The invasion of Greece had begun. The Persian ships were drawn up on the beach at Marathon;
soldiers in their myriads massed on the shore. In their midst was Hippias, former tyrant of Athens,
come to reclaim his city. The night before, he had dreamed that he was destined to be buried
in his motherland. But as he stood on a sandy bank, he coughed, and one of his teeth fell out.
After searching for it in vain, Hippias lamented: “we shall never conquer this land; for this tooth
has been buried here in my place!” By the time he landed at Marathon,
Hippias was well into his eighties, more than old enough to be excused a few vagrant teeth.
But he was far from the only classical personage with a less than brilliant smile.
Augustus, for example, had a mouth full of rotten stumps. And when he was still
in his late twenties, Nero had to have a tooth pulled, presumably because of a serious cavity.
Despite such practical experience, the Greeks and Romans never understood the root causes of
tooth decay. As a result, they tended to regard dental care as a matter of cosmetics, not hygiene.
The standard, and often sole, implement employed to clean teeth was a toothpick.
From the slivers of mastic wood plied by humble hands to the silver and gold models flourished
by kings, toothpicks were correspondingly ubiquitous, and were even given as gifts.
Toothpicks were paired with tooth powders, which were rubbed over the teeth and gums with
an enthusiastic finger. Roman authors listed dozens of recipes. In addition to abrasive
agents like pumice, pulverized bone, powdered glass, and crushed shell, various concoctions
included such ingredients as sheep sweat and the ash of a wolf’s head. Some powders would
certainly have whitened smiles, though only those few that incorporated herbs and spices
beneficial for the teeth and gums would have made any positive contribution to dental health.
The Romans believed – or at least liked to claim – that certain Spanish tribes rinsed
their teeth with human urine (aged for the purpose in cisterns). Since all of
our references to this supposed practice are secondhand or satirical, however, it’s more
likely that we’re dealing with anti-barbarian prejudice than with any historical custom.
In light of the fact that we cannot conclusively discount the use of urine as a mouthwash, it is
perhaps unsurprising that bad breath was a chronic condition in the classical world, despite such
antidotes as honey-soaked wool, mouse ash, and unmixed wine. “Among all the animals,” one Roman
author observed, “man is most prone to bad breath, from bad food, from bad teeth, and especially from
old age.” Toothache seems to have been almost equally prevalent, not least because the remedies
prescribed by ancient authors – which included the burnt heads of mad dogs, grains of sand from
the horns of snails, and boiled frogs – would have done little more than distract sufferers.
Before we plunge into the agonies of ancient dentistry, a brief word about
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code TOLDINSTONE for an additional 10% off. Returning to matters of the mouth.
Although doctors were already extracting teeth and wiring shattered jaws in Classical Greece,
most of our knowledge about ancient dentistry comes from Roman sources. Broken teeth were
filed down, infected gums were lanced; but in most cases, a dentist’s task was nothing
more or less than pulling teeth. Extractions were not undertaken lightly: medical handbooks
emphasized the risks of a careless operation, which ranged from a dislocated jaw to death.
Yet teeth were pulled, frequently enough that “tooth doctors” were a familiar presence in Roman
cities. The process differed from today’s primarily in the absence of anesthesia:
the gum was pulled back, the tooth was loosened by being worked back and forth, and the extraction
was performed with a stylus or forceps. A drain in the Roman Forum yielded 86 teeth – all with
deep cavities – which had apparently washed out from a dentist’s shop. Impressively, not a single
tooth had been broken during the procedure. With the possible exception of a Hellenistic
mummy found with a linen-packed tooth, there is no evidence for cavity fillings. Ancient dentists,
however, were perfectly capable of strengthening teeth with gold wire; an early Roman law
specifically exempted such fastenings from a general prohibition on burying gold with a body.
Though never common, artificial teeth – usually in the form of dental bridges – are well-attested.
By the Roman imperial era, dentures were made of everything from ivory to boxwood.
The effectiveness of ancient dental care can best be judged from the skeletons recovered at Pompeii
and Herculaneum. A cursory glance leaves a positive impression. Only about a third of
the adult skeletons found in the boat sheds at Herculaneum, for example, were missing teeth,
and relatively few had cavities. A closer look, however, reveals a more complex picture.
One middle-aged lady in the sheds, for example, boasted a perfect smile.
But a man of about the same age lying nearby had lost no fewer than seven teeth, and was suffering
from four serious cavities and four abscesses, one so deep that it drained into his sinuses.
Wealth seems to have been no guarantee of dental health. A young girl wearing expensive jewelry,
for example, already had five cavities – probably because her family could afford to
give her plenty of snacks smothered in expensive (and sugary) honey.
The leisure class was, however, spared the sort of wear visible in the mouth of a young fisherman,
whose teeth were badly worn on one side from biting nets on a daily basis.
Whether they were rich or poor, Romans ate a great deal of bread, typically made from flour
ground on basalt millstones. Flakes of stone from the milling process made their way into loaves
and cakes, wearing away at the upper surfaces of Roman teeth. The bases of those teeth, meanwhile,
were almost invariably caked with plaque, since toothpicks and tooth powders – though effective
at removing food scraps and burnishing smiles – were not very good at thorough cleaning.
Despite all these problems, the teeth of most Romans – and, for that matter,
of the Greeks and other ancient peoples – were better than one might expect, largely because,
in the absence of processed sugar, oral bacteria were less aggressive than they are today.
Cavities still occurred; but the pervasive blackened teeth and hollow cheeks of early
modern Europe were nearly as distant from the Roman experience as they are from ours.
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enjoy my book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants. Thanks for watching.