The Ancients - Spinning in the Roman World

Episode Date: January 9, 2022

Spinning held an important place in ancient society, and no, we're not talking about ancient exercise classes. A task for women and slaves, it was used to create clothes, ships sails, and ropes, and its products were integral to all parts of society. An unchanging art for centuries and seen across the globe, spinning was an important practice in the ancient world. This week Tristan is joined by Carey Fleiner to discuss spinning's role in myths, the textiles it helped produce, and its importance in antiquity.Warning: one case of mild language.Order Tristan’s book today: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Perdiccas-Years-323-Alexanders-Successors/dp/1526775115/ref=zg_bsnr_271237_68/260-7675295-7826601?pd_rd_i=1526775115&psc=1If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hithttps://access.historyhit.com/?utm_source=audio&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Podcast+Campaign&utm_id=Podcast To download, go to Android or Apple store:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.historyhit&hl=en_GB&gl=UShttps://apps.apple.com/gb/app/history-hit/id1303668247If you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating Ancients content then subscribe to our Ancients newsletter. Follow the link here:https://www.historyhit.com/sign-up-to-history-hit/?utm_source=timelinenewsletter&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Timeline+Podcast+Campaign

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, where we kicked off 2022 with chats on Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, cannibalism, and now for something completely different, because we're going to be

talking about one of the most important tasks in the classical world, indeed, in the whole of the ancient world. We're talking about spinning, spinning and weaving, but a particular focus on spinning in this podcast. We're going to be looking at the importance of spinning in the ancient Roman world. We're going to be looking at the importance of spinning in certain Greek myths. We're going to be talking about how to spin. And also, we're going to be looking at various fibres used in spinning, such as wool, cotton, flax, and of course, silk. Now to talk through all of this and more, I was delighted a couple of days back to catch up with my good old friend, Dr. Kerry Fleiner from the University of

Winchester. Kerry, she is a lot of fun. She knows a lot about spinning and weaving in the classical world. And she also, as you're about to find out, she also is not afraid to point out my complete ignorance on this topic so without further ado to talk all about spinning in the classical world here's carrie carrie it is great to have you back on the podcast thank you for inviting me it's been some time hasn't it when was the last time we chatted it was down zoom wasn't it so over a year ago maybe it must be first lockdown first lockdown time wasn't it so you know but we've got you back on now as needed and of course spinning and weaving in the ancient world ancient Rome ancient Greece focus on that today but I mean it's fair to say that spinning is something

maybe we take for granted now spinning spinning and weaving, especially post-industrial revolution. But pre-industrial revolution, especially when we look at the ancient world, it was right at the heart of society. Oh, absolutely. It's one of the things I point out to my students because I now do a seminar where I have my students learn to spin because I don't think they appreciate what an arduous, eternal task it is. So I ask them, you know, look around, even if you look around the room where we're sitting right now, how many things here are textiles? So you've got the coverings on the cushions, you've got the carpets on the floors, on the windows, some of the books on the shelf over there being hardback books, they have woven covers. So if you look at a really well done hardback book, in the classical world, you're talking

about rope, you're talking about sails. There's so much that has to be spun and it all has to be done by hand. And I think that's out of a lot of people's experiences. And just before we really delve into the classical world, I think it's important to stress, and you've mentioned it just before we started recording, is that spinning and weaving, this was at the heart of societies across the ancient world? Oh, absolutely. Well, across the world, full stop. When we were talking a little bit about the ubiquity of spinning worlds and loom weights, so probably every time you've gone to a museum and you see this case with these boring old disks with holes in them, it's a loom weight. They're found on all continents except Antarctica Antarctica and many of them are Neolithic. So it's a task, it's an occupation that goes back at least 10,000

years. That's insane. I mean, if we then do focus in on the ancient Mediterranean, what sorts of sources do we have available, archaeology, literature, for learning about spinning in antiquity? The first and most immediate source is going to be archaeology. As mentioned, they're ubiquitous. They're at a point, and I'm not endorsing that people do this, but you can go onto places like eBay and you can go onto antiquarian sellers, and what they have almost cheap as chips are spindle whorls and loom weights, because there's just so many of them. You walk around on sites and they're easily found within households, on the streets, they're just everywhere. So the first

thing that you're going to have for your record is going to be archaeological. You find things in tombs, you find things in houses, you see depictions as far back as the Neolithic Venus figurines, so if you're familiar with those, they're seen as fertility symbols. They are depicting naked women, frequently pregnant naked women, but sometimes they'll be depicted wearing little loincloths and the fabric in those loincloths is twisted, indicating there's some spinning that's going on there. Some of the oldest indications of work that's been spun and then consequently woven can be found back in Turkey dating back to 8,000 years

ago. So it's going to be those archaeological remains well before we have any written description at all. And I'm presuming also when we look at art, maybe in the historical period, that you see, if I remember correctly, on black figure, on red figure, vases, you see people actually doing the spinning, doing the weaving itself? Yes, you will. You'll mostly mostly see women although I know of at least one guy depicted spinning. If you go to the Bath of the Diocletian there's a depiction of a man holding a distaff which might be loaded with

flax or it might be probably with wool. It's mostly women that you're going to see depicted spinning. Sometimes it will be a dedicated object so there's a wonderful vase in the British Museum which is Greek, it's a white figure and it's a woman who's holding a spindle. You will also see depictions of spinning in places where you might not expect it because people don't know what it looks like physically to be holding a spindle whorl. If, for example, you think about the Venus de Milo and she's missing her arms, but the way her body is standing, I think she was spinning because arms but the way her body is standing I think she was spinning because you can see that one arm is up and the other

arm would have been out at her side and that's the posture that you would hold a spindle in and that so sometimes spinning might be might be a bit hidden so there's no way of demonstrating that so everybody who's listening to this is gonna go oh no that's totally wrong that can't be true but it's just something about her posture and just where her arms would have been. You could easily tuck a distaff in a spindle. Well, I love these theories, especially when you say we're going into prehistory period, aren't we? And we're looking at archaeology and for something like spinning weaving, which

as you said, ubiquitous, was across the ancient world. It seems... Goddesses spun. It's part of the myth. You'll have mythology with goddesses spinning. Where we will get to mythology very, very soon. I mean, quickly, just before we go on from the sources, in regards to literature, it's also important, but maybe not as important as archaeology is. Literature can be a bit difficult because there's no real how-to. So if you think, well, how did they do it? I've got all these illustrations, but one thing to keep in mind is the majority of people making the illustrations themselves didn't actually spin.

So they would have been watching their mothers, they would have been watching their sisters. So there are depictions, for example, of, I think it's mentioned in one of the literary sources, of Egyptian women could spin with three spindles. I don't know how that's possible. Maybe Egyptian women could have prehensile toes, I don't know. But again, that's somebody who probably doesn't know, it's a man writing about that. Or you'll see depictions of women holding two spindles, and it's possible, but kind of awkward. So if you think, where is that how-to? Well, again, it's men writing most of the sources. They're not particularly interested in how-to because they're not the ones spinning. So we don't really have any, here's a good technique to use, and here's the best way to spin fibers.

Instead, our literature will tell us about where to get wool, the best ways to breed sheep, that's all your man Pliny, for example, or that household industry is important. But the how-tos aren't there, with one exception really. It's a poem by Catullus where he talks about the three fates that are performing their various actions. But yeah, we don't have the how-tos. We don't have the best techniques and, oh yeah, that's going to happen. Here's how to avoid it. Until you literally get to the 1970s, 1980s, where you have people who are not writing about spinning in the ancient world, but because it's been revived as a folk art.

So you have people who are now taking up the mantle of spinning and weaving as being an artistic accomplishment, a craftsman, an artisan, rather than this ubiquitous daily activity that everyone has to do. So we don't have the how-to, but from what you're saying, we do have the who. I mean, so it is mainly women who are doing spinning and weaving from ancient Greece and ancient Rome, is it? It is everyone except aristocratic men. So slaves of both sexes would have been spinning, children would have been involved in war preparation of both sexes,

sailors spun. So you'd know, well how do you think the sails get made? Of course. Just had an astonished look. But yes, so yeah you'd have sailors spinning because you need ropes, you need sails. In the eastern part of the Empire and in the Near Eastern world you have boats made out of linen. So you've got your guys doing it. I guess Ancient Egypt especially, we'll get on to linen in a bit, but Ancient Egypt with linen, that was right at the heart wasn't it, for being on the seas especially? Yes. And I mean, so why not aristocratic men? Why all these other people but not

aristocratic men for spinning and weaving? Because it's a task for women and slaves. That's what they thought. Well that's how it works. Work can be very gender specific in the ancient world and whereas spinning and weaving represents very industrious women and can consequently come to represent a very important part of women's work and women's contribution to the household. So you have a very well run orderly household. That reflects well on the man. He himself wouldn't be doing it. He has to be out fighting as a soldier, or he has to be your politician who is looking after the rest of the family and protecting the Roman world. He's

too involved in public life to be spending all of his days spinning and weaving. So he's providing the materials, but he's not working with them. There we go. Well then therefore, if we kind of keep on that, how does this all fit in with the man, the strong man Hercules? How does he therefore fit into this? There is a myth of Hercules. I can't remember his buddy, but he beats up one of his buddies and in punishment for injuring, he may have killed his friend. He is sentenced to have to spin with the ladies and he has to wear a dress, so he has to dress up as a woman, and it's because of this emotional outburst because only women are prone to emotional outbursts, they can't control their emotions, so if Hercules is going to act like a woman he has to be punished and do women's work. So it's actually a punishment for him.

And there are illustrations of Hercules looking very unhappy because he's got his full beard and looking very manly man, you know, sort of Andre the Giant sort of thing, but wearing a dress, wearing a matron's headdress and sitting there very begrudgingly with his distaff and his spindle. But with spinning and weaving in the ancient classical world, normally with so many practices you kind of see the evolution, for instance, military evolution of arms and weapons and armour. But with spinning and weaving, is it the same practice for, let's say, in ancient Greece

and in ancient Rome several hundred years later? Several thousand years later. It is an unchanging art. The only difference, so your big pop of technology in the Roman world, and again, when we do the naming of parts, I've got a spindle that's a top whorl spindle. This was not common in the Roman world. And again, when we do the naming of parts, I've got a spindle that's a top whorl spindle. This was not common in the Roman world. They spun with the weight on the bottom. So in the Greek and the Roman world, it would be on the bottom. So if everybody's out there frantically doing a Google image search of Greek women, Roman women spinning, you'll see that most of them are depicted in the artwork with this heavy whorl on the

bottom. It gives it weight and it helps it to spin. The Egyptians spun top wh top whirl and that's how it gets introduced into the Roman world. So the Egyptians are doing it different from everybody else. I personally prefer spinning on the top. I just feel the weight distribution is a little bit better and I didn't bring any bottom whirl spindles with me. And that's going to be something that when the Romans encounter the Egyptian world, when they absorb Egypt into their culture, well the Greeks do because Egypt becomes Ptolemaic before it becomes Roman. The spindles are turned upside down so that's when you'll start seeing top whorls and bottom whorls depicted in the arts, you see both. But aside from that, women's work is essentially unchanged

until you get a drive wheel attached to this to make it go a little faster. We see that in India in the 5th century with the charcoal wheel, which doesn't come west into the Greek and Roman world, where you start seeing the spindle wheel, where you've got a big wheel driving the spindle, and instead of being top-down, excuse me, vertical, the spindle turns sideways, is in the 12th century AD. So that's your next technological revolution.

But in the Roman world, in the period that I cover, it's all hand spindles. Well, that's good to know, because as I said I said we can talk about Greece we can talk about Rome with the same sort of practice I mean that evolution is definitely one for the God Medieval podcast so no worries here at all about that I mean all right then let's keep therefore on Greek myths and then go on to the Roman stuff because of course we talked about Heracles but or Hercules but there are several myths aren't there and there? Perhaps more than lots and lots of myths, which include this spinning and weaving aspect of them. There's loads. The way I think of it and the way I explain it to my students is the Romans almost wouldn't have

the Greeks and the Romans almost wouldn't have noticed she's spinning, she's weaving in the same way that you watch a movie now and people were using their mobile phones to help drive the plot. So that spinning and weaving just becomes part of, it's part of the lifestyle, it's part of the household. So yeah, there are loads of them. Your lifespan, for example, in the Greek and Roman world is going to be measured by three women who are spinning. But you've got your three women, you've got Klothos, she's the spinner. So you've got somebody who is spinning out the thread. Her next sister measures it, so your life is that thread.

Her next sister measures the length of that thread, and the third sister, which is Atropos, I think, cuts it. So it's Lachesis that measures. And I forgot that mixed up. We'll get lots of letters coming in. And when that thread is cut, that's it. That's your lot. So however long that's been spun. So people are even thinking of their lifespan in terms of spinning, because it's something that you saw all the time. So from childhood onwards, this is something that you would see happening in your household,

even if you were aristocratic. So from the three fates to then something like, I'm guessing, well, my mind instantly goes to Arachne. That's the famous weaving tale with the goddess, isn't it, with Athena? Exactly. Arachne was a mortal girl who was an expert weaver and she knew she was an expert weaver and of course you can see where that's going that always gets you into trouble so she's challenged by Athena and she defeats Athena and Athena figures well if that's the way it's going to be Athena turns into a spider and there's different theories about that

is she turned her into a spider's punishment you want to weave there you go knock yourself out is she turned into a spider because that's her whole life and she just wants to weave and now she and her sisters will be weavers forever? Dunno. But yeah, challenge the gods and that's what happens to you. Well we could talk about myths all day but one other myth I'd really like to talk about is golden fleece, colchis. Because there seems to be this quite strong connection with sheep and wool and fleeces and all that with ancient Colchis and this whole myth. Explain away.

Well, Colchis is something of the Black Sea, isn't it? So, again, that's another one that when I mention it to my students, you get a, oh, yeah, because they don't stop and think, well, it's Jason going after. Why in the heck is the golden fleece? Why is fleece something that's, to mix my metaphors, why is that his holy grail? You think of all the possible treasures he could look for. And you find out, though, what does the golden fleece, something that's, to mix my metaphors, why is that his holy grail? You think of all the possible treasures he could look for. And you find out though, what does the golden fleece do? It's not only made out of gold, but it heals all sicknesses. So if you're familiar with the 1963

Ray Harryhausen film, that's what happens is Medea has to be wrapped up in the golden fleece to cure her after she's been injured. There's some reality to this because Colchis was an area that was known for its sheep production and its wool production and it's going to be sheep from Colchis that are cross-spread with sheep from Italy that will eventually produce what becomes nowadays the modern Merino. So I think this is Cashmere Merino on the jumper that I'm wearing but you've probably seen Merino on labels when you've bought socks, when you've bought nice jumpers and it's that really soft, fine wool. Merino sheep these days are the sheep in Australia. And one of the things about the Merino is it's a very, very large sheep, produces a lot of fleece and it produced a lot of fleece

even in the classical world because its skin is really wrinkly. So when you shear a Merino sheep you've just got this really, really wrinkly sheep. So the more wrinkly the skin is, the more fleece you're going to get. So you might be familiar with these stories of sheep that escape from their stations in Australia and go rogue. And when they're captured, you know, two or three years later, you've got like this enormous bundle of wool that you have to shear off this sheep. This was highly prized in the Roman world. Their animals are going to be much smaller than modern animals obviously because the agricultural revolutions haven't happened yet. So you want to crossbreed your sheep to get a bigger sheep and a good wool producer and a white wool producer. So white

wool is very important to the Romans as well. So the sheep from Colchis become very, very valuable as imports into the Italian world especially because the Italians, the Romans as well. So the sheep from Colchis become very, very valuable as imports into the Italian world especially, because the Italians, the Romans, they're cross-breeding their little sheep, the Tarentine sheep, with Spanish sheep once they take Spain in the early second century BC, and then those sheep are then crossed again with the Colchis sheep, and that's where we get Marina. So these huge sheep that we see today in Australia, you know, these renowned for their wool, we have to thank the Romans for that.

Their work in this crossbreeding of sheep. Yes, merino blood is in a number of other sheep. The other thing the Romans did is, and sheep might not particularly thank Romans for this, the fact that sheep have to be shorn, that's because of the Roman breeding program. So I've talked a little bit about this. One of the types of fleece that I like to spin are the so-called primitive breeds. And that doesn't mean they sort of walk around, you know, going, ugh, all the time. It means that they've not been crossbred with any of the Roman sheep. So they've not been crossbred with any of the Marinos. And they still have a lot of the ancient characteristics. Truly primitive sheep do not have to be shorn. They blow their coats

just the way your dog does. When it starts to get hot and his coat starts to get really raggy and all that winter coat starts popping off all over the house and you have to hoover up. Truly primitive sheep, and there's about a dozen breeds still left in Britain and Scandinavia, their coats will just start to shed and fall off and they look horrible. In order to help accelerate the process, of course, they'll rub up against trees or fences or rocks and of course people go out to gather the wool, which is where the term wool gathering comes from. The Romans want to control it. They want to control the length of the fleece, which is called the staple of the fleece.

So they're cross-breeding their sheep for the best fleece. They want to shear at the same time of the year so that the staple is the right length. They even get to a point where they're controlling the quality of that fleece while it's still on the hoof. And that's partly through what they feed the sheep. I used to raise sheep, so we're going to go into a whole weird area here. It's partly what you feed the sheep, because whatever you eat comes out in the top of your head

or comes out in the back of your animal, as well as wearing little coats. So you can protect the fleece while it's still walking around. Well, we'll come back to wool very soon, because that does seem like one of the key fibres, shall we say, for ancient Rome. Yes, very important for the Roman. And we'll get into that very soon. I mean, one last Greek myth.

I love my Greek myths, so I'm going to go back to one more. That's all right. Because this is also very key to weaving and spinning, isn't it? And this is the story of Odysseus, his return, Odysseus' wife. And there seems to be a lot of meaning behind her spinning, isn't there, her weaving? With her weaving, yes it is. Because Odysseus, being a typical guy, absolutely't there? Her weaving. Her weaving, yes, yes, because Odysseus being a typical guy, absolutely refuses to stop for directions. So it

takes him, what, ten years to get back from Troy to Ithaca, even though if you look at it on the map, you think, geez, dude, come on. If you look at his journey in the Odyssey, it's like the winter party dance tour that Buddy Holly went on. It's just all over the place, all over the Mediterranean, taking forever to get back. While he's away, his wife is holding down

the fort. His son's too young. So you've got Telemachus, and he has his own little mini-epic inside the Odyssey. But his wife is holding down the fort. And of course, there are queens in the Near East and in the Greek world, but she's under a lot of pressure from these competing nobles at Odysseus' court. You've got to marry one of us. You can't be on your own, you can't be unprotected like this. In order to hold them off, she tells them, I'll make my choice amongst you guys when I finish weaving this cloth that I have on my loom. So she's very famously a weaver and again there's an aristocratic woman spinning and weaving so it's not unusual that she's doing it, she's providing for her household.

And of course the story is, she's weaving all day long and then at night she unpicks it she's providing for her household and of course the story is she's weaving all day long and then at night she unpicks it she takes it all apart so the piece of cloth that she's weaving never gets any bigger so every day she starts all over again and as somebody who is woven and who has had to unpick props to penelope because it drives me crazy when i have to unpick and start over again but apparently she went and just did this over and over and over again to keep putting these guys off. And is this kind of, I feel as we're going into the Roman world as well with this, and I'm sure we'll go back to this idea, of this idea of the faithful wife and the spinning,

this is very much intertwined with it. Oh absolutely, especially in the Roman world because it's mostly going to be women, the wives, the daughters, the other women in the household who are doing so much of the spinning. This industry and simply how important the woolen industry was to the Romans becomes a symbol of how well a woman can take care of a household, how she can provide for her household. She provides clothing, she provides all of the textiles in the household. It becomes symbolic of her industry, it becomes symbolic of stability in the household. It becomes symbolic of her industry, it becomes symbolic of stability

in the household, to the point where it's not uncommon for brides to be depicted holding a distaff, which is the wooden stick that wool would be wrapped around, to hold it out of your way. Women are depicted on their tombstones with a little work basket at their feet. So there's a famous tomb that's housed up in the northern part of England of a woman called Regina, and her husband wants to celebrate her and why she was the perfect wife to him. And so she's depicted, she's a former slave, so she's native Britain, but she's become Romanized. So she's dressed as a Roman matron, and she's got her jewelry box, so he's been able to bedeck her with jewels, and she has her work box, so she is depicted with balls of wool that she has been making.

It's that sort of twin symbolism that he's been able to provide for her and make her this proper Roman matron, and she's been able to take out proper Roman's work, even though, of course, Celtic women would have been spinning. There's plenty of evidence for spinning and weaving in the Celtic and the British world as well. This gets, I suppose one might say, codified with the Emperor Augustus, who uses the family as a launching pad for demonstrating why he is the best man to be ruling in Rome and why his family is meant to be the symbol of Rome. And he is very proud of the fact that his wife, the Empress, and his daughter spin and weave all of his clothes. So he's not a proud man and that all of this industry is happening in his household as well.

So it all becomes very symbolic. Roman brides are dressed in wool, their hair is dressed up with wool. It's just found everywhere in terms of symbolism in the household. I mean, that symbolism. So if you were to compliment someone in ancient Rome of being a great spinner and they're not an aristocratic man, that would be seen as a very great compliment. Oh, absolutely. My students work through a lot of issues

with what makes the ideal woman and the ideal wife, and we read epitaphs. And sometimes all you will have on an epitaph is, she spun well, or she worked in in wool after a really long marriage together that's what they say exactly my students say the same thing oh well thanks a lot dude there's so much packed into that though so when we look at it we think great that's all you noticed you know she made a great oatmeal that's it if you would compliment somebody now by one single thing they did. But in the Roman

world, there's so much packed into that because of how important this wool industry is to them, what it symbolizes to them. Togas are made out of wool. So those guys running around in the Senate who are holding the entire society together, they're wearing togas made out of wool. Their tunics are made out of wool. We are right now in the middle of a Roman festival which covers the early days of January. It's a festival dedicated to the household gods and to show the household gods what a good family lived there, little dollies were made out of wool representing the members of the family so that the household gods would say, yep those are my people. But again it's the dolls are made out of wool so it's quite interesting. I mean it? I mean, absolutely.

And is it, because we do think of really the white togas, don't we? I mean, maybe some colours in as well. But is it because of those togas, for instance, in that white colour, why in the Roman world of all wool colours, white was the most highly sought after? White is very hard to, a pure white is very hard to attain and to keep it white. So you see this in the later world as well, because when you've got your dandies in the 17th and 18th centuries, all the white lace, that shows they don't work, because how else do you keep all that clean? So you've got your politicians, togas are enormous, you can't put on a toga by yourself,

you have to have somebody help you and it's all wrapped and folded around you and you have to hold yourself with great dignity otherwise it's going to fall off you. Even pure white wool isn't white, white, white. It still has to be treated to bleach it out and make it white. It doesn't take much to introduce stray black and gray hares onto a sheep. So you have to very, very carefully watch your breeding program and not have any colored sheep whatsoever introduced to it to make sure that you have completely white sheep. So again, that's the desire to have these pure white garments that are made, again, to show how shining and symbolic they are for the Senate.

I mean, it's so interesting, this, and I think, personally, for me, it's something that I personally overlook sometimes, is the centrality of something like spinning and weaving for ancient societies and how important it was. I mean, you mentioned how it was this great compliment if you said, you spun well, for instance, for a Roman woman. Of course, we do get in some of the sources, sometimes where women, and sometimes very much unfairly, are portrayed as being very infamous, as very evil people.

It comes to mind someone like Messalina for instance. Are there cases in those where the Roman writers, in order to stress how bad these people were, that they say they were bad spinners, they couldn't spin or something like that? Is that ever used? No, I don't recall running across any of that. If anybody out there listening has an example of that, I would really be interested to know because you would think that would be the antithesis. Instead, what the Romans tend to do when they want to characterize someone like Messalina as being an evil woman or someone like Agrippina the Younger being an evil woman, they talk about that they're masculine because they're assertive, because

they're aggressive, because they're sexually assertive, because they're trying to insinuate themselves into politics, for example. They're doing man's stuff and they're neglecting their household duties but I don't recall anything specifically being said they're poor spinners I think the implication is though that they are neglecting their household duties because it's an essential part of the household exactly so the fact that it is mentioned very specifically that Livia is doing this she's obviously spinning and weaving that Julia is obviously spinning and weaving that that the fact that it's stressed can then be brought out by saying it's not mentioned with these other women but instead these masculine qualities are being mentioned in these women who are not who are not running

their household and as a consequence you have this chaos and this this idea it stretches back to mythological Rome as well, doesn't it? Pre-Republican Rome with some of the kings and their own women. Oh gosh, absolutely. If you look at the individual first seven kings of Rome, let's leave out the last three because they're all Etruscan, but you've got all the origin myths. So you've got Romulus and, oh yes, from Romulus we get here's what the patricians and the plebeians are,, from Romulus we get, here's what the patricians

and the plebeians are. And from Romulus, we get all the assembly. So he's all the governmental institutions. You've got the second king of Rome, Numa. He's all the religious institutions. Then you've got another king of Rome. His wife is a woman called Caecilia, to use her Latin name rather than her Etruscan name, because I'm going to mangle her Etruscan name. It's Tancilia in Etruscan. She's famous because she's associated with spinning and weaving. So she's known as the first woman to have spun and woven the first toga. And is this phony baloney or not? Well, the only kings of Rome, they're deposed in the very, very late 6th century BC. When you've got your seven kings of Rome, your first seven kings of Rome, they're way back in the misty marks of time and they're deposed by the late sixth

century BC. The guy writing about Caia is a guy called Varro and he's writing in the second century BC and he claims that he has seen with his own eyes her spindle, her distaff, the original toga in this museum. So you have a lot of these funny baloney exhibits, the Greeks, the Athenians do the same thing, that people could go and marvel at. But it's the wife of one of the kings of Rome who's doing it. It's not an ordinary person, it's not a slave who's doing it for the king, for the Senate, it's the wife himself which says anybody can do it all the way down. So she's not beneath

doing the spinning and weaving. She's not beneath participating in this activity for the good of her household, for the good of the state. So she becomes a role model. You could say she becomes this role model, doesn't she? Exactly. And this is picked up with Augustus again, by here's a real life empress who's also doing this. There you go, once again, hearkening back to that pre-Republican time. That's insane. And it's done through spinning and weaving. How interesting. That sense of stability, that sense of continuity.

Yes, harkening back, isn't it? I mean, Kerry, that's all so interesting. I mean, let's therefore talk more about wool. I wouldn't say that anywhere else, apart from this podcast. Let's talk more about wool. I mean, because it does feel as if, of all the fibres,

and we'll go into the other fibres as well, it's not just wool, is it? But I mean, wool seems to be the most, maybe popular is the wrong word, maybe the most common fibre that's used? Ubiquitous, shall we say. I think so. It is everywhere. So those of you out there who were celebrating the Saturnalia a couple of weeks ago, hopefully

you had all your wool bands wrapped around your head. Absolutely. And, you know, winning charioteers would tie a wool band around their forehead to demonstrate that they had won. It's all over the place in terms of wool. So you've got the highest wearing, their togas made out of wool, all the way down to the simplest. It's a versatile fiber and it's a very friendly fiber to spin.

So when I first learned how to spin, I was given Romney. So that's not Roman. So you've got Romney there from Kent, which is, it's not a fine wool, but it's very easy to start out with spinning. The thing about wool is it can be spun to a great thickness and still be very sturdy, or it can be spun very, very, very finely. So you may be familiar with the so-called wedding ring shawls that are spun from Shetland actually, and this is fiber that has been spun and then knitted so finely that you can pull it through your wedding ring

so that was a you're giving me this dubious look everybody else who's listening to this is like I know what she's talking about fair enough I don't yeah yeah yeah you gotta pay a visit to uncle google there but the reason they're called wedding ring shawls is because they're absolutely enormous shawls and they're spun so finely they can be pulled through the ring. You can do this with hand spindles. You can spin very, very finely. So I know some people have this attitude, they think, oh, it's the ancient world, everybody must have been wearing really rough clothing and everything must have been very thick and that. I know we're talking about wool and not linen, but you have to keep in mind that there are mummy linens that are three and four hundred threads per inch. So when you think about your bed

sheets, they can have counts in them, cotton counts in them, you know, 800,000, you know, the really luxury sheets that you get. Children's sheets are usually 200 counts, that's where you get bed sheets that feel really rough. That's all done by hand. So you can spin wool that finely by hand. You don't need a machine necessarily to do it. You need a very lightweight spindle to do it, but it can be done. So I can imagine, therefore, that the industry for good wool in the Roman Empire, let's just focus on the Roman Empire then, it must have been very lucrative. There must have been a lot of it all across the Roman Empire. You must have had these wool workshops, you know, from Britain to Syria to Egypt to North Africa because it was needed everywhere.

There are, I know there are dedicated areas. There's a spot in Winchester and my archaeology colleagues would be able to tell me, but I know Winchester was well known as an area for wool production. Italy was. Any place where you can have good grazing ground. One interesting fun fact is sometimes the scrubbier the ground the finer the fleece. Again this isn't this is one of the primitive breeds but Shetland fleece, proper Shetland fleece from the Shetland Islands is renowned for being super fine and super soft and those sheep you know they're being battered by the weather and it's not it's not always the best fodder that they get. When Shetland were first brought to the

Americas because people thought yeah we've got all this grazing room America it's it's so big. Let's bring over big flocks. The fleece wasn't as good quality because they had better diet. So it's absolutely bizarre that the more they ate, the hardier their fleece got. So throughout the Roman world, you know, sometimes you'll get finer fleece even on rougher ground. And of course, you've got the image of the shepherds all over the Greek and Roman world. So you can see this in the cinema now where you always see the little shepherd boys and little shepherds and all that. But the Romans have industrial, not what we would think of as industrial farming, but they will have dedicated farms, these latifundia, where they might be dedicated to grain growing

or they might be dedicated to olive growing. You can get a good picture of what they must have looked like if you can. Next time you fly down to Spain, especially if you're flying to Alicante or one of the East Coast areas, look out your window as you're making your final approach. You see all the little orange groves? Pretend those are olives. That's what a Roman latifundia would have looked like because most of Spain was turned over to olive production. So you can see from the air what some of these places would look like. And of course you have people raising sheep in the same way. So sheep provides you with so much. It's a renewable source for the Romans. You

don't have to kill a sheep to get its wool off its back, which sometimes surprises people. When I've given lectures on sheep and wool and spinning, people think that you have to slaughter the sheep to get the wool off it. No, you cut it off, you give it a haircut and it grows back the next year. This is fabulous for a Roman. So if you've got a couple of sheep, you know, that can keep you in production, even in your household. So you don't even need that many. You don't have to have a huge... It's green. It's very green.

It is for the Romans, yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, that's fascinating, that point about southern Spain, because you're giving me more and more weapons in my arsenal, which I can approach the History Hit team and say, we need to do new documentaries in southern Spain. Forget Hannibal, forget the Phoenicians, just to see the sheep and the olives. Do La Refundia in Spain, yeah, yeah, because the whole province was basically turned over to these sort of production estates.

Well, there we go. On a bit of a tangent, talking about Shetland, I mean, doing something in the moment like Iron Age Brochs, you think of those huge Iron Age towers in the north, and if you think there were shepherds there at the same time that these brochs were being inhabited, you know, it's not the weather conditions wouldn't have been anything like the Mediterranean But perhaps these people who live in these brochs had better quality clothing and better quality wool because of the sheep being better up there, isn't it? It's amazing to think. Well, here come all my statistics. I should have told you regret having me come and talk to you about wool.

Wool fibers, an individual fiber, can absorb up to seven times its own weight in water. So all you guys up in the north wearing the big Aran sweaters from the Isle, those sweaters tend to be spun in the grease, so there's still lanolin in them which helped to make them waterproof. So that's really, really handy. Wool is incredibly warm and it breathes because you have all these air pockets in it. So if you ever went camping as a kid and they told you, don't wear cotton, don't wear jeans because jeans get wet, they never dry and you are stuck with wet trousers. When wool gets wet, it might take a little longer to dry but because it has all those air pockets in it, if you can hang it near a fire source or a warmth source, it will

dry fairly quickly. So you do, you have all of these advantages so something that's knitted out of wool is fabulous to have next to your skin or to wear in layers so you'll be nice and toasty warm okay you know this is the great benefits of the ancients podcast you come for the ancient history you stay for the tips on wool there you go and other types of fibers Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything from ballads to banqueting, from ghosts to gunpowder plots,

from saints to sodomy. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I'd like to move on to the next fibre, which is, of course, linen. Yes, for blacks. Now, talk away, explain away about linen in the ancient world, because this feels like a more complicated process. It's really complicated, and I think when I give these talks, I tend to veer away from linen, because most of the description that I give

is moving us into the medieval and the Viking worlds. Linen is a pain in the backside to process. It was a very expensive fiber in the classical world. So for the Romans having something made out of linen, it would have been a little more expensive. But it's ubiquitous in the Egyptian world and then it starts to be grown in the Greek world once you get Ptolemaic, Egyptian, all that. So it comes from the flax plant. So the Latin for flax I think is linnus, linnus, something like that. Latin person has to look it up. And they're lovely little plants that, little tiny seeds, and you spread them out all over your plot and they take a lot of

care even when they first start coming out. Flax can grow to, that's about 40 centimeters I think, I would say two feet, but I think that's about 40 centimeters. So each one of your little flax plants can grow to 40 centimeters and inside that stem is your staple. Remember I said staple is the length of an individual fiber that you spin. 40 centimeters is really long for staple. That means you can spin it very, very finely and it'll be very strong because it's so long. And linen fiber can be spun very, very finely. But you have to take care as those little plants are growing because they're so spindly when they first start coming out that if they get knocked down by a wind, they won't grow

straight and it's kind of useless to use as a fiber so you can lose your crop right there. You have to do a lot of weeding until the little plants get tall enough because in the classical world, weeds are everywhere. We don't have pesticides. If you want to get rid of weeds, you've got to have somebody out there plucking them. The scenes in Gladiator where your man is walking through the golden field drives me crazy because that is modern technology. That field would have been bursting with color of weeds.

But anyway, once your plants are grown, you're not finished yet. You can't just take them and start spinning them. There's a number of steps. Hopefully, I can remember what most, you can't just take them and start spinning them. There's a number of steps, hopefully I can remember what most of them are. Take your bundles of flax, hopefully they've all grown nice and straight. You've got to dry them out, so they're all nice and dry now, but you can't spin them yet because your fibers are actually inside a hard coating, so the outside of the flax stem, you've got to get rid of that.

So you've got everything, it's all nice and dry. To get rid of that outer stem, you've got to literally rot it. And that's a process now called retting, because it's a medieval word, but it comes from this word meaning rotting. So you can hear those are Anglo-Saxon words, those aren't Greek and Roman words. The retting process is usually done by leaving bundles of your flax in running water. I tried to do it when I grew flax at one point in time. That experiment didn't work very well. Once you've left this bundle of fibers in water for the outer casing to rot, you have to dry it again. So you can't just pull off the slimy rot. It has to dry again. Now you can break off

that outer coating. I haven't even gotten to the fiber yet. So you can see why I sort of move along. We've got all this process, all of this equipment, so you end up probably heard of the expression of breaking flax. That's when you take this now dried, rotted stem and you hit it with a wooden stick. Just assume in me that I know absolutely nothing because I know absolutely nothing. Yeah, you know, absolutely. You can take the piss out of me as much as you want with this. Just go ahead. Well, like I said, once you've dried the rotted stems, it's much easier to break them off. So you have the stems laying across a trestle and you literally slap a hard, almost like a two by four against it. And that helps make your now dried, rotted casing just pop off. It's very crummy. It's very messy. Now you've got your fibers, which you can't

spin yet because now you've got to comb them. You've got these devices that look like dog combs, dog brushes and they're quite deadly because they have very long tines on them. The Romans used to use combs as torture devices so they can be quite dangerous and you're dragging these now. They look very clean, they almost look like hair but you're dragging these bundles of fiber through these combs because that pulls out the broken pieces, it pulls out all the scrappy pieces and what you're left with almost looks like a fairy tale princess's hair. So it's very soft at this point because you've beaten the hell out of it and you've dragged it through these horrible combs and now you've got this nice, soft remaining fibers, very,

very long. They're bundled together in a little package called a strip. And that's what you're going to dress your distaff with. That is moving us into the medieval period when we start thinking about Snow White and Cinderella with their spinning wheels and that stick that stands next to the spinning wheel that looks like it's on the top of a broom. That's all your fiber is coming down to spin with. Flax can be spun wet which is the preferable way to do it because you get a nice smooth fiber or it can be spun dry and you get the preferable way to do it, because you get a nice smooth fibre, or it can be spun dry, and you get a very hairy fibre, like with rope. Wet spun

flax produces the type of linen that you would get on mummy wrappings. That produces the type of linen that you would make your boats out of. That would produce the type of linen that you make your armour out of. I was going to say, because it's very strong and endurable, isn't it? Yes. And you say, you mentioned sails,asa and actually going back to the military things quite quickly I mean what springs to mind is the linothorax which was used by Alexander the Great's soldiers at that time in the Hellenistic late classical period and it's I mean Dr Gregory Audretti I think his name

is in University of Wisconsin-Madison he did experiments where they got linen and they made it like the ancient way to recreate this linen armour. And they tested it out with bows and arrows. I think he was allowed to shoot one of his pupils, you know, who was wearing the linothorax to test its ability. And I'm happy to say that the student didn't go to hospital. He got an arrow in his chest and he was absolutely fine because the linothorax protected him. Is it padded at all? I don't know.

You'd have to ask Greg. But what is so interesting about it is how this fibre is used to make such a strong material, whether it's for the battlefield, whether it's for sails. They made ropes out of it. For ropes? They made ropes out of it. They made sails out of it. The Egyptians were making ships out of it to sail down the Nile with.

I don't think they're making battleships out of it. It doesn't surprise me because, I mean, I've been talking about, you know, the super fine wrappings that you can make with a mummy, but if you continue to ply it, you are going to get fibre that's thicker. I can see where it'd be very tough. It can be waterproof, I can see that. Wrinkles very easily as well. It's really interesting. Especially as we've gone from wool and as we go on to cotton, because this is quite different, isn't it? Cotton is a completely different animal. When you think about cotton now, well, when you go to concerts, you buy cheap cotton t-shirts and fast fashion frequently.

If it's not artificial fibers, fast fashion tends to be cotton. Of course, that's very terrible for the environment because of the production. You think of cotton as being cheap and friendly and cheerful and all over the place. Cotton in the classical world is a luxury fiber. It's very, very expensive. If in the Egyptian world you're only a priest, you're wearing linen and mummies being wrapped in linen, again, cotton is an Egyptian fibre and it's only going to be

the most aristocratic people who could afford to wear it, why is it so expensive let's have a think do you know why it's so expensive I have no idea, it's the production it's how it's produced so I think when a lot of people think of cotton these days if they're thinking of it in popular culture

they're thinking of the American Civil War and they're thinking of the slaves who are having to pick cotton in the fields and that. And there was an invention in the late 18th century that actually exacerbated the situation with slaves in the United States because that's the invention of the cotton gin. If you grow cotton, and it's really cool to grow because obviously the flowers are the cotton balls. Once they bloom, there you go, you've got little cotton balls that you can, when I'm saying balls, I'm saying B-O-double-L as opposed to B-A-double-L, but you can pull it out and you've got a little handful of cotton which is also full of seeds, little tiny round seeds. And if you give a cotton ball, B-O-L-L, to a small child and say, pick out all the cotton

seeds, it's fun for about the first five minutes because they're very slippery and it's a real pain in the backside to have to dig through all the cotton and cotton can get compacted very easily. And of course that was slave labor, having to pick out all of those seeds. What Eli Whitney did was he invented a gin that you could feed these raw cotton balls into and it's two, if you imagine putting two dog brushes on rollers so that they face each other, almost like a little grinder, and as these two little grinders are rolling away against each other, you feed in your raw cotton.

The cotton will go through the grinders because it's just being combed and those little short hairs will go right through the grinder, but the seeds pop up and they stay up on the surface. It's miraculous and it revolutionized cotton production because suddenly cotton became very cheap. That's the 18th century. So the Romans aren't doing that, the Greeks aren't doing that, the Egyptians aren't doing that. They're having to pluck all these seeds out by hand.

So that is genuine slave labor there. And the same thing would have been happening in India. I know I'm focusing more on the Roman world, but of course cotton is such an important fiber in India as well. So it's so labor intensive to pull all of this out. The other thing with cotton as well is we've been talking about staple, again, the length of your fiber. In sheep, the staple can be very, very short if it's a meat animal.

It can be really long. You've probably, if you do a Google image search of like Teasdale, you'll see a sheep with very long rasta curls on it. We've talked about the flax having the 40-centimeter staple. Cotton staple is anywhere from a centimeter to two centimeters. That's it. So it has to be finely spun and it has to have a high twist in it and that can make it very difficult to spin as well on a spinning wheel.

Ironically, the more modern quote unquote device to spin is actually useless. I find it very useless. When I have my treadle spinning wheel, I can't spin cotton on it and I never could. It's much easier to spin the hand spin wheel because they spin more quickly. And charcoal wheels. Charcoal wheels are a godsend for cotton. You can get cotton now, cotton has been cultivated now to have longer stables. So Egyptian cotton has a two-inch staple. Again, that's all modern breeding. But you notice it's Egyptian cotton, so that's where most of it's going to be grown. Cotton also has very specific growing requirements. It's hard to grow cotton out of doors in England, for example, in all of Britain, because I think you need about 160 sunny days at a certain temperature, and

that's not happening here. Some people start in greenhouses that they grow for hobbies, but it's very, very expensive. One question that you might be thinking about is, well, hang on a minute, did the Romans know that cotton was a plant? Yes, of course they did. Because everybody knows the story of the Lamb of Tartary, a business that, oh, it's actually not a plant, it's little sheep that bloom on the ends of stems and then people harvest this little sheep, the cotton comes from these little plant sheep or whatever.

That is medieval. And that is the result of the breakdown of communications between East and West after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, after the fall of the Roman Empire. But in the Roman world, they absolutely knew it was a plant. I think we're just highlighting once again why the ancient world is so much cooler than the medieval world. Right. I mean, who knows? It's always a competition between the ancients and gone medieval, although I love them to bits. To me, it's no contest, but there you go.

It's never a contest. I love my medieval cousins, and I started out as a medievalist. I think of the medieval world as my parents and the classical world as my grandparents. Living with your grandparents can be way cooler. So I just abandoned my family and went home to live with the grandparents. 100%. 100%. That's a great analogy. I was going to use a fishing analogy. We throw something out to them once in a while so we can draw them into the fold.

But as you say, it's not really a competition. You mentioned America. We're not going to America next, but we are going away from the Mediterranean for the next fibre. Oh, I want to take this in the other direction. The Aston Martin DB5 of ancient history, the gold Mick Jagger ticket, which is silk. This is the prized fibre, isn't it? It is the prized fibre. And it is known in the Greek and the Roman world, although it's not cultivated in the Greek and the Roman world, although it's not cultivated in the Greek and the Roman world. It's a great secret from China and from India.

It's this great secret to the point where the Romans and the Greeks speculated, where did it come from? Some of them get pretty close. Now where it really comes from, if you're talking, there's all kinds of silks. And the Cadillac of silks is something called bombix silk and of course that's named after the bombix caterpillar bombix moth and that is the caterpillar that only eats mulberry leaves so it's a real pain in the backside to cultivate and the british in fact were going to try to cultivate bombix silk in north carolina when they first started colonizing the east coast and it was a ladies it was a ladies hobby and so you you had these plantations in North Carolina that were all mulberry trees that

were just covered with these insects. And of course that's what you get in China and that's what you got in India where mulberry trees cover with these insects. And of course they'd be spinning their cocoons and they'd be a bit messy and you'd have dangling bits of cocoons that had broken or whatever hanging off these trees. Which means that through a series of, you know, you've got one person at one end who starts saying, oh, well, here's where this silk comes from, these worms eat mulberry leaves, and when they go into their larval stage, they spin a cocoon around themselves, and that's where the silk comes from.

That gets passed to the next person, the next person, the next merchant, the next person, the next traveler. By the time it gets west into the Greek and Roman world, you have people saying, oh, well, where silk comes from is there's a special type of morning dew that appears on the ground in China, and the Chinese go out with rakes, and they rake this up, and that's silk. There's other explanations. I think it's Pliny who says, no, no, it comes from special trees. There's special trees that produce this matter that people go out and harvest, and you can see where that is that distorted story of the caterpillars crawling all the trees so they weren't really

sure all of this came from cocoons of course would have become known later as you move later into the Roman period and that's when your man Justinian sends his emissaries so this very famous story of him sending his ambassadors with hollowed-out staves so they could steal cocoons and bring them back which a cool story bro the problem is the cocoons are useless because you've got your little insect in there and there's some people don't like they don't like so it's not vegan because you have to kill the insect to get to it there is vegan silk which I can tell you about a minute proper silk but if you're

bringing silk cocoons back to the West, you can't breed them because the little guy is still in there, unless you let him burst out and become the moths, and that's how you start your breeding program. But that is how silk is brought, according to the story, that it's smuggled. And it breaks that hold that Eastern traders had on the West, because silk is so expensive that it becomes symbolic of clothing of goddesses and only the absolute wealthiest of the wealthy could afford it and in poetry it becomes synonymous with that that is the most delicate that is the most expensive you know sort of gossamer and the myths tell us that silk comes from the goddesses when they gather the clouds and they spin them on their golden spindles and that's what produces silk.

So we have no silk that survives from the classical world but we have paintings and it's quite beautifully rendered in frescoes because fresco painting looks very delicate and dainty anyway. So you see fresco paintings of women who are wearing gossamer silks, Of course, you can see their bodies through this diaphanous cloth that's wrapped around them. But only the most wealthy people would be able to afford it. Well, mine's going to the frescoes, for instance, from Pompeii. They immediately spring to mind with the silk, you see that flowing nature of them. I mean, so how was silk, how was

it processed in the Roman world? It would have been processed in the Roman world. I think the silk is being bought already as fabric. Right, okay. Don't quote me on that one. So the cocoons wouldn't have been brought because... As you say, we're Justinian, gotcha. Exactly.

The way that you reel off cocoons, I've not done this personally because I just, I couldn't do it. You can buy cocoons. You can go to spinning and weaving shops. There's a place up in Finsbury Park that sells a lot of this stuff as well. You can buy the cocoons. A single cocoon is one long length of silk thread because obviously it's a little worm. He's spinning that enormous cocoon around himself. What you have to do is, I'm simplifying this, is the cocoons are held together by a gummy substance

that's also produced by the worm, otherwise it would just unravel. And in order to loosen that gummy substance, all the cocoons are put into boiling water. I'm pretty sure you've had something else too, but I can't remember what. And once that substance has been dissolved in the hot water, the cocoons are then reeled. So you find your end and you just start reeling off all of your silk. And that's how you end up. Silk is sold by the brick, so you end up with your brick of bombings. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era,

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I can buy a brick of bombic silk, which is about a kilo, for about 50 quid now, and I still balk at that. That's really expensive. But back in the classical world, it could easily be 10,000 times that much. Incredibly expensive. A talent, you'd pay a talent for it. Do we have records, for instance, of how much people would pay for this stuff? Yes, and there are, usually it's because it's so unusually expensive. So somebody's paying

an outrageous amount of money for something. And frequently, to emphasize how expensive this stuff is, we'll be told that it was purchased in talents. And a single talent, or using talents, this is usually how war retribution was rendered so you owe us five talents every year as part of your war retribution because it's it's tens of thousands of pounds of gold for example it's insane that's insane yeah reparations and all that isn't it we've talked about so much of this last carry over this last hour carry it's been insane like from myths to the social role of spinning and weaving to these various different fibers i've just been skimming the surface there's

well i'm sure i'm sure there is and we're not finished yet because let's talk about how they actually did the spinning itself you've got the equipment as well let's say you've got your fiber let's say you've got your wool how would they then go about spinning this fibre in the classical world? Oh, right, right. I know, I know, I've bored everybody trying to talk about how you prepare flax and how you prepare cotton. Wool has to be prepared as well, or it should be prepared. So you pull it off your fleece, so think back to watching Babe, a pig in the city where farmer Hoggett is pulling all of his shorn fleeces and he's unrolling them

and he's bundling them up. When you unroll a freshly shorn fleece, you've got to do what they call skirting it. So you go all around the edges and take off the dung tags, take off all the waste wool, all the nasty little pieces and you're left with basically like a sheep shaped rug made out of wool. Then you have to grade it because some of the wool is going to be better than others so the finer the better wool. The Romans would try to protect their wools. So even while it was still in the sheep, you can read about sheep who have been washed in wine to get a lot of the dirt off the sheep. Sometimes they would actually comb the wool while it was still on the sheep, which helps to straighten out the crimp that's on it.

The Romans would wash their wool. Now how they wash the wool is very different from how I do it. The process that I do is something called scouring and I use a lot of soap because I don't like to spin wool that's got lanolin in it. That's called spinning in the grease. I don't like doing it. Some people really love doing it and again those Aran sweaters are spun in the grease so they become waterproof. Pliny tells us that the grease keeps it being fireproof. Don't try that at home because I don't buy it. It burns a little more slowly but grandma will go up if you don't put her out. So don't try that at home. The Romans don't have soap, and you need soap to dissolve that lanolin.

Instead, when the Romans wash a fleece, it's to get all the dirt out of it, all the mud out of it. So they'll wash all their fleece to do that. So they end up, they still have a fleece that's still got a lot of lanolin in it. In fact, wool workers had very soft hands so people who were constantly shearing sheep and working with sheep, unlike other workers who are going to have rough calloused hands, very nice hands because working with lanolin all the time. So you've got your fleece. In order to spin it smoothly you either want to comb it or card it. Combing is man's work because the combs are so big and heavy. Carding is what the kiddies did. It takes seven spinners, five to seven spinners to keep

a weaver busy and in order to have that fiber ready for that spinner somebody's got to be carding all that wool. I didn't bring my hand carders with me, sorry. They look like dog brushes so if you've been brushing your dog you have your hand carders. That helps to fluff up your wool, it helps to open it up from the locks so you don't see the curly locks on the sheep anymore. So you fluff it all up with your cards, then it's ready to spin, huzzah! So you have the stuff that I brought is all commercially processed so it looks very nice and neat. But that is very easy to spin because you're not seeing the individual locks. This stuff that I've brought

has been commercially combed so it's called, and it means all the fibers are lined up with one another. So when you go to spin it, it's just going to feed straight out of the draft very easily. But what the Romans would do and the Greeks would do and people in North America would do in this age of hand spinning, even once you got to spinning wheels, in the evenings, everybody would card. The kids would card, farmers coming in from the field would card. Everybody would card this wool so that the women the next day would have full baskets to spin. And so you'd have people spinning in the evenings. Because you don't... I can do a lot of spinning by hand without having to have light necessarily on it.

So it's a lot of stuff you do in the evening. This is when all your stories are being told and all your recollections of the day. So if you wonder, you know, people sitting around telling myths, they're also going to be working with their hands at the same time. So everything is going to be all tied in together. So it's all the stories that people are talking about and family traditions and all of these stories about the myths. So of course, if everybody is hand-carding and everybody is spinning, you can see why so many of the myths would feature it because it's what you're doing while you're sat there. It's not just in the Greek and Roman world that you see this. A lot of the stories about spinning and weaving and all those myths also appear in Native American

myths and South American myths and Aboriginal myths because it's while you're doing it, you're telling the stories of doing it. So that's how you end up preparing all of your wool. So it becomes this activity that includes the entire family. So it includes all of this industry. And you can also see somebody saying that to little kids, because it is an arduous, unending task. You know, I don't want to do this, but it shows that you're a good Roman. It shows that you're contributing to the household. So it's all this positive reinforcement that you need to have when you have this endless drudgery that you have to do. Well, Kerry, this has been fascinating I mean as you say we've

only just together doesn't it weaves together doesn't it um so I say we've only just kind of scratched the surface you're the expert in all of this is there anything else you'd like to highlight to talk about about spinning and weaving in the ancient Mediterranean world before we really wrap up but you think I need to mention that I think it's a neglected subject I mean we've barely talked about weaving of course it's talked about spinning in the work that I've tried to do not many people have done much work on it and I think what really helps is the marriage of having either the background in medieval history or the background in classical

history and actually being able to do the activities, it helps so much. I have a little workshop that I do with my students where I get them to try to use hand spindles and suddenly it becomes clear to them why you would praise somebody for saying that she spun well. So this hand's one thing. It would be nice to see more about it. I think you're quite right what you said at the beginning it's ubiquitous and something you don't even think about it's almost like it's under the surface so everybody's focusing on the politics and the wars and and everything else that's going on but you sort of forget this this everyday thing because it's not mentioned in the sources it's not something necessarily that your writers would be interested in but there's there's loads out there there's I mean there's far more that I would like to be able to do with it we haven't

talked about dyeing and and coloring the fibers and that we've just talked about the production how often did dyeing sometimes happen when you're making in the ancient world then oh that would that gets us off on a whole topic about dyeing with natural dyes and all of the italic salts that you need to make sure the colours are locked in. And I can, let me say this briefly, when it comes to dyes, the queen of the dyes is purple because of course you think of purple royalty, emperors and all of that. Tyrian purple. Tyrian purple, which comes from a seashell. It was very, very, very expensive. That would have been the crushed seashells that were made.

Most natural colors do not stick to fibers. Cotton and wool dye differently, so you need these metallic salts, which are called mordants. It comes from the Latin word mordo, which means to bite. The dyes will lay against the fibers and then they just slough off. But when you prepare your fiber with one of these metallic salts, the dye will grab onto the metallic salt and that's how you end up getting your dyes. There are vibrant colors in the ancient world. So not as vibrant as Hollywood would have us believe when we see people wearing like bright pink and sort of

anodyne dyes that you get in the 19th century. But you could have all sorts of mad colors. Some of the best ones are going to be up here in Britain because you've got the fungus and you've got lichen. That's where you get all your tartan colours.

That's where you get purples and your reds and your blues and all of that. But dyes would take us into something. That's plenty book eight. Natural history book eight.

That's another podcast. Yeah. But there's loads with that. Yeah, there's loads of stuff we've not even done. I find that when i talk about this stuff i had no idea that people would be that interested in it because for me it's been a hobby since since i was a kid and it's this marriage i think between doing the roman stuff as well as the handwork that really fascinates people because i think a lot of the people that i've met who do spin and weave don't

know any of the history of it at all and the mechanics of it in that respect so it's it's been really great for me to to meet people who've been so enthusiastic about it and hearing about it because I just thought I bored people but I can't think of anything off the top of my head like I said it's a neglected topic and I'm quite excited to to be able to do more with it well very exciting. As you say, we have focused more on spinning than the weaving. So we'll wrap up now. I mean, weaving, is that, for instance, with the big looms that we see depicted on the... Because that's actually the last thing before we really wrap up. I'm thinking now Greek pottery again.

But you do see sometimes those huge looms that are used. Is that the staple throughout the Greco-Roman period for weaving? Yes. Those are warp-weighted looms and they can be quite huge. They're not always freestanding, they're usually propped up against a wall. You see vestiges of those in the Scandinavian world up through the 19th and into the early 20th century. It's really hard to find information about them because they get superseded by the type of loom where you see somebody sat at a bench and they're working the treadles

and they're slamming the beater and all that. Butser down in, is it East Sussex or Sussex? Yes, I know what you mean, Butser Ancient Farm, yeah. There are two or three of these upright looms because one of our postgrad students is what they call an experimental archaeologist and she's working on her PhD right now and that's what she does so she is the on-site weaver working with one of these. My loom is cheating because I use a jack loom which is a 20th century invention so that's something very different that's the treadles and the beaters and

all the different sheds and all that sort of thing. But the loom that you see will not be superseded till the Middle Ages. So, yeah, work is, the hand spindles, the looms is virtually unchanged throughout our period. So one of the most enduring aspects from the ancient world, from the ancient Mediterranean, but from the ancient world, is, as you say, is this thing that we sometimes take for granted today because we live post-industrial revolution, is the hand spindle of all things. Exactly.

Exactly. And again, this is one reason why I like teaching it, because I think people are completely unaware of where do all of these textiles come from. You'll be noticing all afternoon everything that's textile. Or woven, even if it's not fiber because it can be rubber it can be you know it can be anything oh yeah i'm gonna be on the tube looking at all the clothes around me like a madman thank you so much and imagine doing it all by hand i know i know it

blows your mind it really does not just the tube but the seats everything the carpets everything well carrie this has been fantastic as i said focusing more on spinning than weaving maybe we'll get you back to talk about spinning dying there's so many various aspects we could talk to you about this topic brilliant last but certainly not least you have written a book recently all about life in ancient rome what is this book that is my writer's guide to ancient rome and it covers it covers i don't think think actually covers spinning and weaving in it, so that's for the next edition. It's for people who are creating imaginary worlds, whether they're writing historical fiction, whether they're doing games, and also just for the general reader actually of just general aspects of the Roman world and what made them tick and especially where to find sources.

So I know from the feedback I've gotten off the book people have really appreciated that there's a lot of primary sources in there and there's a whole chapter just on where you can look things up on websites both academic and popular history but it covers all aspects of Roman life and break my heart about gladiator and the name of Russell Crowe's character oh my god I laugh I'm not allowed to watch gladiator with anybody anymore because I start pointing out the mistakes from the very beginning and what what is his name in the film because it's absolutely mental it's Maximus Deridius my name is I can't remember but it's it's what what is it with a name that's that it's just mental because it's just strung together random words that it doesn't he doesn't have a proper family name there's only 20 prime moments and I don't think they hit it

with that because Maximus is his prynoman and Maximus wasn't a prynoman I'm getting very geeky now It's what we like, it's what we like on the pod It just cracks me up. I think I refer to him as Russell Croentius in the book as well, so I don't know if anybody has ever told him that, I think it's only sold about three copies

so he probably doesn't know but, oh it drives me nuts the name's not for me, you have to buy a copy of the book. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Just piquing the interest, Kerry. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast. Cheers, thank you.

It's been fun. Well, I hope you've enjoyed this podcast all about spinning in the classical world. It was great to get Dr. Kerry Fliner back on the podcast to talk through all of this. And I say back because she did previously feature

on The Ancients right at the start of The Ancients podcast to talk all about Agrippina the Younger so go and check that one out if you haven't listened to it already now last but certainly not least if you want more ancient history content if you want more ancients well why not sign up to our newsletter which you can in the link in the description below I'm also going to point out now that recently Spotify has added a new feature for its podcasts. You can now rate podcast shows on Spotify. So we'd be very grateful if you listen to us on Spotify

to go to the Ancients page and to give us a rating. A nice rating, please. That would be lovely. It really helps us spread the An ancients to more and more people. We're becoming infectious, but a good infectious in that regard. Anyways, I'm going to stop rambling on now, and I'll see you in the next episode.