Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - What Made You Ugly In Ancient Rome?

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

What was a Roman skincare routine like? Why did the beard make a comeback under Emperor Hadrian? And what did it mean to be ugly in this time?In this new mini-series, we'll be exploring the beauty standards - and ideas of ugliness - throughout time periods in history.Starting today with Ancient Rome, Kate is joined by historian and author Emma Southon to find out why Romans would have loved the recent bushy eyebrow trend.Find out more about Emma's work here: https://www.emmasouthon.com/This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.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.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely Bertwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Bertwijkster Sheets. And I'm so, so glad that you are. And if you're new here, this is the first time you've ever listened to Betwix the Sheets, well, then we're extra, extra pleased to have you here. And we have something for you.

This is called The Fair Do's Warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And we have to tell you that, because you might just have wandered in here, thinking betwixt the sheets is some kind of podcast about interior design or bed furnishings. And it's not. It's a smutty rude podcast. And if you listen to this and you keep getting offended, well, I'm afraid just tough tits. That one's on you because fair do's, we did warn you.

Right. On with the show. Speaking as a historian and somebody living in the Year of Our Lord 2025, one way that you can accurately, with pinpoint precision, measure time is with eyebrow trends. Just bear with me on this one. For instance, I have friends who are still in recovery from the pencil-thin eyebrow era of the 90s. Hashtag never forget. And here, in a Roman bathhouse of all places, eyebrows are still a big deal. They still have their own fads and trends. Roman women used coal and black dye smeared across their eyebrows to enhance that look.

And poets are marveling at their mono brows. Honestly, like a really black thick. monobrow just like a line across the center of your face. That was like a whole thing with the Romans. And the trends don't stop there. Of course they don't. Not when it comes to beauty. And so too when it comes to what is not beautiful, what we regard as ugly. So put those tweezers away and the less said about concealer lips the better. We have got some exploring to do. What do you look for a man? Oh money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the fire.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel so done. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. Beauty standards and sex history go hand in hand, or rather crotch in hand. If you want to have sex, you probably need to make yourself attractive, or at least put on a bit of deodorant and brush your teeth. Not if you're rich, obviously, then you can just look like whatever the hell you want to look like people will want to have sex with you anyway. But this isn't a podcast about them. This is a podcast about trying to look beautiful.

And the Romans were exactly the same. They were every bit as concerned about looking attractive as we are today. And in this new mini-series, we will be exploring ideas of beauty and ugliness through the ages. And we will be starting with the absolutely fabulous and utterly appalling Romans. Have you ever seen a genuine Roman hairstyle? It's something to behold, I can tell you. How did they smell? What did a Roman smell like? And in what ways were enslaved people part of their beautifying process? Well, joining me today is a long-time friend of the show, the always wonderful and always horrifying Emma Southern, who is an expert in all things ancient Roman and she is going to help us get under the skin of Roman beauty standards. Are you ready for this one?

I know I am, let's do it. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Emma Southern and her cat is also here. How are you two doing? We're very well, we're very cosy. We're all curled up and ready to talk about some Romans. Livia is so excited for this one. She's named after a Roman that she's come to join in.

She's very beautiful, so she knows all about Roman beauty. Perfect segue. Look at that. A secondary expert, yes. we are actually here to talk about Roman standards of beauty which is a fascinating topic as you go back through time and I'm very curious as to know what on earth the Romans are doing because every single time I speak to you I'd lose even more respect for them than I had.

That's how I know I'm doing my job, yeah. Keep lowering the bar and they keep smashing through it every single time. So if there was any kind of babies that were killed in the people, pursuit of this or mass strangulation to achieve a flushed glow of the face, I will not be surprised. But we'll start here for anyone who hasn't listened to you on the show before, which frankly would be bonkers, can you give us a sort of a rough estimate of what time period are we talking here? If we say Roman, because the Romans are still with us. They're still around today.

What do you mean when you say Romans? So when we say Roman, we broadly mean the period from about 500 BCE to about 500 CE, which is the Roman period or the high Roman period. But when people say the Romans or talk about Roman stuff, we're usually talking about a much smaller kind of 200-year period, about 50 BCE to about 200-ish, 250 CE. That's the period for which we have by far the most information. and virtually everybody that I'm going to mention in this episode

and everyone that have ever mentioned probably has come from kind of that period. So the fall of the republic and then the rise of the empire through to what we call late antiquity, which is when the Christians start getting involved. Is that why everyone stays focused on this quite small chunk of time within a thousand years of histories because there's the most evidence for it. Is there a real? Yeah, it's not just that those were the best bits.

The most evidence for those people. They're the periods when it's like the richest and has the most influence and therefore was doing the most of its writing and the most of its producing stuff. And when they, even all of the stuff that we think we know about the periods before that, like all of the old wars and what they imagined about the foundation of Rome, it's all written during that period. It's all written during the late Republic and the very early years, the early decades of the imperial system. So even when we talk about what the Romans considered to be ancient, we're really talking about what the Romans at the time of Cicero and Augustus thought about their own history rather than any other period in that. This is like peak Roman.

Yeah, exactly. And it's still quite a big chunk of time. And if you think about how much beauty standards change within our lifetime, I mean, I'm sure that you can recall things that you were doing as a teenager or a younger person that now you look back on you're like, oh no, why were we doing the eyebrows? That was old enough to remember the pencil thin eyebrows.

I'm also old enough to remember the pencil thin eyebrows. And yes, my sister's eyebrows have never grown back from overplucking. Thankfully, it was too much of a wist to do it. I had to grow mine back with regain the bones and the boldness. That's true. I didn't think you could do that. That's amazing. Yeah, well, you turn, neither did I, but it turns out you can. Top tip, everybody.

I'm going to tell my sister, yeah. Yeah, please do. There's a little message. Put a toothbrush and then just comb it through morning and night and pretty soon. Three more hairs will emerge. I'm trying to think of like what other, like beauty trend. I remember when you said, does my bum look big in this and that was bad. That was a bad thing, yes, rather than trying to emphasise it.

That was like the worst thing ever. Yeah. And now it's like, hell yeah. Yeah, it does. And like, we used to straighten the hell out of our hair when, like, very poker straight hair was a thing. And then, like, volume came back and we were all doing overnight curls instead. I was thinking earlier because I was reading, I was like making lists of all the terrible things at Rovers does their skin. I remember that walnut cleanser that everybody had that had walnut shells in it.

They were, like, exfoliated your skin. Apricot that, like, scratched a blow of flesh off. Yeah. It was actually painful. Highlights. Like, like, the, just looked bad. Like, just a bit of your hair was a different colour. Was just, like, a big, thick chunk of hair.

Yeah. And that was incredibly hot and cool. And, yeah, and it all, you know, it changes, for now it changes so quickly. But it's always changed from generation to generation. You're always, like, rejecting what your parents were doing and being, like, no, we don't do short skirts anymore. We do midi skirts now. Yes. And everything at the moment is very oversized, which,

I'm enjoying, like, big oversized trousers and big oversized jumpers and t-shirts. And that'll change again and it'll look very dated. So you're thinking like 200 years of history. Yeah. The Romans, like, it must have changed a lot what was cool and what wasn't cool. Do we have any information on Roman eyebrows? We do, actually. We do, yes.

They loved a thick eyebrow. They were really, like, that period about five years ago when really big eyebrows were in. Yes. And they would have loved that. They talk about how women would fill in their eyebrows with coal, with black dye. There's a couple of references to people having false eyebrows, like to make them thicker. Oh, okay.

And like there's one reference to a very sexy monobrow and it's like how it's a kind of poem about how beautiful someone is. And it says, you know, the gap between your eyebrows is so small. It's delightful. See, that's what I'm talking about It's the uniquely weirdly Roman things So they loved a really bushy Like bushy to the point where the brows are touching

And what else? If like you're thinking of like Roman beauty standards Like a massive eyebrow I feel like I should go and like get a pencil A massive eyebrow Big eyelashes as well So they're mascaraing What on earth are they using for that?

They're using like lamp black and ashes or just anything that you've got a lot of like you know fire and charcoal line around you can use that coal so they love big eyelashes like big eyebrows

they like very very very pale skin another one with the pale skin another one with the pale skin it's a classic of like pre industrial societies we only really like tans because it shows that you can travel and that you can be outside

instead of having to be stuck inside at a desk whereas it like tanning shows leisure time because you can travel and sit on a beach in somewhere warm all year round. But for the Romans and kind of most pre-industrial societies, you have paleness means that you don't work outside and means that your leisure sign is inside. And so they love this very, very, very white skin. And that never really goes away.

They, at all periods, they talk about white pale skin and using skin lightening and like white creams on their face. So you get the classic stuff that still continues where they're using white lead on their face and then they're putting other things on their face to deal with the like massive sores and peeling skin that they're getting from the fact that they're putting lead on their face.

The most famous apart from the lead which is pretty bad is crocodile dung which was believed to have some kind of bleaching property. Right, okay. What on earth? How does crocodile dung make your skin whiter? Surely that would make it darker. I've never seen Crocodile Dung actually You'd think so

Maybe it's white Maybe it's white But they talk about crocodile dung All we have is men talking about women doing this Pretty much And 99.9% of the time They're saying Aren't women gross and stupid

For doing all of this stuff to themselves And they don't realise that it makes them not hot at all As if the only reason Women would do this is to make men happy And so they we have most of the evidence for this kind of thing comes from poetry, it comes from satires, it comes from plays, it comes from men making jokes about them

and being like, erg women, aren't they stupid? Or philosophers being like godwomen, this is the evidence that they're less evolved than we are because they do all of this stupid stuff. This is all sounding horribly familiar. Like this is, it's like that you still get this rhetoric today of like once in a while some man will be brave to venture forth on the internet with a picture of a woman

who doesn't look like she's wearing much makeup and say something like, this is what real beauty is and then all the women will come charging and going, that's actually quite a fucking lot of makeup. There, pal. Yeah, that's actually loads. And the no makeup makeup thing is totally something that the Romans are like as well

because a lot of the time you will have the like these men will be writing about women who have, you know, they've got lipstick on, they've got blush, sure on, they're like, aren't they silly for putting like chalk on their faces? So they look white and then they go out in the, um, so chalk is something that they use chalk dust and like mix it with some kind of oil or something and put it on the skin. And then if they sweated or if it rained, it would

run. And so they make all of these jokes about women who has who you can see their makeup running because it's cheap makeup. But at the same time, they'll be like barbarian women are so gross because they don't even put makeup on or do their hair properly. Like, and they don't enhance their prettiness, and that's how we know. And they're kind of disgusted equally by women that don't do anything to themselves.

Yeah, that's them. Which is classic. They want this idea of women that enhance their natural beauty, but at the same time, with, like, delicate makeup that looks like they've put some effort in, but not too much effort, But if they have made it so that it is clear their main way, wearing makeup, or they're wearing makeup that is unnatural in some way.

So, like, coloured eye shadow is something that they'll use. They'll grind up dye. They'll use the same dye that they use on clothing and use them as eye shadow. And they're doing it because it looks pretty and it's fun and makeup and changing your appearance can be fun. And then men are like, oh, gross, what are you doing? That's not natural. How dare you?

I have very clear ideas of what natural is. and those are the only opinions that we're left with, really, apart from one guy. And we don't have any women's opinions. So we don't have like any bloggers who are like, I love doing my makeup. I find it really fun. Do you know what's kind of mad about that? It's just like when you said the only people that are writing about makeup are men, that's just thrown the entire thing into a very, very different perspective for me

because I'm imagining these are mostly straight men writing about. women being, so this, if I went up to my dad and I said, who's Charlotte Tilbury? He'd think it was one of my mates. Do I mean, like, if I tried to like say, eye, eyelash curlers, uh, eyebrow gel, a highlight, he would just look at me. I said, what, have you got a foundation? He'd think I wanted to like, do something to the tiles in the bathroom or something. So the idea that men are going to be able to understand what women are doing, that suddenly makes it really difficult, doesn't it? It does. And they assume because they're men, that women are doing it for them.

Because they have no conception of female community. And women are putting like a huge amount of effort in. And you can see it, like hair is the one that we can really see because it survives in paintings and stuff. And you can see how much time and effort and money and expertise, enslaved expertise, mostly, is going into making these really elaborate hairstyles. and they're also presumably doing very elaborate makeup as well and they think it looks gorgeous and the men are like, these women can't even stand up, ha ha ha,

but they're presumably doing it for other communities of women who are like, God damn, that hair looks amazing. Like how did you even get that foot tall? Like they have, there's a particular type of hair called Flavian hair where there was this period where they made like big, they look like fans, like big flat oval. on the front of their head and then there would be a bun

behind it. I want to see that. That would be made of like intricate plats. Has anybody ever recreated it? Because I know there are like food historians out there. They have. Is there like a hair historian who's redone this?

There is. There's a great hair historian on YouTube whose name I've forgotten. But she has recreated them and she shows how they sewed the hair like they would and how time consuming these would be and then how challenging they could be.

Hang on. My producer who was also on the call but keeping quiet has just texted me. Yep. Fucking hell. There you go. Wow. That looks like she's wearing a bonnet, but that's hair.

But it's all hair like sewn and platted and like hours of work and probably quite painful and you're going to have to keep your head relatively still in order to wear it. But that is clearly not for men. Like that is not beautifying for men. That's not even for lying down. what that is. Like, that is hair for other women to be like, damn, you have a lot of money and a lot of time

and that looks cool. And I wish I could do that. I'm just looking at that, like thinking how would they have done it? Presumably they would have worked out that heat can change the hair for a little bit to like curlers and stuff like that. But that is, if anyone,

well, people, like I said, if anyone's listening to this, hopefully someone's listening to this. But whoever, just Google it, Google Roman hairstyle. That is so. crazy, impressive. It probably is the first thing that comes up if you Google, there is, I'm going to find out the name of the woman.

Yes, we should, let's give her a shout out. Janet Stevens, if you Google Janet Stevens with a pH, her hair recreations of what these look are. It's my evening sorted. That's incredible. Yeah, she does other periods as well, but she shows how a lot of it is done with kind of hair pieces and then they're sewn in.

Mind you, we still, have hair pieces sewn in today weaves and extensions and such I mean I imagine that the Romans be a little bit

harsher than the ones that they do have today what were they bleaching hair because one of the and I'm never quite sure if this is like an internet myth

about the Romans I've only been able to find people saying it's true about and other people saying that it's true that women selling sex had to

by law dye their hair blonde and wear makeup. No, it kind of sounds like something they would do, but also not, because I don't know if they cared that much. No, you know, selling sex, you need somebody for every taste. Everybody has, you know, the aesthetic of beauty that you see in art and in sculpture, for example, or described by, like,

these guys who are all part of this one elite community. They're all aristocracy. are the guys that we're left with these opinions and they've all got very similar opinions. It's like if we just had like 75 Jacob Rees-Mogg's and their opinions on beauty and like nobody else basically. But what you clearly see is that people, there's like a whole diversity of beauty. So you have people who dye their hair red and you have people who die their hair black and you have people who die their hair blonde.

And red and blonde are seen as being quite kind of exotic hair colours in Rome because they're white foreign. So doing that is a statement of being kind of clearly unnatural. It's like dying of hair pink. And it's a deliberate decision. And people do do it. And then men like Seneca are like, oh my God, how dare you? That's awful. So they were dying. They were using Hena and I imagine chemicals that you'd be lucky if yeah, hair was left on by the end of that. Exactly. All kinds of things that they would use to a lot of plant-based materials, but also anything that will bleach or... Looking at those pictures of that hair and that is wow hair.

I went to Pompeii, we were filming a documentary and we had a Toga expert who came along to dress me in the lovely down snow. And what I was really surprised about is like not only how much fabric was involved, but the fact that it's really a balancing act. Yeah. Like it's not pinned. Because I was expecting him to get a badge or something and, pin it in place and it's not. It's like, it's balanced on you. So if you walk quick, it's going to

come off. But like looking at that hair as well, you can't move around with that hair. Like everything these women are doing is just very mobile, surely. They are. And it is a, much like with the toga, it's a display of how little you have to do because you've got people to do it for you. Specifically, you own people to do it for you. Like that hair and, you know, wearing a lot of makeup and wearing a delicate dress, a wearing a toga, which is solidly two metres of material, like they're massive,

are a demonstration that you don't have to move around very much, that you can sit, you can move slowly, you don't have to carry anything, people are going to bring you everything. It is a sign of wealth and status as a result. Even if you don't have anybody near you right now, it's a demonstration that you do.

I usually do. I have somebody available. Yeah, exactly. But we still do that today, don't we? Like, you were making that interesting point earlier about a tan is doing the same thing that pale skin was doing throughout history. It's a signifier of, like, look, I've got money. This is about me being wealthy. Yeah.

And like high heels, for example, in the workplace or a demonstration that you're not going to have to do any manual labour. Good point. Or any labour at all in my case, because I'm absolutely immobilised by them. Yeah, you're just going to sit. You're not going to be walking too far. or anywhere. A lot of what we're considered to be beautiful that we add to ourselves generally is a sign that we are wealthy and there is something that is therefore by design unattainable to 99% of people and like all kinds of like smooth skin is always an ideal in and the Romans obsessed with

it as well. That's a constant isn't it that well like I'm trying to think of constant. Healthy I think is it? Although the Victorians did have a I like to look a bit sort of pale and a bit sickly at some points. But it wasn't like actually looking sick. It was like a pale and sort of drawn thing. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Fragile. That's the one. Yeah, to look a bit fragile. But I think looking healthy is fairly consistent. Shiny eyes, pretty consistent. Smelling nice. That's, at no point in history, have I found anyone that doesn't care about smelling nice?

No, they do like to smell nice. Romans love to smell nice. What do they smell of? What does a nice Roman smell of? A lot of incense, a lot of like imported fragrances. So incense, myr, frankincense, your like quite heavy scents generally that would probably to us smell quite like churchy. Yeah.

Yeah, so they love that kind of things that come from Arabia that are quite intense. Musky stuff. Yeah, musky stuff. And rather than kind of flowery smells that they could get nearby, they like a good heavy, oily scent. Nice. I'll be back with Emma after this short break. So we've been talking a lot about the women, but what about the men?

Because they have beauty standards too. It's just that women... They do. Because of the patriarchy, we are forced to put ours on show in different ways. But men are equally as concerned about how they look. So they weren't doing their hair like that. But what were they up to? Men are

My personal favourite Which I'm currently obsessed with telling people Is that men plucked their armpits I love that Which I find delightful Because it sounds awful Yeah And there's this bit

Seneca mentions it twice Which I feel really funny So one point he says He's talking about two different types of orators But like some who do too much And some who don't do enough And he says like on the one hand you have these guys

and they're like the guys who shave their legs because they do too much and on the other hand you have these guys who don't do enough and they don't even pluck their armpits like that's just a basic level of bodily care for him is plucking your armpits. Was it all the

hair gone? I seem so. It happened in the baths and you had like people there who would pluck the and there's other people who complain about the sound coming from the baths that you can hear people like screeching basically because their armpits are being blocked. Wow.

All right. Well, they were quite determined then. It is. So I like that that men plucked their armpits. This is actually a really interesting shift that you get is that for most of Roman history, beards were considered to be quite barbarous and a sign of a lack of civilization. So shaving the face was considered to be a demonstration of like your control, basically. you are.

They're obsessed with that, aren't they? Yeah, so hairlessness is considered to be the ideal, and beards are considered to be quite foreign and a bit weird. And then there is a very specific shift with the Emperor Hadrian, who's about like 170. He's very into Greek culture, and he has a beard. And so he single-handedly redefines the beard as something manly and cool for Romans. And all of a sudden you get statues and portraits

and people who have beards who are able to be masculine and pretty. Whereas had they like 100 years before that, even 50 years before a Hadrian, a guy with a beard, everybody would have thought he was

kind of effeminate and kind of Greek and probably wouldn't be somebody that you would necessarily completely trust but you certainly wouldn't think of him as beautiful. Do they nick a lot of beauty standards from the Greeks? They seem to have borrowed many other things. Yeah, they did.

They did. They inherit them directly and then they, because the Romans are the descendants of the Greeks, and then they steal them pretty clearly as well. Like they think that the Greeks are great. It's just a shame that the gods didn't like them because they didn't do their religion properly, essentially. If they had been a bit kind of cooler and less beardy, then maybe they could have had their own empire. But unfortunately, the Romans came along and fixed all of the problems that the Greeks had. A lot of ideas around, one, like what a beautiful body looks like. So the kind of musculature and the every undergraduate's favourite, the tiny dick. The tiny dick. Yeah.

What's your thoughts on the tiny dick, Emma? Why? Why? Why, why? The tiny dick is a demonstration of control and tidiness and elegance and neatness. Neatness, yeah. And a large penis is a size. of kind of a barbarous lack of control.

So, yeah, so the tiny penis, the neat little penis is a, it comes directly from the Greeks. But also there are ideas that beauty, morality and divine favor or divinity are all inherently connected. That a good person is beautiful and a bad person is ugly. That those two things are inherently intertwined, that they're convened. that there can be no like separation between those things and that the gods are beautiful, therefore beautiful people must be godly. Yes, that's pretty privileged and a half, isn't it? It is. It is. And it's kind of fascinating,

because you see all this stuff in fiction, like, where people are identified as noble or elite, because they're so beautiful. It's like, oh, you're obviously too beautiful to be low class. You sometimes see that in like fairy stories and things where some princess is actually dressed as a peasant, but it's really obvious that she's not because she's so beautiful. Exactly. Yeah. And it's the same like, it's the exact same tradition of beauty and nobility are connected. And then that is connected to divinity.

But we do still do that. There's been research paper after research paper published about how people are nicer to people when they perceive them as a. The world is a better place if you are good looking basically. Oh. Yes. Yeah. It's like we still, I mean, hopefully not to the same extent that the Romans were doing it, but that's still very much with us, this link between moral worth and being noble and what you look like.

Also, it's very funny how it seems like they almost doing it on purpose, like how obvious they are with it. So when you read Suetonius's biographies, everybody. biography that he writes about an emperor and their family ends with like a little potted description of them and all of the good emperors are like and his legs were great and his hair was great and he was uh his arms were well shaped and he was in great health and then all of the bad emperors are like he had bandy legs he was bald he had bad skin um and they just seems impossible that like none of them were fine looking

none of the bad emperors were okay but no they were all funny looking because they were evil and that was inherent to them and therefore their evil came out in their face and as a result people who don't meet their kind of beauty standard because they have like

Tiberius has acne for example and like this what is very clearly adult acne that is being described is presented as like a representation of his bad moral character. So all of these people around the world with acne. Oh, that's not fair.

Being treated as though that is the god cursing them for having bad moral character. Wow. The other thing that you realise when you look at the statues, apart from the rather modest package that a lot of them seem to be working with. And there has actually been research done on that.

You know, there's been research papers of answering the question, like are they actually smaller? So I read one and someone had gone full like maths professor on it ratios and scales and like average statistics and they came back with yeah they are they are actually smaller than average

so they are well that's good to know it's good to know in it I'm glad somebody else did that I'm so glad that somebody did that you can read it online actually but looking at the body that the penis is attached to that is not small and when you're looking at that body

that is every bit as unobtainable as men on the cover of men's health and fitness today. It's like there's muscles upon muscles on these guys. Yes, everything is very beautifully defined. And I went to the Vatican with my mum last month. When you get up close to them, like they're so defined. And like every muscle is picked out. And part of that is their sculptor showing off, like how good they are at doing the human form. But part of that does then drive in the same way that men's magazines do now,

like the idea that this is an ideal body type and men will try to do that. And you do see, like, bathhouses are also gyms and men are working out in them. And there are like manuals that survive for men for like weightlifting, basically. Like they do it with rocks. So lifting progressively heavier and heavier rocks and trying to tone their bodies and philosophers again complained that men of their generations spend too much time working on their bodies and not working on their minds. Of course.

Because something's never change. Funnly enough, kind of women's ideal body type is much more obtainable. It's still squidgier. Much squidgier. It is softer. The ideal is small boobs, wide hips and are kind of soft curves. And they don't like, there's all this stuff about. women covering up thin bodies by wearing loads of clothes to like give the impression that they have more to them because they don't really like thinness.

They don't like fatness because they have the same thing that we do really that fatness is related in some way to lack of control. And they're obsessed with control and self-control. So they don't appreciate that, but they do like softness in women. but male beauty is very hard, very toned. And you look at the emperor portraits. And Claudius, for example, who is in real life a disabled man. He has some kind of limb difference that means that he limps. This also means that he kind of hunches slightly.

And he's called a monster by his mother because he has. His mother was kind of terrifying. And he's kept out of the public art. for most of his adult life because he has visible disability. And it's considered to reflect poorly on the imperial family that they have a disabled person in the family and that is a sign because they consider disability to sort of be a sign of divine disfavor.

And so they keep Claudius out of the public eye for most of his life. But eventually through a series of unfortunate events, he becomes emperor. And then all of the statues of Claudius are him as this buff, ripped 25-year-old soldier. Like, he's a 55-year-old, 60-year-old man with visible disability. But that is not how he portrays himself. He portrays himself as the physical ideal of a Roman man, which is he's always got an old face.

So he's always got like a kind of, you know, middle-aged man face, but on buff-ripped body. Do you know, that just makes me think that, because, like, we are, at the time of recording, Donald Trump's health report was released a couple of weeks ago. And in it he claims to be, it's like six foot two. And I think in British, in British way, it's like 14 stone that he claims that he is. And obviously people have some questions about this.

But like that's sort of the same thing, isn't it? Yeah. There's a vanity to it. But then like, why is he doing it? obviously to try and appeal and pretend that he's this athletic person when he's not. Yeah, and because there is, like, we maintain the same idea that health of the body and health of the mind are connected. Yes. And if Claudius was to portray himself as he was, then people in the empire would trust him less. They would be less willing to allow him to be in charge of the armies.

they would be less willing to allow him to make laws. And 99% of the empire only ever sees a statue or a coin. And they don't really know that he is disabled. And so that's fine for them. They're like, okay, what a great guy. And so he can't portray himself as he is. But that has to be, I think, quite crippling to, again, it's an unobtainable body standard because it is,

it's like a 4% body fat. it's ridiculous that these guys rippling muscles I spend four hours in the gym a day gladiator standard like it's not one that most people can obtain but the point of a body

ideal is that it's not obtainable for anybody unless their job is having that body and that makes everybody else feel bad but then we work really hard in order to try to do it and ideally buy something because all of this stuff is being sold by somebody like these people aren't making these cosmetics in their house. They are going to the shops and they are purchasing cosmetics to fix their skin.

They are purchasing cosmetics to dye their hair. They are purchasing stuff that will, you know, help them gain or lose weight to fit this bodily ideal. So it's basically all the same, like, create an insecurity and then sell to fix it. Thinking about Roman perceptions of ugliness. and we've definitely touched on some. But I remember just then that you told me Julius Caesar was upset because he was bold. He was really embarrassed. If there was one Achilles heel that that man had on his colossal ego,

it was the fact that his hair was thinning. Yes. And a lot of people have this fear that they are losing their hair. The baldness is... Bolding's bad. It's ugly. Yeah. Right.

Okay, baldings ugly. Yeah, like it's unmasculine. If they had hair transplants, they would. would have, they do have their own little versions of Rogaine, like they are rubbing all kinds of herbs and, like, barley into their head. Wow. Oh, no, it's the ashes of snails that they use for freckles. Freckles are also not great.

Oh, so freckles are out. Yeah, so you burn a snail and then you use the ashes on your face. Classic. That's a good. There we go. That's the Romans. That's the Romans that I know and love, as long as something's in pain. Somebody has to die, yes.

It's all been very tidy up until this point. Like nobody's been brutally murdered or... No. Is it just, is it aging? Because in most cultures and times as far as I can see, I've yet to find a group of people that view aging as erotic or sexy. You can find cultures that find aging as respectful that you gain wisdom, definitely. But none that I have found where it's like, Jesus, you're hot when you're 18.

It just isn't there. It's always getting old is bad. Getting old is bad, yes. Old age remains bad. Men get wisdom. Women obviously don't. Of course not. Why would we? There is a poem by, I think it's Marshall,

where he compares wrinkles on women to mould. Brilliant, thank you for that, Marshall. Excellent. Quite glad he's dead. Yes, he's horrible. Big, not fan of Marshall. they have the classic thing with women who wear makeup or who dress nicely as soon as they've like you know

past the point of menopause they're laughable and hilarious because who would want to have sex with them and the only reason that anybody would want to be wearing makeup obviously is to have sex or shave your legs that's the only reason there can be any other like pressures or desires on to do it and so that's kind of a classic joke is the old lady old lady, I say, like a woman my age, basically, 42.

Very makeup. It would be, it is depressing. It would be kind of a classic Roman comedy. It is a woman in her 40s or 50s who looks like she might want to be attractive. Brilliant. Thanks, Romans. I'll be back with Emma after a short break. What about just thinking, because what I know about Rome is, It was very multicultural. It was very multicultural. You've talked about that on this show before,

and I've definitely seen Mary Beard doing a documentary about how they weren't, one of the few saving graces about the Romans is they weren't racist. They came up with different ways to hate and persecute people, but race doesn't seem to have been one of them. You were just a Roman no matter what you were. But how did this play into their notions of beauty then? Because it's all sounding very Western and white so far. It is. And that, to be fair, is one. place where they are, whiteness is beauty as far as they are concerned really.

And darkness is a deviation from that. And so they obviously are fully aware that non-white people exist. They're well into North Africa. They have a lot of contact with Sahara and sub-Saharan Africa. They have, there are images of

black people in Rome and in the Roman world, but never as an object of beauty, always as an object of either fetishization or barbarism. So you do see, for example, the fetishization of black men and black male genitalia. So there's this... Wow. Were they the ones that started that? Because that's still very much with us.

It's got... It's very much with us. It's got a category on Pornhub. Yeah. So there is a mosaic from, I think it's from Pompeii, actually. It's definitely from Italy. of a black male bath attendant, a slave bath attendant, and then he has an enormous penis.

Oh. Not like in a pan way, where it is like comedic or it's like divine, but in like fetishizing blackness way. Wow. And it's picked out in colours, but they very much have this image of blackness and darkness as being,

exotic and it cannot be beautiful because it is not whiteness basically and they have a very clear idea that that beauty is whiteness which allows certain people from northern Europe to be considered to be beautiful as long as they adhere to Roman standards

but often they don't so they think that like moustaches are hilariously stupid and they do also think but you don't get the fetishisation of the Northern European in the same way at all. Okay, okay. So as a final question then, a lot of the Roman beauty standards are completely bonkers.

Like if you walked around in that hairdo today, you would get laughed at. If you leaded your face white, you would turn a few heads. People would think you were on your way to some kind of fancy dress party. But was there any beauty treatments that the Romans use that perhaps is still with us that stood the test of time? Or was it just wall to wall insanity? I mean, we don't even put,

we do pluck body hair, but you don't do it with tweezers. Not so much anymore. I mean, a lot I think of what they do if you made it with something that was slightly less toxic, it would probably be, like you could totally do a Roman beauty tutorial

that was kind of lightening the skin, filling in the eyebrows, putting on some rouge, Some of the kind of lesser crackers' hairstyles are basically just a bun and you're going to not be far away from what I did this morning. Interesting. And, you know, skin lightning, for example, is still very much something that people do as well. When you kind of look down at what they're doing, actually one thing that I found while I was looking at this

while I was like going through looking for fun stuff was pimple patches that they had. Pimple patches. So they would make very, very thin leather and they would put a little bit of like alum on it and then they would put the little pimple patch on their pimple patch on their spots and then some of them would colour them in to make them like a statement piece.

Wow. Like the little star face things. Like the little beauty spot that you see in 18th century. Yeah, exactly. So little pimple patches So a lot Like the stuff that they use is the stuff that they have access to And what they've got is stuff that

Like it's basically the same stuff that they're using as medicine But what they're doing is they're trying to smooth the skin They're trying to make the eyes big The cheeks pink The lips pink And they're trying to Make the hair look like time has been spent on it And

That sounds most familiar Yeah, and so it has not changed in terms of what they're doing that much. What we use to do it is more complicated now. But in terms of what they look like, and when you look at portraits and stuff that we have, it does not look unbeautiful to us. And that's because we are direct descendants of the romance. So we've still stuck with a lot of their kind of,

ideas of what health and beauty look like. Emma, you have been fabulous to talk to once more. You always are. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can find me at emmaSouthern.com or they can find me at History of Sexy.com in my podcast, History is Sexy,

or on Instagram at Emma Southern. Thank you so much. I can't wait to talk to you again. Always a pleasure. I'm always happy to be here. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Emma for dropping by. And if you like what you heard, Don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts.

I know everybody says that. It's the mantra of all podcasters, but it really does help us. If there's a subject you would like us to get into, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. Coming up, we have got episodes on female executioners, and the second in this miniseries, What Made You Ugly in the Medieval Period?

With the utterly fantastic, a completely beautiful, Elena Yarniger. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.