Speaker 07

  It does. And they assume because they're men that women are doing it for them because they have no conception of female community. And, and women are putting like a huge amount of effort in and you can see it like hair is the one that we can really see because it survives in paintings and stuff. And you can see how much time and effort and money and expertise, enslaved expertise mostly, is going into making these really elaborate hairstyles. And they're also presumably doing very elaborate makeup as well. And they think it looks gorgeous. And the men are like, these women can't even stand up. Ha, ha, ha. But they're presumably doing it for other communities of women.

• 19:01Kate Lister?

  Yes, as, as they always do.

• 19:02Speaker 07

  Who are like, god damn, that hair looks amazing. Like, how did you even get that foot tall? Like they have, there's a particular type of hair called flavian hair where there was this period where they made like big, they look like fans, like big flat ovals on the front of their head. And then there would be a bun behind it. That would be made of like intricate plaits.

• 19:25Kate Lister?

  Has anybody ever recreated it? Cause I know there are like food historians out there. They have. But is it like a hair historian has redone this?

• 19:32Speaker 07

  There is. There's a great hair historian on YouTube whose name I've forgotten, but she has recreated them and she shows how they sewed the hair like they would.

• 19:40Kate Lister?

  Oh my god.

• 19:41Speaker 07

  And how time consuming these would be and then how challenging they could be.

• 19:46Kate Lister?

  Hang on, my, my producer, who is also on the call but keeping quiet, has just texted me.

• 19:50Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 19:51Kate Lister?

  Fucking hell.

• 19:53Speaker 07

  There you go.

• 19:54Kate Lister?

  Wow, that looks like she's wearing a bonnet, but that's hair.

• 19:59Speaker 07

  But it's all hair, like sewn and plaited and

• 20:03Kate Lister?

  Woo.

• 20:04Speaker 07

  Like hours of work and probably quite painful and you're gonna have to keep your head relatively still in order to wear it. But that is clearly not for men, like that is not beautifying for men.

• 20:16Kate Lister?

  That's not even for lying down.

• 20:19Speaker 07

  Like, that is hair for other women to be like, damn, you have a lot of money and a lot of time and that looks cool and I wish I could do that.

• 20:28Kate Lister?

  I just looking at that, like thinking, how would they have done it? Presumably they would have worked out that heat can change the hair for a little bit, so like curlers and stuff like that. But that is, if anyone, well, people, like I say, if anyone's listening to this, hopefully someone's listening to this. But whoever, just Google it, Google Roman hairstyle. That is so crazy impressive.

• 20:49Speaker 07

  It probably is the first thing that comes up if you Google. There is, I'm gonna find out the name of the woman.

• 20:54Kate Lister?

  Yes, we should let, let's give her a shout out. That's.

• 20:58Speaker 07

  Janet Stevens, if you Google Janet Stevens with a P H, her hair recreations of what these look are.

• 21:04Kate Lister?

  My evening sorted. That's, that's, that's incredible.

• 21:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, she does other periods as well, but she shows how a lot of it is done with kind of hair pieces and then they're sewn in.

• 21:17Kate Lister?

  Magic, we still have hair pieces sewn in today, weaves and extensions and such. I mean, I imagine that the Romans be a bit, a little bit harsher than, than the ones that you have today. What, were they bleaching hair? Cause one of the, and I'm never quite sure if this is like an internet myth about the Romans. I've only been able to find people saying it's true about, and then other people saying that it's true. That women selling sex had to by law dye their hair blonde and wear makeup.

• 21:50Kate Lister?

  No, it just it kind of sounds like something they would do, but also not, because I don't I don't know if they cared that much.

• 21:58Speaker 07

  No, well, you know, selling sex, you need somebody for every taste. Everybody has, you know, the aesthetic of beauty that you see in art and in sculpture, for example, or described by like these guys who are all part of this one elite community. They're all aristocracy are the guys that we're left with these opinions and they've all got very similar opinions. It's like if we just had like seventy five Jane Caprice mogs and their opinions on beauty and like nobody else, basically. But what you clearly see is that people, there's like a whole diversity of of beauty. So you have people who dye their hair red and you have people who dye their hair black and you have people who dye their hair blonde.

• 22:41Speaker 07

  And and red and blonde are seen as being quite kind of exotic hair colors in Rome because they're quite foreign. So doing that is a a statement of being kind of clearly unnatural. It's like dying your hair pink. And it's a deliberate decision, like, and people do do it. And then men like Seneca are like, oh, my God, how dare you.

• 23:05Kate Lister?

  Awful. But so they were dying. They were using henna and I imagine chemicals that you'd be lucky if your hair was left on by the end of that.

• 23:15Speaker 07

  Exactly. All kinds of things that they would use to, um, a lot of plant based materials, but also anything that will bleach or.

• 23:23Kate Lister?

  Looking at those those pictures of that hair and that is some, that's wow hair. I went to Pompeii. We were filming a documentary and we had a toga expert who came along to to dress me in the lovely down snow. And what I was really surprised about is like, not only how much fabric was involved, but the fact that it's really a balancing act.

• 23:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 23:43Kate Lister?

  Like, it's not pinned because like I was expecting it to get a badge or something and pin it in place. And it's not, it's like, it's balanced on you. So if you walk quick, it's gonna come off. And but like, looking at that hair as well, you can't move around with that hair. Like, everything these women are doing is just very mobile, surely.

• 24:04Speaker 07

  They are. And it is a, much like with the toga, it's a display of how little you have to do because you've got people to do it for you. Specifically, you own people to do it for you. Like that hair and, you know, wearing a lot of makeup and wearing a delicate dress or wearing a toga, which is solidly two metres of material, like they're massive, are a demonstration that you don't have to move around very much, that you can sit, you can move slowly, you don't have to carry anything. People are going to bring you everything. It is a sign of wealth and, and status as a result. Even if you don't have anybody near you right now, it's a demonstration that you do.

• 24:41Kate Lister?

  I, I gen- I usually do. I have somebody available.

• 24:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:45Kate Lister?

  But we still do that today, don't we? Like, you were making that interesting point earlier about a tan is doing the same thing that pale skin was doing throughout history. It's a signifier of like, look, I've got money. This, this is about me being wealthy.

• 24:57Speaker 07

  Yeah. And like high heels, for example, in the workplace are a demonstration that you're not going to have to do any manual labour.

• 25:04Kate Lister?

  Good point. Or any labour at all, in my case, because I'm absolutely immobilised by them.

• 25:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, you're just going to sit. You're not going to be walking too far anywhere. A lot of what is considered to be beautiful that we add to ourselves generally is a sign that we are wealthy. And it's something that is therefore by design unattainable to 99% of people. And like, all kinds of, like, smooth skin is always an ideal in, and the Romans are obsessed with it as well.

• 25:37Kate Lister?

  That's a constant, isn't it? That, well, like, I'm trying to think of constants. Healthy, I think, is it? Although the Victorians did have a, like, to look a bit sort of pale and a bit sickly at some points. But it wasn't like actually looking sick. It was.

• 25:52Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 25:54Kate Lister?

  It was like a pale and sort of drawn thing.

• 25:56Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 25:57Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah, sort of, yeah, a bit faded. That's the one. Yes, look a bit fragile. But I think looking healthy is fairly consistent. Shiny eyes, pretty consistent. Smelling nice. That, that's, at no point in history have I found anyone that, that doesn't care about smelling nice.

• 26:14Speaker 07

  No, they do like to smell nice. Romans love to smell nice.

• 26:18Kate Lister?

  What do they smell of? What does a nice Roman smell of?

• 26:21Speaker 07

  A lot of incense, a lot of like imported fragrances. So incense, my frankincense. Your like quite heavy scents generally that would probably to us smell quite like churchy. Yeah. So they love that kind of, things that come from Arabia that are quite intense.

• 26:40Kate Lister?

  Musky stuff.

• 26:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, musky stuff. And rather than kind of flowery smells that they could get nearby, they like a good heavy oily scent.

• 26:50Kate Lister?

  Nice. I'll be back with Emma after this short break.

• 27:00Kate Lister?

  Autumn is underway at last, which means the nights are closing in and everything in nature feels like it's just slowing down. Except us, of course. For most of us, me included, the world still has a lot of demands on us that can feel like a lot to deal with. There will be a time in all of our lives when we could use therapy. But often when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. Finding a therapist is hard enough, but finding one who actually takes your insurance? That's where most online therapy platforms fall short. Many don't work with insurance at all, which means you're stuck paying the full cost out of pocket or paying for an expensive monthly subscription.

• 27:45Kate Lister?

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• 30:19Kate Lister?

  So we've been talking a lot about the women, but what about the men? Because it's, they have beauty standards too. It's just that women-

• 30:25Speaker 07

  They do.

• 30:26Kate Lister?

  Because of the patriarchy, we are forced to put ours on show in different ways. But men are equally as concerned about how they look. So they weren't doing their hair like that, but what were they up to?

• 30:36Speaker 07

  Men are, my personal favourite, which I'm currently obsessed with telling people, is that men plucked their armpits.

• 30:46Kate Lister?

  I love that.

• 30:47Speaker 07

  Which I find delightful because it sounds awful.

• 30:51Kate Lister?

  It sounds horrendous.

• 30:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, and there's this bit, Seneca mentions it twice, which I find really funny. So one point, he says, he's talking about two different types of orators, but like some who do too much and some who don't do enough. And he says, like, on the one hand, you have these guys and they're like the guys who shave their legs because they do too much. And on the other hand, you have these guys who don't do enough and they don't even pluck their armpits. Like, that's just a basic level of bodily care for him is plucking your armpits.

• 31:21Kate Lister?

  Was it all the hair gone?

• 31:23Speaker 07

  I assume so. It happened in the baths and you had like people there who would pluck the, and there's other people who complain about the sound coming from the baths, that you can hear people like screeching basically because their armpits are being plucked.

• 31:40Kate Lister?

  Wow. All right. Well, they were quite determined then.

• 31:44Speaker 07

  It is. So I like that, that men plucked their armpits. This is actually a really interesting shift that you get is that for most of Roman history, beards were considered to be quite barbarous and a sign of a lack of civilisation. So shaving the face was considered to be a demonstration of like your control, basically, that you are-

• 32:05Kate Lister?

  They're obsessed with that, aren't they?

• 32:07Speaker 07

  Yeah. So hairlessness is considered to be the ideal and beards were considered to be quite foreign and a bit weird. And then there is a very specific shift with the Emperor Hadrian, who's about like 170. He's very into Greek culture and he- Has a beard and so he single handedly redefines the beard as something manly and cool for Romans. And all of a sudden you get statues and portraits of people who have beards who are able to be masculine. Um, and pretty, whereas had they like a hundred years before that, even fifty years before. A Hadrian, a guy with a beard, everybody would have thought he was kind of effeminate and kind of Greek.

• 32:52Speaker 07

  And probably wouldn't be somebody that you would necessarily completely trust, but you certainly wouldn't think of him as beautiful.

• 32:58Kate Lister?

  Did they nick a lot of beauty standards from the Greeks? They seem to have borrowed many other things. Yeah, they did.

• 33:04Speaker 07

  They did. They inherit them directly and then they, because the Romans are the descendants of the Greeks and then they steal them pretty. Clearly as well, like they think that the Greeks are great. It's just a shame that the gods didn't like them because they didn't do their religion properly essentially. Um, if they had been a bit kind of cooler and less beardy, then maybe they could have. Uh, had their own empire, but unfortunately the Romans came along and fixed all of the problems with that the Greeks had. A lot of ideas around, one, like what a beautiful body looks like. Um, so the kind of musculature and the, every undergraduate's favourite, the tiny dick.

• 33:44Kate Lister?

  The tiny dick?

• 33:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 33:45Kate Lister?

  What's your thoughts on the tiny dick, Emma? Why? Why, why, why?

• 33:49Speaker 07

  The tiny dick is a demonstration of control and tidiness and elegance and neatness. Um, so, um, and a large penis is a sign of kind of a barbarous lack of control. Um, so, um, yeah, so the tiny penis, the neat little penis is a, it comes directly from the Greeks. But also their ideas that beauty, morality and divine favour or divinity are all inherently. Connected, that a good person is beautiful and a bad person is ugly.

• 34:27Speaker 07

  That those two things are inherently intertwined, that there could be no like, uh, separation between those things. And that the gods are beautiful, therefore beautiful people must be godly.

• 34:42Kate Lister?

  Yes, that's pretty privileged and a half, isn't it?

• 34:46Speaker 07

  It is, uh, and it's kind of fascinating because you see all this stuff in fiction, like where people are identified as noble or elite because they're so beautiful. It's like, oh, you're obviously too beautiful to be low class.

• 35:00Kate Lister?

  But you sometime, you sometimes see that in like fairy stories and things where some princess is actually dressed as a as a peasant, but it's really obvious that she's not because she's so beautiful.

• 35:12Speaker 07

  Exactly, yeah. And it's the same, like, it's the exact same tradition of beauty and nobility are connected. And then that is connected to divinity.

• 35:22Kate Lister?

  But we do, we do still do that. There's been research paper after research paper published about how people are nicer to to people when they perceive them as attractive. The world is a better place if you are good looking, basically.

• 35:35Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 35:36Kate Lister?

  Yes, yeah, it's like we, I mean, hopefully not to the same extent that the Romans were doing it, but that's still very much with us, this link between moral worth and being noble and what you look like.

• 35:48Speaker 07

  Also, it's very funny how it seems like they almost doing it on purpose, like how obvious they are with it. So when you read Suetonius's biographies, every biography that he writes about an emperor and their family ends with like a little potted description of them. And all of the good emperors are like, and his legs were great and his hair was great. And he was, uh, his arms were well shaped and he was in great health. And then all of the bad emperors are like, he had bandy legs, he was bald, he had bad skin.

• 36:27Speaker 07

  Oh, and they're, it, it just seems impossible that like none of them

• 36:35Speaker 07

  were, were fine looking. Uh, none of the bad emperors were okay. Uh, but no, they were all funny looking because they were evil and that was inherent to them. And therefore their evil came out in their face and. As a result, people who don't meet their kind of beauty standard because they have like, Tiberius has acne, for example, and like this, what is very clearly adult acne that is being described is presented as like a representation of his bad moral character. So all of these people around the world with acne.

• 37:09Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's not fair.

• 37:11Speaker 07

  Being treated as though that is the god cursing them for having bad moral character.

• 37:15Kate Lister?

  Wow. The other thing that you realise when you look at the statues, apart from the rather modest package that a lot of them seem to be working with, and there has actually been research done on that, you know, there's been research papers of answering the question, like, are they actually smaller? So I read one and someone had gone full like maths professor on it with ratios and scales and like average statistics and they came back with, yeah, they are, they are actually smaller than than average. So they are.

• 37:43Speaker 07

  Well, that's, that's good to know.

• 37:45Kate Lister?

  It's good to know, isn't it?

• 37:46Speaker 07

  I'm glad somebody else did that.

• 37:48Kate Lister?

  I'm so glad that somebody did that. You can read it online, actually. But looking at the body that the penis is attached to, that is not small. And when you are looking at that body, that is every bit as unobtainable as men on the cover of men's health and fitness today is like there's muscles upon muscles on these guys.

• 38:10Speaker 07

  Yes, everything is very beautifully defined and I went to the Vatican with my mum last month. When you get up close to them, like they're so defined and like every muscle is picked out. And part of that is the sculptor showing off, like how good they are at doing the human form. And but part of that does then drive in the same way that men's magazines do now, like the idea that this is an ideal body type and men will try to do that. And you do see like bathhouses are also gyms and men are working out in them and they, there are like manuals for, that survive for men for like weightlifting, basically, like they do it with rocks. So lifting progressively heavier and heavier rocks

• 38:55Speaker 07

  and and trying to tone their bodies. And philosophers again complained that men of men of their generation spend too much time working on their bodies and not working on their minds. Because something's never changed. Funnily enough, kind of women's ideal body type is is much more obtainable.

• 39:15Speaker 07

  It is still.

• 39:16Kate Lister?

  Squidgier, much squidgier.

• 39:19Speaker 07

  It is softer. The ideal is small boobs, wide hips and a kind of soft curves and they don't like. There's all this stuff about women covering up thin bodies by wearing loads of clothes to like give the impression that they have more to them because they don't really like thinness. They don't like fatness because they have the same thing that we do really, that that fatness is is related in some way to lack of control. And they're obsessed with control and self-control. So they don't appreciate that, but they do like softness in women. Um, uh, but male beauty is very hard, very toned.

• 39:58Speaker 07

  And you look, like you look at the emperor portraits and Claudius, for example, who is in real life, a disabled man, he has uh some kind of limb difference that means that he limps. This also means that he kind of hunches slightly and he's called a monster by his mother, um, because he has. Yeah, his mother was kind of terrifying. Um, and he's kept out of the public eye for most of his adult life because he has visible disability. And it's considered to reflect poorly on the imperial family that they have a disabled person in the family and it that is a sign because they consider disability to sort of be a sign of of of imperial, of divine disfavour.

• 40:39Speaker 07

  And so they keep Claudius out of the public eye for most of his life, but eventually through a series of um unfortunate events, he becomes emperor. And then all of the statues of Claudius are him as this buff, ripped twenty five year old soldier, like he's a fifty five year old, sixty year old man with visible disability, but that is not how he portrays himself. He portrays himself as the physical ideal of uh of a Roman man, which is, he's always got an old face, so he's always got like um, a kind of, you know, middle aged man face, but on buff ripped body.

• 41:17Kate Lister?

  Do you know, that that just makes me think that, because like we are, the time of recording, Donald Trump's health report was released a couple of weeks ago and in it, he claims to be, it's like six foot two and I think in in British, in British way, it's like fourteen stone that he that he he claims that he is. And obviously people have some questions about this. But like, that's sort of the same thing, isn't it?

• 41:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:45Kate Lister?

  There's a vanity to it, but then like, why is he doing it? Well, obviously to try and appeal and pretend that he's this athletic person when he's not.

• 41:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, and because there is, like, we maintain the same idea that health of the body and health of the mind are connected. And if Claudius was to portray himself as he was, then people in the empire would trust him less. They would be less willing to allow him to be in charge of the armies. They would be less willing to allow him to make laws. And ninety, you know, ninety nine percent of the empire only ever sees a statue or a coin and they they don't really know that he is disabled. And so they, that's fine for them. They're like, okay, what a great guy.

• 42:34Speaker 07

  And so he can't portray himself as he is. But that has to be, I think, quite crippling to, again, it's an unobtainable body standard because it is, it's like a four percent body fat.

• 42:46Kate Lister?

  It's, yeah, it's ridiculous that these guys.

• 42:48Speaker 07

  Rippling muscles. I spend four hours in the gym a day, gladiator standard. Like, it's not one that ninety, like, most people can obtain. But the point of a body ideal is that it's not obtainable for anybody unless their job is having that body. And that makes everybody else feel bad, but then we work really hard in order to try to do it and ideally buy something. Because all of this stuff is being sold by somebody, like, all these people aren't making these cosmetics in their house. They are going to the shops and they are purchasing cosmetics to fix their skin. They are purchasing cosmetics

• 43:26Speaker 07

  to dye their hair. They are purchasing stuff that will, you know, help them gain or lose weight to fit this bodily ideal. So it's basically all the same. Like. Create an insecurity and then sell to

• 43:41Speaker 07

  Sell to fix it.

• 43:42Kate Lister?

  Thinking about Roman perceptions of ugliness, and we've definitely touched on some, but I remember just that that you told me Julius Caesar was upset because he was bald. He was really embarrassed. If there was one Achilles heel that that man had on his like colossal ego, it was the fact that his hair was thinning.

• 43:59Speaker 07

  Yes, and a lot of people have this fear that that they are losing their hair, that baldness is

• 44:06Kate Lister?

  Balding's bad.

• 44:07Speaker 07

  It's ugly, yeah.

• 44:08Kate Lister?

  Right, okay, balding's ugly.

• 44:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, like it's unmasculine. It's if they had had hair transplants, they would have. They do have their own little versions of Rogaine, like they are rubbing all kinds of herbs and like barley into their head and oh no, it's the ashes of snails that they use for freckles. Freckles are also not great.

• 44:29Kate Lister?

  Okay, so freckles are out.

• 44:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, so you burn a snail and then you use the ashes on your face. Classic.

• 44:38Kate Lister?

  That's a good, there we go. That's the Romans. That's the Romans that I know and love, as long as something's in pain.

• 44:44Speaker 07

  Somebody has to die, yes. It's all been very tidy up until this point, like nobody's been brutally murdered or

• 44:50Kate Lister?

  No. Is it just, is it aging? Because in most cultures and times as far as I can see, I've yet to find a group of people that view aging as erotic or sexy. You can find cultures that find aging as respectful, that you gain wisdom, definitely, but none that I have found where it's like, Jesus, you're hot when you're 80. It just isn't there. It's always getting old is bad.

• 45:18Speaker 07

  Getting old is bad, yes. Old, age remains bad. Men get wisdom, women obviously don't.

• 45:27Kate Lister?

  Of course not, why would we?

• 45:28Speaker 07

  There is a poem by, I think it's Marshall, where he compares wrinkles on women to mould.

• 45:34Kate Lister?

  Brilliant, thank you for that, Marshall. Excellent. Quite glad he's dead.

• 45:38Speaker 07

  Yes, he's horrible. Big not fan of Marshall. They have the classic thing with women who wear makeup or who dress nicely as soon as they've like, you know. Past the point of menopause, they're laughable and hilarious because who would want to have sex with them? And the only reason that anybody would want to be wearing makeup, obviously, is to have sex or shave your legs. That's the only reason. There can be any other pressures or desires to do it. And so that's kind of a classic joke is the old lady. Old lady, I say, like a woman my age, basically forty-two. Wear makeup. It would be. It is depressing.

• 46:21Speaker 07

  It would be kind of a classic Roman comedy is a woman in her forties or fifties who looks like she might want to be attractive.

• 46:30Kate Lister?

  Brilliant. Thanks, Romans. I'll be back with Emma after a short break.

• 46:46Speaker 04

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• 47:15Speaker 03

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• 48:25Kate Lister?

  What about, I'm just thinking, because what I know about Rome is that it was very multicultural. It was very multicultural. You've talked about that on this show before and I've definitely seen Mary Beard doing a documentary about how they weren't, one of the few saving graces about the Romans is they weren't racist. They came up with different ways to hate and persecute people, but race doesn't seem to have been one of them. You were just a Roman, no matter what you were. But how did this play into their notions of beauty then? Because it's all sounding very Western and white so far.

• 48:56Speaker 07

  It is. And that, to be fair, is one place where they are.

• 49:01Speaker 07

  Whiteness is beauty, as far as they are concerned, really. And darkness is a deviation from that. And so they obviously are fully aware that non-white people exist. That they're, you know, they're well into North Africa. They have a lot of contact with Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa. They had their images of black people in Rome and in the Roman world, but never as an object of beauty, always as an object of either fetishisation or barbarism. So you do see, for example, the fetishisation of black men and black male genitalia. So there's this.

• 49:46Kate Lister?

  Wow. Were they the ones that started that? Because that's still very much with us.

• 49:51Speaker 07

  It's very much with us.

• 49:52Kate Lister?

  On Pornhub.

• 49:54Speaker 07

  Yeah. So there is a mosaic from, I think it's from Pompeii, actually. It's definitely from Italy, of a black male bath attendant, a slave bath attendant, and then he has an enormous penis.

• 50:08Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 50:09Speaker 07

  Not like in a, in a pan way, where it is like comedic or it's like divine, but in like fetishising blackness way.

• 50:18Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 50:19Speaker 07

  And it's picked out in colours, but it is, they very much have this, this image of blackness and darkness as being exotic and it cannot be beautiful because it is not.

• 50:33Kate Lister?

  Whiteness, basically, and they have a very clear idea that that beauty is is whiteness.

• 50:41Speaker 07

  Which allows certain people from Northern Europe to be considered to be beautiful as long as they adhere to Roman standards, but often they don't. So they think that like moustaches are hilariously stupid. Um, and they do also think, but you don't get the fetishisation of the Northern European in the same way at all.

• 51:04Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay. So as a final question then, a lot of the Roman beauty standards are completely bonkers. Like if you walked around in that hairdo today, you would get laughed at. If you leaded your face white, you would turn a few heads. People would think you were on your way to some kind of fancy dress party. But was there any beauty treatments that the Romans used that perhaps is still with us that stood the test of time? Or was it just wall to wall insanity? We don't even pluck, well, you do pluck body hair, but you don't do it with tweezers.

• 51:38Speaker 07

  Not so much anymore. I mean, a lot, I think, of what they do, if you made it with something that was slightly less toxic, it would probably be like, you could totally do a Roman beauty tutorial that was kind of lightening the skin, filling in the eyebrows, putting on some rouge. Um, some of the kind of lesser crackers hairstyles are basically just a bun. Um, and you're gonna not be far away from what, you know, I did this morning.

• 52:09Kate Lister?

  Interesting.

• 52:11Speaker 07

  And, you know, skin lightening, for example, is still very much something that people do as well. When you kind of look down at what they're doing, actually, one thing that I found while I was looking at this, while I was like going through, looking for fun stuff was um, pimple patches that they had.

• 52:24Kate Lister?

  Pimple patches, okay.

• 52:26Speaker 07

  Pimple patches. So they would make very, very thin leather and they would put a little bit of like alum on it. Uh, which is, and then they would put the little pimple patch on their pimple pat, on their spots. And then some of them would colour them in to make them like a statement piece.

• 52:44Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 52:44Speaker 07

  Like the little star face things.

• 52:47Kate Lister?

  Like the little beauty spot that you see in 18th century.

• 52:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. So little painful patches. So a lot like the stuff that they use as the stuff that they have access to. And what they've got is stuff that like, it's basically the same stuff that they're using as medicine. But what they are doing is they're trying to smooth the skin. They're trying to make the eyes big, the cheeks pink, the lips pink. And they're trying to make the hair look like time has been spent on it.

• 53:20Kate Lister?

  That sounds very familiar.

• 53:21Speaker 07

  Yeah. And so it has not changed in terms of what they're doing that much. What we use to do it is more complicated now. But in terms of what they look like, and when you look at portraits and stuff that we have, it does not look unbeautiful to us. And that's because we are direct descendants of the Romans. So we're still stuck with a lot of their kind of ideas of what health and beauty look like.

• 53:54Kate Lister?

  Emma, you have been fabulous to talk to. Once more, you always are. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 54:01Speaker 07

  They can find me at emmasouthon.com or they can find me at historyissexy.com and my podcast, History is Sexy, or on Instagram at Emma Southon.

• 54:10Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. I can't wait to talk to you again.

• 54:14Speaker 07

  Always a pleasure. Always happy to be here.

• 54:18Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Emma for dropping by. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. I know everybody says that it's the mantra of all podcasters, but it really does help us. If there's a subject you would like us to get into, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. Coming up, we have got episodes on female executioners and the second in this mini series, What Made You Ugly in the Medieval Period with the utterly fantastic and completely beautiful Eleanor Jarniger.

• 54:53Kate Lister?

  This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 55:11Speaker 04

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