Aspects Of Ancient Roman Society That Were Frankly Barbaric
At its peak, the sprawling Roman Empire stretched from Britain to the Middle East, taking in large swathes of northern Africa. By common consent it brought civilization to many parts of the Old World — even if not everyone gave their conquerors a grateful welcome. But if you look beneath the civilized surface you’ll probably be surprised at the sheer barbarity of some everyday Roman habits.
Gladiator blood
In our time people who suffer from epilepsy can turn to a number of drug and other treatments to control their condition. But during the days of the Roman Empire, those who were afflicted by epilepsy turned to a far grimmer pursuit.
The most favored remedy for epilepsy back then was the blood of slain gladiators. That’s right: Roman doctors would prescribe this gory liquid as a cure for those afflicted by epileptic fits. Gruesomely, this cure was said to be most effective if the blood was fresh.
Eyebrow weirdness
Few modern women, it’s fair to say, regard eyebrows that meet in the middle as something to which they aspire. But Roman women had very different ideas about their eyebrows. Indeed they positively sought a single brow above their eyes.
Of course not everyone could actually grow their eyebrows to meet in the middle. But resourceful Roman women had remedies for that. If their eyebrows were distressingly separated, they would simply join them up with a line of soot or kohl. Alternatively, they’d strategically glue on some animal hair.
Sick of eating
Wealthy Romans really loved their food: they just couldn’t get enough of it at the lavish banquets they loved to throw. In fact, they just didn’t want to stop eating, even when their appetites were entirely sated so that they couldn’t manage another morsel.
But there was a way to carry on chowing down on the elaborate dishes served at elite feasts. Make yourself vomit, and then you’d have plenty of room to carry on gorging. A resounding “Yuck” seems to be the only sane reaction today.
Bad-hair days
For Roman women, the ideal of beauty was to have either blonde or red hair. Of course, not everyone is blessed by nature with hair of either color. And let’s remember that women of Rome were largely of Italian stock, so being born brunette was hardly a rarity.
If you were unlucky enough to have dark hair, dying was the answer. Some of the dye ingredients were fairly horrifying, such as wood ash or goat fat. Roman women also used red-hot brass rods to curl their locks. Tragically, all this mistreatment could end in baldness. So it’s not a surprise that wigs were popular.
Soapless washing
There’s nothing like a long hot bath with plenty of suds generated by your favorite brand of soap. But the Romans didn’t actually use soap. So how did they wash themselves?
They had their own particular way of getting clean. First Romans would anoint themselves with perfumed oils. Then they’d grab a strigil. Made from ivory or bronze this was rather like a curved knife with a dull edge. They’d use the implement to scrape off the oil they’d applied.
Rude graffiti
The Romans had a very creative penchant for coarse graffiti. Much evidence for this comes from the excavations of the Roman city of Pompeii, which was amazingly preserved in a blanket of volcanic ash after Vesuvius blew its top in 79 A.D.
Some of the graffiti uncovered by archaeologists was decidedly off-color. One example is “Restituta, take off your tunic, please.” This writer went on to get much more graphic. On a more plaintive note, another Roman wrote, “Cruel Lalagus, why do you not love me?”
Roman drains
The Romans had a very extensive network of underground drains. But these weren’t used to dispose of human waste: instead they were constructed to supply running water and to drain off excess water from the streets.
When it came to human waste, that was commonly disposed of in the street. Unsurprisingly, in any big city this created some fairly horrendous public-health problems. Analysis of fossilized Roman excrement shows that they suffered from very high levels of infectious diseases and parasites.
Lamentable laundry habits
Time to wash your clothes? Reach for a box of detergent. But not if you were a Roman: they had a very different way of cleaning their togas. In fact they were in the habit of using human urine on laundry day.
Actually, repugnant though it may be to modern sensibilities, using urine to clean clothes is not completely mad. This freely available human byproduct contains ammonia, a chemical which does actually get rid of stains. Even so, it’s not a laundry method we’d recommend!
Slavery
Roman society was underpinned by widespread enslavement. Weirdly, it was an equal-opportunity kind of servitude, since no matter the color of your skin, you could be owned by a Roman. And it wasn’t only the wealthy that had slaves. Even middling folks might own their fellow humans.
Still, in many ways slavery was no different in the Roman era than in more recent times. As the PBS website points out, “Like modern slavery, it was an abusive and degrading institution. Cruelty was commonplace.”
What’s on the menu?
Well, perhaps we’ll start off with some parrot-tongue stew, then move onto a brace of stuffed dormice. Maybe you’d prefer a plate of spayed sow’s womb? Or if you fancy a steak, how about one carved from a giraffe or a camel?
Apparently some Roman chefs had a quirky sense of humor: one recipe was designed to bamboozle diners in a rather unpleasant way. A dish resplendent with an entire fish would be served. But once you started eating it, you’d find it was stuffed with cow’s liver.
Malodorous medicine
Pliny the Elder completed the 37 volumes of his great work Natural History in 77 B.C. This scientific encyclopedia, the first of its kind, included material about medical treatments of the day.
One treatment for epilepsy that Pliny described called for “a camel's brain, dried and taken in vinegar.” Another remedy, this time for a snake bite, involved “she-goat's dung boiled down in vinegar.” Other conditions could be treated with rabbit or tortoise droppings. You might reasonably think that it all sounds a bit too heavy on the dung!
Stinky sponges
The Romans knew nothing of toilet tissue. But like anyone else, they had to clean themselves somehow. So they used sponges. These were mounted on sticks, and in public lavatories they were shared.
A rudimentary attempt at hygiene consisted of dipping the sponge in vinegar between users. But even so this primitive practice had the inevitable result of spreading unpleasant bacterial diseases, which in turn unfortunately meant more visits to the lavatory. Just be thankful for the invention of single-use toilet paper!
Marriage
Writing for the BBC’s History Extra website, Annelise Freisenbruch tells us, “Childhood was over quickly for Roman girls.” Legally Roman girls could be married once they were past their 12th birthday. Boys, on the other hand, couldn’t marry until they were 14.
Romans had little idea of the concept of romance as we know it. Most marriages, especially among the elite, were more akin to a kind of contract of union between families. They were designed to preserve and increase wealth and status.
Emperors behaving badly
Some of Rome’s Emperors behaved in ways that left a lot to be desired, to put it mildly. Take Caligula, who ruled from 37 to 41 A.D. Just short of his 25th birthday when he came to power, his reign became a byword for unbridled depravity.
The History website tells us, “He had brazen affairs with the wives of his allies and was rumored to have incestuous relationships with his sisters”. Not just immoral, he was also bizarrely eccentric. His plan to elevate his favorite horse to a senior political position was only thwarted by his assassination.
Cruel punishments
Given the severity of punishments, being a criminal in Roman times was an extremely risky business. If you were apprehended as a felon and found guilty, your fate was bleak indeed. One of the favored penalties for miscreants was the horribly prolonged death that came with crucifixion.
For serious crimes you might be stitched into a sack with an animal: snakes, monkeys, and dogs were all possibilities. Then you’d be thrown into Rome’s river, the Tiber, to drown. So all in all, it really was a good idea to stay on the right side of the law.
Enthusiastic poisoners
Romans, it seems, were very keen on poisoning one another. The poet Horace, born in 65 B.C., relates the tale of one infamous female poisoner, Locusta. The Emperor Nero is said to have employed this Locusta to poison many of his enemies, among them his own half-brother Britannicus.
First-century statesman Cicero claimed that one Oppianicus the Elder was also a prolific poisoner. He’s said to have killed his brother and his brother’s wife, motivated by his desire to get his hands on an inheritance. Oppianicus also found time to do away with his own spouse.
A ruthless army
The New Criterion website quotes the historian Gabriel Barker’s estimate that between 400 and 100 B.C. the Roman army perpetrated no fewer than 124 massacres. He noted, “These included mass killings and disfigurement of prisoners, mass enslavements, looting, and punitive destruction of cities”.
One of the worst war crimes committed by Roman troops came in 167 B.C. That was the year the Romans conquered the kingdom of Epirus in Greece. In doing so, they destroyed towns, killed many Epirotes and enslaved 150,000 of them. And that was after they’d surrendered.
Gory games
The games held in Rome’s magnificent Colosseum were hardly sport in any way that we would recognize today. To be honest, the word bloodbath is an apt description of what went on. In his 2012 book Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome Donald G. Kyle gives death-toll estimates for one set of games.
These games, held in 108 and 109 A.D. by the Emperor Trajan, saw the deaths of 10,000 gladiators. On top of that, 11,000 animals were killed. Kyle believes these numbers may be exaggerated, but even so it’s slaughter on a horrifying scale.
Beavers
Beavers played an important and rather revolting part in Roman life. More specifically, a substance called castoreum, which was harvested from glands in the animals’ rears was considered an essential medicine. Beavers use the secretion to mark their territories.
Writing in 2023 in National Geographic, Jessica Taylor Price described castoreum as “a yellow, syrupy substance from the castor sacs near a beaver’s anus”. Unfortunately for the dam-building animals, the only way to harvest the castoreum was to kill the beaver.
Birth control
Roman birth-control methods were eccentric, in many cases probably ineffective, and sometimes downright dangerous. Women were invited to smear themselves with everything from cedar resin to honey and white lead.
Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century A.D., promoted an especially bizarre contraceptive: writing for the Vindolanda website, a skeptical Sheila Ledge gives a description. “Cut open a type of hairy spider, which has a very large head with two small worms inside. If the worms are tied on to women with a strip of deer hide, allegedly they will not conceive for a year.”
Revolting cosmetics
When it came to cosmetics, Roman women used some truly disgusting preparations. If you suffered from acne, one recommended treatment consisted of a lotion made from onion and chicken fat. To keep the skin healthy, potions made from goose fat were popular.
Women removed unwanted hair with an exfoliant made from crushed oyster shells; they hid gray hairs with a preparation of squashed worms and oil. Perhaps most off-putting of all was the use of crocodile excrement as a kind of rouge.
An energy drink
Energy drinks are very popular among athletes and the general public nowadays. And exactly the same was true in Roman times. Although you probably wouldn’t want to swap your modern-day booster for one made to a Roman recipe.
That’s because the principal ingredient in a Roman energy drink was goat dung which had been simmered in boiling vinegar! Chariot-racers in particular were said to have been keen fans of this goat-waste concoction. According to Pliny the Elder, another aficionado was Emperor Nero.
Inconvenient emperors were murdered
The succession of Roman Emperors was often a thoroughly messy and gruesome business. On as many as 37 occasions the post was rendered vacant by the simple expedient of killing the incumbent. Emperors had to continually look over their shoulders, since death might come from disloyal bodyguards, resentful family members, or political rivals.
The Emperor Claudius was poisoned by his wife and niece Agrippina. Members of Caligula’s personal security, the Praetorian Guard, slaughtered their boss. Petronius Maximus, Britannica tells us, “was caught by the enraged Roman populace and torn limb from limb.”
Lewd art
When 18th-century archeologists excavated Pompeii, which as noted above had been destroyed by a Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 A.D., they were astonished by the obscenity of some of the artworks they found. They found it so shocking that they hid them in what was known as “The Secret Room”.
Notable examples of these explicit artworks included a lovingly rendered marble statue featuring Pan, the Greek God of the Wild, and a goat. Then there was a fresco of Leda, a mythical Greek princess, in close conversation with a swan. It wasn’t until 2022 that much of this erotic art went on display.
Roman mooning
It’s popular today among frat types and other scallywags, but the first recorded incident of mooning actually comes from the Roman era. We know about this event thanks to the account left by a first-century Jewish priest called Flavius Josephus.
It was the time of Passover, and Roman soldiers were on alert in case of any disorder from the often-rebellious population of Jerusalem. Josephus wrote that one soldier turned his back to the crowd, exposed his rear and “released at them a foul-smelling sound”. Unimpressed, the mob then launched into a full-scale riot.
Awful aphrodisiacs
Women loved victorious gladiators. To be exact, Roman women loved the perspiration of victorious gladiators. After winning a fight in the arena, gladiators would, naturally enough, need a wash. Killing opponents was hot work! So, in the Roman manner of washing described previously, they would anoint themselves in oil then scrape their skin with a strigil.
The ensuing liquid waste was then collected and bottled. Women would buy this unsavory fluid, which would be made into a cream. They would rub this potion into their faces in the bizarre belief that it was an aphrodisiac.
Public latrines
Roman homes tended not to have bathrooms, so the only option was the communal latrine. These consisted of long benches with holes where people sat together. This companionable milieu meant the users could exchange gossip and news as they answered the call of nature.
As well as a complete lack of privacy, these public toilets had another major and much more dangerous drawback: they had a tendency to explode. The build-up of methane below the lavatories could reach dangerous levels, so a careless spark could end in disaster.
Donkey milk
One of the most peculiar beauty treatments favored by Roman women was the donkey-milk bath. Skincare was very important to the Romans, who regarded a clear blemish-free complexion as an absolute must.
So if you were wealthy enough, you’d fill your bath with donkey’s milk, which was believed to be extremely good for the skin. One who particularly enjoyed bathing in asses milk was the Emperor Nero’s wife Poppaea Sabina. She even created her own beauty product, a face mask prepared using donkey milk and dough.
Terrible table manners
To put it mildly, etiquette at Roman dining tables lacked refinement. Wealthy Romans would loll around on sofas at dinner time and chuck anything they didn’t want on the floor. Skin, bones, and shells were all dropped to the ground.
And if the call of nature came during a mealtime, a slave could bring a chamber pot so that the gorging need not be interrupted, even for a bathroom break. Breaking wind was also entirely acceptable at even the most lavish of banquets. Sounds like it would be enough to put you right off your roasted dormouse!
Women gladiators
You’d be forgiven for thinking that gladiatorial combat in the arena was an exclusively male preserve. But the truth is that women fighters took part in these gruesome public displays as well. Quite often the females taking part were actually slaves whose masters thought they might make a bit of money from them.
But it wasn’t only those women at the bottom of society who participated in the bloodthirsty Roman games. Some women from wealthy backgrounds also became gladiators, attracted by the excitement and dubious glamor of the arena.