Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - How Filthy Were The Romans?

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Some of the key remnants of the Roman Empire are their public baths - huge complexes, multiple different rooms, the basis of many of our modern spas. But were the Romans clean?How regularly did they wash? Were they really using urine to wash clothes? And what's this about a communal wiping stick?Kate is joined by the wonderful Alexander Meddings for the first episode in a series where we are trying to find out just how smelly people were in history. Alex is a Rome-based historian and tour guide. Find out more about his work here: https://alexandermeddings.com/ This episode was edited by Nick Thomson. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. This is betwixters sheeds. Welcome back. Thank you for coming again. And to keep everybody safe

and to keep everything just snugly and untriggered, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way covering a range of old subjects and you're being an adult too. Oh my God, I feel so much safer.

Thank God for that. Right, shall we press on? I think so. Oh, a spadey. Plush, white dressing gowns with little cotton slippers, the smell of eucalyptus, soft, ambient music, stone walls and a bit of warm lighting, maybe a candle.

At least that's what you'd expect, right? Right. And we should probably thank the Romans for that one, shouldn't we? They were big on bathing, wasn't all of this their idea? Huh. Well, they might have been a bit muckier than we think. No,

And welcome back to Petricks the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. When you think of the Romans, you think of baths. You do think of baths. All right, you'd probably think of some other stuff too. You might think that they're a bit stabby and a bit rude. They did like to put penises on the floor a lot. But once you've done thinking of that, most of us think about baths. Rome, baths.

That's what they did. So you might naturally assume that they were a very, very clean bunch of people. But were they really? Is the bath thing just Roman propaganda? Well, today I'm joined once again by the Rome-based historian Alexander Meddings to find out how often the people of the Roman Empire wash their bodies and their clothes and their teeth, for that matter. In essence, we're asking the question, just how filthy were the Romans?

Tweezers and mudpacks at the ready betwixtors, let's do it. And welcome back to betwixtor sheets. It's only Alexander Meddings. How are you doing? I am great. How's Italy? Italy's lovely. Italy's lovely.

It's getting a little bit colder now, but it's still sunny, still warm enough. Still, still nice enough to be drinking a glass of wine in the evening on the veranda, that kind of weather. That's the plan for after, yeah. Damn it. It's so miserable and horrible in the UK at the moment. But I'm not here to make myself feel bad about not living in Italy. We're here to talk about how filthy the Romans were, and not necessarily. in a euphemistic way, literally, how mucky were they?

Because they have a reputation as being incredibly clean, don't they? Yeah, it's a reputation that's not necessarily deserved. Oh, that's interesting. Because I was talking to Elin Eyanegro about the medieval people, and she got really angry being like, they weren't as dirty as everyone thinks, and now you're going to be like, the Romans weren't as clean as everybody thinks.

I love a bit of controversy. It's interesting, right? Because we kind of, yeah, we assume that medieval peasants are really kind of covered in mud and super dirty, probably from Monty Python and all of that. And then we assume the Romans are spick and span and really clean and that the baths are these kind of centres of sanitation. They're really not, as I'm sure we're going to dive into.

There's no plumbing system. Really? We'll get to that bit. We'll get to that bit. One of the things I asked, Eleanor, was like, where does the idea that the many of people are really dirty come from? And it's all kinds of things. But there is some truth to the fact that the Romans were quite clean.

Or is that a sort of a later invention of people projecting back onto them? Because we do. We think of them as like they're bathing and they're lazing around and they've got slaves brushing their hair and they've got, you know, like oils and stuff and their perfume. That's what we think about when we think of Rome. We do. And they are cleaning themselves, but that doesn't necessarily equate with them being

clean or hygienic in any modern sense of the word. Also, we always tend to talk about the Romans represented by the sources. So we're talking about kind of 0.05% of the population of the empire. The rich people. The ones who have all of these slaves to attend to their every woman, clean them, whatnot. The vast majority of the Hoypiloi are proper dirtbags. And that's that done. Thank you for listening to Betwigs the Sheets.

Well, let's talk about baths then, because that has got to be something, like a tick in favour of like, they must have been reasonably clean because if there was one thing that they're famous for, it's the baths, right? Yeah. Stabbing people and baths. That's Rome. Conquering people, building baths, building stuff, yeah. Building stuff, stabbing people, having a bath.

And having absolutely appalling attitudes towards women's sex and basically anyone who's not underly Roman male. But they were clean when they were doing it. Yeah, so baths are ubiquitous in Rome and also. across the empire. So according to a census done by Marcus Agrippa in the year 33 BC, so this kind of the reign of Augustus, early Roman Empire, there are 170 public and private baths in Rome alone. And it was probably closer to about a thousand by the fourth century. So by the time that the Western Empire fell. That's a lot of baths, isn't it? Yeah. And when we think of Roman baths,

we probably mistakenly think that these are simply just places where you, you know, go jump into a pool, swim around a bit. But these are leisure centres. These are kind of gymnasiums mixed with spas, mixed with libraries, mixed with places where you go to socialise, plot, politic, work out, get some abs. I'm trying to think of like a comparable thing, like there's a thousand baths in ancient Rome. Would that be like the equivalent of how many gyms that you might have in your local town today? I think that's a really good comparison, yeah. And you also have different types of baths just as you have kind of different types of gym, you know, virgin. and fortune athletic chains

and your local one down the road. But you're not going to be too far away from a bath? No. And you can go very easily. Entry to the baths is basically free. It costs one quadrants, which is the lowest denomination of coin. It's just like a Fredo prior inflation.

But when they were tempi. Okay. So you said that it's a social occasion. Can you talk me through? Like, what do you mean by this? This isn't people just running in flinging off the togo, giving it a quick once over and then clearing off again? Well, they're big facilities made up of many different sections.

There's no kind of standardised form. It's going to vary depending on where you go. But you're going to have, for example, a cold room, a frigidarium. You're going to have tepid baths, the tepidarium, and then you're going to have hot baths, a caldarium, which are having hot water essentially piped into them, or you can have underfloor heating provided by a hypercow system. So you have like smoke and kind of fire pits beneath the floor and that's heating the floor above, etc. You're going to have also the Sudatio, which is where you go to sweat.

The Italian word for sweat is Sudare, still to this day. And you're also going to have gymnasiums, places where you can work out. In the baths of Caracalla here in Rome, there was a Greek and Latin library where you could go and consult whatever papyrus of choice you wanted to. If you can read, probably very few people can in the grand scheme of things. You can also go and get some food. We're told of sausage sellers and hot food sellers, pastry sellers at the baths. You can probably go and find yourself a sex worker. Wow, they are really covering all bases here.

Do you want a book or a blowjob or a pie? Take your pick. And in Pompeii, I think you went to the suburban baths in Pompeii, right? And the graffiti in there is eye-opening. It's yes, yes. It's kind of reassuring to know that for as long as we've been around, given the chance to scroll something on a wall, we will go for a cock and bowl every single time. Yeah. In the men's baths especially.

There's so many willies in there. Yeah, that's it. And also loads of different sex scenes. Were they erotic places? Because that's something that Arnold was talking about with the medieval baths. I suppose it's difficult to separate one from the other because it's people being naked and people being close together and people. people stripping off. Or maybe that's a very modern projection. Maybe it was just like, hey, we're naked and? Well, they're kind of sexualized in the sense that everything in Rome is, because

there's no real concept of private, apart from if you're within the house, the domus. Absolute horn dogs. They were. Of course, the baths were sexy. And it's also a privilege that very few people enjoy to have privacy, to have your own domus, to have your own private area. Most people are living in communal living. They're having to see and listen to sex, all of the kind of everyday things that people are doing, going to the toilet, eating, getting rid of said food. It's one of the things that we often don't think about the history of the past

is just how piled in on top of one another everybody would have been. Like just talking about like shit and pissed and you absolutely would have seen people like your friends and your family going to the toilet. And they would have seen you. That would have been completely normal. There is no privacy whatsoever. Sex would have been something that was happening pretty much all around you. It's very strange for us to try and get our heads around that level of, I guess, intimacy is the word, but gross intimacy.

I mean, it's maybe comparable to kind of Victorian London and a Jack the Ripper era, London, you know, when you've got people kind of just like going for it down in any kind of alleyway they can find. I think Rome is much the same in the East End. Privacy is a very recent thing. You don't have to go back that far at all in our history and you can find records of people in tenement buildings and poor areas and they're living just absolutely piled in and you can still find that happening to this very day.

You can. The baths, I mean, they're not necessarily equated with sex, but sex definitely takes place there. There might be rooms set aside for sex workers. We only have one brothel from the ancient world, but they would have been absolutely everywhere and they're probably cropping up in any kind of public, well-attended venue that you can imagine. Baths are also equated with sex in a meme from the ancient world.

So we have this kind of, it's a meme, it appears on lots of tomb inscriptions. It essentially says that baths, wine and Venus, Venus being sex here, are all bad for the body. But Baths, Wine and Venus all make life worth living. Oh, that's a good meme. That's a fun meme. It appears on the tomb on the Appian Way. I think it appears in tombs across the empire. I love that.

You put it on their tombs. Yeah. It's just basically putting it on your tomb, I'm a massive slut. Yeah, I shagged around a lot, and I also like to the occasional bath. Hopefully the latter. Oh, I love that for them. They really owned that, didn't they? Okay.

All right. So they are quite sexy places, but it sounds more like a modern-day sauna that you might go into. You've got different heated rooms and you kind of wander around chatting with people. Yeah. We have a lovely description from Seneca, the tutor to the Emperor Nero, who lived above Abath house. And he was a proper grumpy old man. And he's left us a letter which he wrote to his friend in which he's complaining about everything that's taking place there. And anybody who goes to a gym these days will totally empathize with a lot of what he's saying.

He talks about the guys who are there pumping iron and groaning obnoxiously loudly. He's talking about those who like to splash and kind of. a bomb into the pool rather than getting gracefully. This is one where we probably can't identify too much, but there are lots of armpit hair pluckers applying their trades in the bats. So they're screaming out for clients, and the clients in turn are then screaming having their armpits plucked. Was that the picketrixes? Absolutely. Yeah, I think so. I was going to say, I think I put that in one of my books, so I hope that's right. So it sounds like a very plucky word. So it does, doesn't it? This is like grooming, really.

isn't just getting yourself clean, it's grooming better. Yeah, and it's male grooming. So it's been around since the beginning of time. And it was it was gendered, wasn't it? You had male baths and female baths. Yeah, sometimes. Some structures are going to be designed so you can accommodate men and women separately. In others, they might have mixed and mingled. You might have a kind of Budapest bath situation maybe where you have like kind of a certain time where women can go, a certain time when men go. There's a certain time of day where the sick go, which is actually in the morning, which makes no sense. So in the afternoon, you can stew in all of their scummy skin.

Oh, yum. Oh, that's nice. I know that the Romans were big on class. Was it segregated by class? Did you have like the paws can go at this time? Slaves can go at this time? Not really. If you are very wealthy, you might have your own baths complex. So on the Appian way, there's a bath complex, a private one known as Capo di Bauer baths. And they belong to a guy called Herodes Atticus, who was a Greek scholar, second century tutor to a couple of emperors, and he had his own ornate baths complex. But if you are a politician, say that you're running for office, it's probably in your best interest to also turn up now and then at the public baths and kind of show your face, show your power, show the size of your retinue.

Right. Okay. Give it a flex. Now, you said that just because they're bathing doesn't necessarily mean that it's clean. There's a difference there. Why would you say such a thing? Because all of this sounds quite clean to me. They're going quite regularly. They're a bathhouse on every street. Why wouldn't that be clean? Because there's no good way of recycling the water. Essentially, the best way that you're going to do it is you're going to just keep flooding the tubs. And you're going to keep flooding the pools. It's horrible. It's really bad. So all of the scummer's got to essentially float to the surface and then it's got to make its way out of there. And this is where you have moving water. A lot of the...

baths are just going to have stagnant pools lying around, which are hotbeds of malaria, cholera, all of the good ones. It's so bad for you that, isn't it? Just like warm vats of water that how, I don't even know how many people would be visiting these establishments in a day, but enough. A lot. Yeah, I mean, if you consider there are a few thousand baths complexes in the fourth century, the million people at the height of the Roman Empire just in Rome alone, stewing.

Sweating and farting and pissing. and just, oh, yeah, it's like a lot of kids, not just kids, in swimming pools today. Also, funnily enough, kids are not allowed in the Roman baths. It's only for adults. So, stinky kids at home having to be bathed in a pail of water. It can't have been that they just put some water in and then that was it for a thousand years. We never bothered to change it again. Like, they must have had some kind of, like, how often were they changing this water?

Well, the water's coming in on aqueducts. So the water, I mean, it's going to depend. Some baths are being fed by cisterns, but a lot of it's going to be aqueduct water. And this is going to be, in the case of Rome, it's going to be coming from really far away, up to 54 miles away from the mountains down to the southeast. They did do a good aqueduct. They loved a good aqueduct. They were really proud of them, too. They're immensely jingoistically proud of their aqueducts and their sewers.

They're like, Greeks, what have you ever done? I'll give them that, though. Yeah. Yeah. They're impressive structures. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they're mightily impressive. It takes a lot of calibrating.

But do you think they'd have been changing the water every day? No, it's going to take a really long time, isn't it, for a big pool of water to completely change. A big tub. It's going to take a long time. And you're also going to have to distribute water to the baths to all of the different parts and all of the different rooms. It's going to take a while. It's a big job, that, isn't it? It's a grim job.

But not the worst. Wait till we get to the sewers. Oh. Oh, God, of course. I'll be back with Alexander after this short break. Yeah, we do have some sources, don't we, that talk about how, I mean, they didn't know about bacteria, but they talk about things like don't go to the baths with an open sore because you'll be dead in a week.

Yeah, precisely. I mean, they're good at spotting some form of cause and effect. They really didn't fare very well. They also sort of know that you shouldn't go to the baths on the lash. You shouldn't go there and just kind of drink your body weight in wine, not hydrate and then go to a banquet. They sort of have worked that out. But yeah, their medical knowledge is wanting. It's not super hygienic, really.

I guess if you're rich and you have your own bath, it's marginally better, isn't it? That you're just sort of sitting, at least you're stewing in your own juice. You're stewing in your own and your nearest and dearest filth rather than that of a million other people. Right. Okay, so they are bathing, but it's not super hygienic. What about just like general cleanliness? What about the clothes that they're wearing? So you can be washing these in a number of ways.

Can be washing them in water, much like we do today. But fulleries are things. So fulleries are where you're going to take your big heavy bull and toga, if you need to get it, for example, dyed or cleaned. Problem with fulleries is that they are using ammonia to do the, the bleaching and the cleaning. And ammonia derives from urine. I knew you were going to say that.

I knew urine was going to show up somewhere. So these places really stink. And the way that they're sourcing the urine in these fulleries, well, it depends. In places like Ostia, Antica, which is Rome's port city, they managed to kind of cleverly design it so the runoff from the latrines is going into the fullery. But for the most part, you're going to have terracotta jars lining

either the side of the road or in the vicinity of public latrines that people are encouraged to piss into. And then someone at some point is going to carry this terracotta jar brimming full of piss to the fullery. Problem is that terracotta jars are kind of porous, and if they're not glazed, they break easily. And so it's entirely likely that you're going to be carrying this as some kind of poor enslaved person. And it's going to get drenched in it. It's going to just crack. I think it's like one of those internet myth things is that there's this thing that comes around every once in a while that the Romans used to wipe themselves off the Bint the Loo on shards of pottery. That's always sounded like complete bullets to me.

It sounds more like what you're talking about. They're using terracotta pots maybe to piss in in the street and then they're throwing that away in the latrine or they're using it to carry around. Yeah, it really depends. I mean, some people will have definitely wiped themselves using shards or pebbles or what have come to hunting. the military when they're away on campaign will be doing like anybody does. I'm not going to say anyone does when they go campaign. Well, no, but you know, like use your imagination. What would you use?

Leaves, I guess, if you don't have any toilet paper. But in the latrines themselves, in the public toilets themselves, there's the communal sponge on a stick. Now, that sounds delicious. Tell us about that. Well, one person could actually tell you whether it is delicious or not, because we have one horrible anecdote from a, it's from Seneca, and it concerns a German huntsman. from the first century AD, he was condemned to death in the arena, fighting wild beasts, some leopard or whatever.

And rather than face this noble death, he retires to the public latrines, or just latrines of the arena. He takes this sponge on a stick, and he rams it down his throat and kills himself so that he doesn't have to die in public. And Seneca said, this was a good death. No, I'll give me the leopard.

Right, right. Any day you take the leopard eating your face. Leopard. Give me the leopards. That's, oh dear. There is some debate around this sponge on a stick of like whether this was to be used communally to wipe ourselves or whether it was like a toilet brush in a bathroom that it was used as a cleaning. I mean, either way, you don't want it down your throat.

No, you really don't. But yeah, there is some debate. We're not entirely sure whether it's used to wipe bottoms or whether it's used to wipe the rim of the toilet. But, I mean, they're not flushed toilets. So you're not going to be using toilet brush. is in the same way that we do today. These are, for the most part, if they're public latrines, they're going to discharge into sewers. And if they're private toilets, they're likely going to just be cesspits.

And situated in the kitchen, for the most part, toilets. Oh. Okay. All right. I'm quite impressed that they've got sewers, though. They do. Yeah. That's another one of their crowning achievements of which they're particularly proud. In Rome, you have the Cloaca maxima, the great sewer, which is built in the reign of Rome's fifth

King, Tyquinius Priscus, and there's a pretty horrible story about its construction. Constructing it was the work of the very poor, and apparently it was such a grim job having to excavate and dig out this great drain that lots of people were just killing themselves rather than have to go to work. As punishment for this, and to ensure that his drain got completed, Tarquinius ordered that their bodies or the bodies of anyone who had killed themselves be crucified publicly naked, so it could be eaten by Carrian. He did. Yes. Get back to work.

Of course he did. What? They are the only group of people I could know who could manage to work a crucifixion into internal plumbing systems somehow. Got to get it in there. It's why we've got stabbing people, bathing, crucifying people and having appalling attitudes towards anyone who's not an elite Roman male. Let's talk about the latrines because that, whenever you've got people, This is going to have to be dealt with at some point. Did they have special areas, like this is the toilet area that you would go to,

the sources that say how bad it was? Was it better than you might have thought that it was, or was it just wall-to-wall off with a crucifixion thrown in? It's going to be pretty grim. I mean, you have them all over the city. You're going to have them in very densely populated areas, maybe even the ground floor of a Roman apartment building, is going to be converted into public latrines.

sponsored and paid for by a local benefactor, so one of the elite. There's no city council to speak, so it's all kind of locally funded infrastructure. They are going to smell horrendous. A lot of stuff is going to crawl up from them because there are no traps. And they're also going to explode quite a lot. So you're going to hear lots of explosions because you have a buildup of gases like hydrogen, sulphide and methane, unless you're sending people in like slaves and convicts to actually go and clean out the sewers. which they did, they're going to block a lot of the time. And so you're going to get explosions.

And the Romans thinking, there be magic. There'd be magic and dracon stuff. Oh, my God. Do we know who was cleaning this stuff out? Like you said they're like convicts and slaves. Or was it like a job? Because the other thing is that job called a Knight-Sailman in the UK, it could actually be quite well-paid because it was a horrendous job

but nobody wanted it. But what did the Romans do? So for cesspits, which is the usual setup in private residences, mainly because you don't want your house connected to a sewer, less something crawl up from it, or less there be a flood, and you just get kind of horrible. Or an explosion. Or an explosion, yeah. These are being emptied by guys who are coming at night with a wagon, and they are collecting all of the effluent,

and they are usually transporting it into the countryside, where it's being used as fertilizer. Okay. That's quite industrious. It is. And they're paid, okay. I think, if I remember, it's 11 asses. That's the daily wage for being able to bring loads of effluent into the countryside.

And that's the equivalent of maybe like, I don't know, it's hard to do ancient money in modern terms. Maybe like a dozen Fredo the Frogs, Cabri Fredo the Frogs, Chocolate Bars. It's still not a massive amount. No, it's not. I wouldn't do that for it. 11 Freddos. There's no way in hell. 11 trips of the bath. What would the streets be like then?

If you've got this many people in a built-up urban area, people make mess. They make mess today. You only have to encounter a binman strike to go, oh, bloody hell. This builds up very, very quickly. Yeah, I'm telling me, I live in Rome. Every year there's a rubbish crisis where it just doesn't get collected. It's usually in the middle of summer. And it's amazing how quick that we go from quite a civilised good people to just, oh, now we're living on our own filth.

Like, very fast that can happen. That's fine. Yeah. This is fine. This is the new normal. It was really bad. It was really bad. We have a lovely description from Juvenal.

He's a satirist writing in the first century AD. And I loved it because he describes a Rome that resonates with me a lot today. He talks about the endless traffic in narrow twisting streets and swearing at stranded caters. and swearing at stranded cattle. Not so much that, although you do get the occasional wild boars that make their way into the city these days. And he says all of the noise,

they would deprive even a Claudius of sleep. And the Emperor Claudius was a famous narcoleptu. But yeah, it's going to be full of mud. It's going to be full of shit. It's going to have rotting corpses of cattle, of slaves. Oh, God, of course. Exposed children. It's going to be really horrible.

Like things die, animals. die. And then of course there's butchery as well that has to happen for people to eat meat. Of course, which is probably next door to the public latrines. Yeah. Oh, God. It's bad. You do get a lot of graffiti around Pompeii. And it's amazing how much a variation on this turns up. Stop shitting outside my house. Like, it's just endless, like, written all over the city, not by the same person. I don't think it was by the same person. Of just like people going, whoever's shitting outside my house, stop it. I'm still keeping an eye out in Rome today for something of the soul.

Because also modern-day Romans are really into their graffiti. It's something that hasn't changed over 2000 years. So much of it's shit-related. It's incredible. My favorite one from Pompeii, there's one written by the doctor to the emperor Titus, a guy called Apollinaris. It was found in a latrine. And he says, Apollinaris, the doctor of Titus, shat well here.

Hick Kakavit Benet. It's like he had a good shit here. And given the Titus died, I think, at age of 41 from a perfectly curable fever, that might have been his crowning achievement as a person and as a medical profession. But it's, it is interesting, like when you read, and there are books that you can get,

really good books that just list out all the graffiti around Pompeii, is how much shit features in it, which again comes back to that, that point we're talking about early on, is like that would have been a very, very real feature. Now we are lucky enough to have a system where we just go into a room by ourselves flush and it just, it's taken away for us.

I don't think about it at all. We can use paper, wash our hands. Just wash our, yeah. Please wash your hands, for God's sake. But you do get the impression that, like, shit is a real issue. People are shitting on the floor. They're proud of having a shit. They write it on the walls.

Yeah. Well, Pompeii is a fascinating case too, because in Pompey, there are those raised sidewalks, right? You've got the stepping stones that cross the roads, because the roads are going to be, at times, they're going to be literally flowing with shit and waste. and dirty water from baths, from latrines, from everywhere. Incidentally, modern-day Romans think that we're also barbarians

because we don't have B-days in our bathrooms. Oh, well, see, that's fair enough, actually, that one. There's not a lot of criticism that the British will take, but I think we do have to fess up to that one, is that why do we think that just wads of dry tissue are acceptable? I think that that is gross, actually. I'm with the Romans on that one. I can only apologise on behalf of our people.

I'm a convert too. back with Alexander after this short break. Let's talk about something that you do see cropping up again and again and again in the sauces. It's like when someone's trying to compliment someone, they almost always say that their breath smells nice, which suggests that that was quite a big issue for them. The way people smelled seems to be very important. This is really bad.

You ready? Apparently, the best mouthwash came from Portuguese piss. Specifically from Portugal. So that's mixed in. charcoal and apparently cross mouse brains. I have no idea what the science is behind this. What on earth? Yeah.

That's not a thing. I know. Who came up with that? I don't know. I don't know. I should know. I should know. No, no, you shouldn't know.

Nobody should know. I kind of don't want to know. Yeah. I got to that depth and I thought I'm going to stop doing. Jesus. But if you couldn't get Portuguese piss and mouse brains, what might you be using? to try and make your breath smell better.

I personally would be masking it with a lot of wine, I think. That's probably the way to go about things. You're going to be masking it with wine and a variety of horrible. Garum, of course, fish sauce. That doesn't make it smell better, does it? No, of course. No, no, no. For anyone that's listening, what's garum?

It's a fermented fish sauce, which the Roma is essentially used to make things taste a bit salty. And you've tried it in Pompeii, right? You tried it when you were over in Italy. Yes, I did. and I've never forgiven them for that. Did you notice in that documentary that Dan Snow got to go and do the scenes in the baths where he was just lazing around in a jacuzzi

and I had to do the one where I tried rotten fish sauce? Oh, it was honestly, it was horrendous. There's also something worse than the taste. It's the fact that fermented fish sauce contains lots of eggs, which then grow into tapeworms. And so they've found... Now, why did you say that, Alexander? You didn't need to say that.

Now I'm going to have to end the interview to go to a doctor. I hope this wasn't in your case. But yeah, they found from studies across the Roman Empire that people the Romans colonized tended to have lots of tapeworms, some as long as 25 feet wrapping around their intestines. And this probably came from Garum. Bad. Oh, no. Bad, bad, bad.

So what did the Romans ever do for us? They've done garum intestines. Tapeworms. All right. So they might have smelled. that hopefully of wine, we can hope that they smell of wine, if not something awful. What about like perfumes and soap and things? What would they like to smell like? Well, in the baths they're covering themselves with oil or some kind of ground up powder and then they're going to be using the striggle, that kind of instrument to scrape it off their bodies. That's their idea of cleanliness. Nice.

And in terms of perfume, yeah, kind of look no further than the New Testament really, the stories of what incense, frankincense and mure. So you're going to have these kind of, these kind of smells are going to be of an aristocratic Roman. They're going to smell like a church congregation service. Like quite a heavy incense smell is probably what the, yeah, musky. Mixed for them musty and musky. If I could transport you back to the streets of ancient Rome at the height of the Roman Empire, what do you think it would have been like? Do you think it would have just been like an olfactory assault course?

Do you think it just would have been wall-to-wall awful? Yeah, I think it's pretty bad. It's also very, very dangerous. I mean, unless you are one of the elite and unless you have your own bodyguards, Consider that also blades abandon Rome, so you're going to have bodyguards with clubs who are out to protect you if you have to make errands at night, although you're going to generally try and avoid going on to the streets at night. But any time when you're wandering around, it's going to be dangerous. It's going to be really stinky. And at some point, you're going to encounter some horrible, incurable disease, which is going to lay you low and you'll probably be dead by 25.

Oh, dear. So not really as squeaky clean as we like to think of it. Is there any records of any emperors who are known for being particularly cleanly or particularly dirty? Let's think. Tiberius, he liked to frequent the public baths with his retinue, but that's more a kind of show of power. What about Julius Caesar? He was very vain. I know that much.

He liked getting his armpits plucked, didn't he? He was big into depolation. But in terms of cleanliness, I'm not sure, because he would have also been. seen as a kind of rough and ready soldier who's out there getting a bit grimy. Yeah. Down with the troops, digging ditches. They think that like too much preening and too much cleanliness would have been feminine, is that might have been what they were thinking.

Precisely. I think so. You have to dedicate your energy and your attention elsewhere, so, you know, killing people and building stuff. Would you rather be in ancient Rome, or would you rather take your chances in the Middle Ages, or in Victorian London when it comes to cleanliness, just for a comparison. Who's the cleanest? It's a really tricky one.

I mean, in terms of my own personal amuse, I once got dysentery working at a bar at V Festival as a student. So I don't think I'm going to fare very well in any of these settings. But, oh, gosh. I personally would take Rome, but not because of hygiene, just because I would maybe give myself a fair crack at being able to navigate the streets, just based on jogging and get out of the city really quickly. go to the countryside and then just be hopefully enslaved by some wealthy, some wealthy person who lives in a sunnier climb.

Good point. Good point. You'd be a more familiar territory. Alexander, you've been so much fun to talk to again. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? The best place might be my website, which is alexandamedding's.com, where I've got a blog and also I advertise some tour services. I also have a domain Appio with Alex.com, through which you can contact me.

me and join me on an Appian Way tour. I've actually taken a fair few betwixters down the Appian Way this summer, which now I say that loud. That sounds really dodgy. It's not dodgy at all. Alexander can take you up the Appian Way if he wants to. You just have to pay for the experience. Thank you so much.

You have been so much fun, as always. Thank you, Kate. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Alexander for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget. get to like review and follow along whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are going to find out if anyone else in history was more gross than the Romans. Can the Egyptians or the medieval people outdo them when it comes to filth? And if you would like us to explore a subject,

or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Nick Thompson and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixters Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast, a podcast, by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.