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.”
