It’s been a terrible day for young Bibulus Flaccus. He just lost all his money at
dice and after a few too many glasses of the lowest grade posca, he got the shock of his
life in the dirty, stinking public toilet. As he relieved himself, a disease-carrying rat bit his
backside and to his astonishment, flames came up through the hole. If that wasn’t bad enough,
in a few weeks’ time, he’s going to have to fight as a gladiator to try and pay off his debts.
Bibulus Flaccus didn’t have it easy, and as you’ll see today, many Romans didn’t.
That’s why we doubt you modern-day folks would have lasted long in the empire.
Mr. Flaccus is a guy we just made up, but his crappy day is based on a true story. For instance,
posca was a really cheap alcoholic drink made from water, vinegar, herbs, and salt - booze reserved
for the lowest of the low. A poor Roman could have lost a lot of money after downing a jug of that
and playing the popular betting game of dice. He might have also thought about trying to pay his
debts off by fighting in the gladiatorial arena. We also mentioned him emptying his bowels in
a rather dangerous and disgusting toilet. So, we think we’ll talk a bit more about hygiene,
or lack thereof, in the Roman empire, before we get to the business of fighting for your
life and trying to make it through the terrifying ordeal of a Roman childhood.
The Romans were pretty advanced in terms of sanitation, but that didn’t mean there weren’t
widespread diseases and pervasive filth. Going to the toilet could be a scary thing indeed,
which is why some historians say on the walls of public latrines there was often graffiti relating
to Fortuna, the goddess of luck. And when you did dump your load, there wasn’t that much privacy.
The wealthier Romans had private bathrooms with plumbing, so what they dispelled from
their bodies went down the hole into a sewer system. For them, the very thought
of using a dirty public toilet made them want to throw up. In today’s show, we’re going to
class you as a regular working person in Rome, a plebian, someone who didn’t have an en-suite.
In the house, you might have done the deed in a chamber pot and taken the contents out to
the sewer, but many regular people just went out to the public toilets where they would
likely have had to sit above a hole with many other folks next to them also taking a poop.
Their togas might have hidden their private parts, but nothing could hide the noise and smell.
Then there were the rats, which festered around the latrines. They spread disease,
and if that wasn’t bad enough, sometimes the build-up of methane could cause fires,
so this is why many Romans prayed when they dropped off the kids at the pool.
According to the book “Death and Disease in Ancient Rome”, matters were made worse because
some people would just throw the contents of their chamber pot into the streets. This exacerbated the
already big problem of disease. Even worse, the sick would bathe in public baths with the healthy,
so getting ill in Rome wasn’t hard to do. They might have used a scraper to remove the dirt
when they bathed, and also applied some scented olive oils, but they didn’t have soap. This also
made it easier to spread disease. One good thing they did do, though, was not touch their own poop.
To wipe their butts, they often used a sea sponge attached to a stick that was left close to the
toilets in a little man-made stream. These things, called “tersorium”, were shared by everyone. Yuck.
The Roman Empire lasted over a thousand years and of course, some places were filthier than others,
but in general, if we sent you back there now, the majority of you would
have an issue with pooping and bathing. Even the Roman elites would have to be
extremely desperate to use the “bog”, as the British call it. Free women in general never
used the public toilets, and even if a slave girl did have to relieve herself in them, she ran the
risk of being mugged or assaulted. This brings us to crime.
We very rarely hear about the streets of ancient Rome, where the regular people
lived and worked. These streets were not a place you wanted to be after dark.
If you lived in a city there were slums, and even if you didn’t live in an ancient Roman project,
you might have been housed with other families in a rather packed ancient-style apartment complex.
We know a little about these areas thanks to the Roman poet named Juvenal,
who didn’t have many nice things to say about the poorer parts of Rome.
He joked about walking through the dark streets at night, saying that one of the many hazards
was someone throwing a chamber pot full of human detritus out from a window, and it landing on your
head. In his own words, he said, “There’s death in every open window as you pass along at night;
you may well be deemed a fool, improvident of sudden accident, if you go out to dinner
without having made your will.” Many poorer people lived in little
rooms contained in large buildings called “insula”, meaning island.
They were sometimes 100 feet high, so it wasn’t much fun walking under those at night.
One guy that lived in one of those buildings wrote that they were so close together he
could lean out of his window and shake hands with the guy in the next building. Generally,
the less cash you had the higher up you lived, because of the dangers up at the top.
People in these buildings weren’t exactly secure. If a fire happened, that often meant
mass death. The Roman statesman Cicero once joked, “Two of my buildings have fallen down,
and the rest have large cracks. Not only the tenants, but even the mice have moved out!” It
was no joke for the tenants, of course. There were lots of overpopulated,
crumbling buildings, and since the residents cooked in little metal boxes in their rooms,
there were lots of deadly building fires. If things did go up in flames, tough, everything you
had was gone. The poor couldn’t afford insurance, that was a luxury reserved for the rich..
One modern historian wrote about what happened to the poor in the event of a fire,
“You were on your own. At best, you might hope for help from friends or relatives,
or perhaps a wealthy patron.” He said there was no form of banking for these people, meaning when
things turned disastrous, they were truly fudged. But in those dark labyrinths of streets, there was
more to fear than falling poop and dodgy safety standards. A rich person would not travel through
the streets at night, and if they really had to, you can be sure they’d have what Juvenal called
a “long retinue of attendants.” That’s because there were so many muggers lurking in the dark.
This also meant that the average person would have to worry about more than just muggers.
Sometimes the rich would walk around in the streets and they’d have their armed
escort beat the crap out of you just for fun, or especially if you’d gotten in their way.
The historian Suetonius wrote that Emperor Nero would do this while dressed up as a
commoner wearing a hat and a wig, and to those that fought back, he’d “wound them,
and throw them in the common sewer.” That was actually pretty charitable for the sadistic Nero.
There were watchmen, called “vigils”, but they mainly focused on fires. In general,
when it came to keeping your valuables or life, when you went out at night you took a risk.
Nonetheless, there were laws as written in the Book of Civil Law
(Codex Iuris Civilis). If you chose the thug life in ancient Rome, you could end up in court and
the outcome could be brutal - but just remember that forms of justice changed over the centuries.
You can find documented cases of when thugs thought they could get away with crime. In one
case, a man sneaked into a shop and put out the lamp in order to steal something. The shopkeeper,
probably a bit of an ancient Charles Bronson character, wasn’t having any of that despite
seeing that the thief was armed with a piece of rope that had a chunk of metal connected to it.
They went for it in the street and the result was that thief getting a good beating and
losing one of his eyes. The case went to court, and it was decided that the man had
every right to take that eye. Case closed. But let’s say you lived in one of these
God-forsaken places and one day you decided to stand up and fight for your rights by
protesting a recent tax hike. Tax increases were common. Those military campaigns weren’t cheap,
and there’s evidence of tax increases not just bankrupting regular people but driving
some to starvation. Of course, you’d fight! By the way, there were from time to time general
strikes in Rome when the plebs were virtually starved. These were called “Secessio plebis”
and sometimes came with a threat of whipping or death. Other times there was actual reform
and the elites acceded more power to the people. But let’s say you were part of a protest in Rome
that turned into a riot that got out of hand. The emperor surrounded himself with
his praetorian guard and the regular Roman guards were sent to the streets to break up the crowds
and arrest the ringleaders. Even though you aren’t a slave, your arrest spells big trouble for you.
You see, you’re a person of meager wealth, and because your social status isn’t high,
you will be treated worse by the courts. That’s just how things were. As one historian remarked,
“Your chances of success in court would depend largely on your status vis-a-vis the accused.”
If you were a slave, it would be even grimmer. It would also be bad if you were a non-citizen.
But even though you are a citizen, you are part of what was called the humiliores
(the lower class); not the higher class, honestiores. You then get sent to the
civil courts and are found guilty of causing violence and inflaming the public’s discontent.
There were no long-term prisons for criminals in ancient Rome. As historians like to say,
justice was swift. Not only that, you could be legally tortured before you confessed. That was
fine in the eyes of the state, although this was usually only used for the worst kinds of crimes.
In short, since it was a fairly serious violent crime, you’d be lucky to just get a whipping.
For the same crime, a non-citizen might have found himself being worked to death on one of
the mines or quarries (damnatio in metalla). That meant worked to death, literally. It was a death
sentence and it was slow and agonizing. If during the riot a fire broke out and
someone died and you got the blame, you could expect the worst. In ancient Rome,
this could be brutal. It might simply have been a beheading, but depending on who you annoyed,
it could have meant being burned, buried alive, thrown off a cliff, crucified, impaled,
or even being tied up in a sack with a snake and a rooster and dog and thrown into a river.
As a member of the lower classes, you might also have been forced to fight in the arena
(damnatio ad gladium/ferrum). This really sucked. Gladiators in ancient Rome as we said at the
beginning could have been volunteers trying to pay off debts. They could also have been slaves
or someone who’d committed a serious crime. In any case, you have to look past Hollywood and
imagine what it would feel like fighting for your life against another gladiator, or even
wild animals - and we don't mean rabbits or geese. Damnatio ad gladium was a special kind of fighting
because in this case, you had zero chance of winning, and we mean zero. It was a sentence
of dying by the sword. It was a punishment most often reserved for slaves, but since you’re a
menace to society, you’re getting the chop. The statesman and philosopher, Seneca, had a
particular distaste for this. He wrote that one day he went to the arena expecting to see games
but instead found a bloodbath and death. He said about the condemned, “They have nothing with which
to protect themselves, since their whole body is exposed to blows, they never strike fruitless.”
Similar was damnatio ad bestias, condemned to the beasts.
Seneca wrote, “In the morning, they throw humans before lions and bears.” This often happened to
the criminal lower classes, especially if they’d committed the crime of kidnapping,
counterfeiting, or like you, causing an uprising. Plus, after the death,
the property of the deceased was taken, and no will was allowed to be written.
This was hardcore Roman justice at its worst. But sometimes the plebs loved seeing the condemned
being slashed to pieces by the claws of a lion, a tiger, a leopard, or a hyena,
taken from North Africa, or a brown bear or wolf taken from other parts of Europe. Sometimes there
wasn’t much fighting at all, and the condemned was just crushed by an elephant or fed to a crocodile.
It was rough justice for sure, but sometimes criminals were given a chance to fight for their
freedom after receiving a good amount of training at a gladiator school. This punishment was known
as “damnatio ad ludos”, meaning condemned to the games. With around four hundred amphitheaters all
over the empire, there were a lot of games. They were massive events, too, sometimes advertised
like we advertise movies, but with giant paintings on walls of the gladiators or the exotic animals.
Despite what you might have seen, when the professional gladiators fought, it wasn’t always
a fight to the death. In fact, the mortality rate might have been from 20 to 25 percent in these
highly entertaining exchanges of skill and might. Sometimes a man could fight to live another
day and then fight again, and perhaps one time the sponsor of the games would hand
him a wooden sword (rudis) at the end, which meant he got back his freedom.
The thumbs down thing was also real. Sometimes an injured fighter would “raise a finger
as a sign of submission” and a ref would stop the match. Then, the editor, sometimes the emperor,
would gauge the crowds’ feelings and give a thumbs down for death, or two fingers for mercy.
If the injured man had put up an excellent fight, he was often spared in the context of the games,
not the death penalty context, where he was always finished off. In that case,
even if without a sword or armor he somehow beat the other guy, another gladiator would
step in and finish the job. Were the games fixed?
That’s hard to say for sure, but it would be foolish to suggest they were never fixed over
all those years. One time a man in the crowd booed and shouted about a fix and
the emperor Domitian had him taken to the arena and torn apart by a bunch of hungry, wild dogs.
It was probably better to keep your suspicions to yourself, something we imagine would be hard
for many of you outspoken YouTube commenters. Given the massive incarceration rate in the
USA and the fact 70 percent of Americans have done something that could land them in prison,
it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say many of our viewers may have faced this blood sport
during the days of the Roman Empire. So yeah, that’s another reason why you wouldn’t have
lasted long back then, or at least if we sent you back now and you didn’t change your ways.
But what if you got sick in those days? In the latter part of the empire,
the Romans did some amazing things in terms of medical discoveries. They had
people such as the guy we call Galen, who made many breakthroughs in medicine.
If you were sick, you might have been told to take some rest or exercise more,
and if you were lucky enough to see a physician, he might have told you that you had an imbalance
of one of the four humors. Those were: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm.
If they were out of balance, the theory was you could get physically sick or mentally depressed.
So, if you had constant headaches or chronic stomach pains, the way you would likely have
been treated is purging the overabundant humor responsible. That could mean blood-letting or
forced vomiting. As the encyclopaedist, Celsus advised, “To cause a vomit on getting up in
the morning, he should first drink some honey or hyssop in wine, or eat a radish,
and after that drink tepid water.” In general, if you got seriously sick,
there wasn’t much you could do but hope your immune system – that no
one knew about of course – would come to the rescue. As medicine advanced in the empire,
there were crude surgeries such as amputations, but there were no anesthetics. Opium was sometimes
administered but it wasn’t exactly great at relieving pain for removing bits of people.
If you came down with a disease, say a virus, it might have been blamed on
“minute creatures too small for the naked eye to see.” That was pretty close to the truth,
but another person might have told you the stars gave you the disease. There were a lot of whacky
theories and medical treatments back then. If you had warts, you might have been told to
apply burned cow dung, mouse poop, or swan fat to the affected area. At some point in time when you
had chronic headaches, you may have been advised to apply a fox’s genitals attached to your head.
For epilepsy, you might have been told to drink the blood of a gladiator or eat
some camel’s brain that’s been soaked in vinegar, or consume water that has had a
bear’s genitals in it. You might also have been told that you were possessed by a higher power.
You get the picture, getting sick in Roman times wasn’t a walk in the park.
As for diet, you won’t be surprised to hear that the richer Romans had a much more diverse diet
than the poor did, including lots of meat. The very poor might have subsisted by eating
lots of porridge, called “puls”, but most folks could get their hands on fruit and vegetables
and of course that Roman favorite, bread. Those with more money would eat things such
as flamingo tongues, or they might have been partial to the delicacy of dormice.
It seems they also ate a lot of meat and fish that weren’t cooked well, given the fact researchers
say many, many Romans had a parasite problem. The sharing of butt cleaners also didn't help.
The wealthy also ate poop, or at least cow dung. They believed when it was boiled and
mixed with vinegar, it could be added to water and the drink provided a boost of energy. Many
collected their own urine, for the purpose that when it dissolved into ammonia it was
great at keeping clothes and teeth white. But that was mostly for the well-to-do,
your regular person wouldn’t have had time to think about how white their teeth were.
They would have been more concerned with getting their next meal and perhaps feeding
their new baby, a baby that in the worst cases would have been dumped in the streets
with the hope someone might take it as a slave. Let’s also remember that the father and mother
of this baby might well have been in their early teens and that there was a real chance that the
mother might have died while giving birth. Prior to that, she could have been given some powdered
pig poop to drink with some water to relieve her labor pain. If the pain got too bad, someone might
have placed the right foot of a hyena on her. We have no idea how they came up with that.
While these kids were considered adults at that stage, even at age 12 they were supposed to have
given up playing with toys and were now expected to do some serious chores. After age eight,
kids were seen as being old enough to take on responsibilities. Playtime was over. Childhood was
tough, but given how hard it was to get through it with all the disease you could contract,
adulthood was a blessing, especially for the poor. All in all, life was hard for the poor just
as it is now, but there were many positive things about ancient Rome.
We’ll just save them for another day. Now you need to see how the other half
lived in “The Horrible Life of an Average Roman Empire Slave.”