20 Wild Facts That Will Make You Glad You Weren't Born In Ancient Rome
20 Wild Facts That Will Make You Glad You Weren't Born In Ancient Rome
Rome was anything but a constant toga party. In fact, life back then was pretty terrible for most people. From poor hygiene to little in the way of human rights, here are the facts on the ugly side of ancient Rome.
Rome was anything but a constant toga party. In fact, life back then was pretty terrible for most people. From poor hygiene to little in the way of human rights, here are the facts on the ugly side of ancient Rome.
Ancient Rome was one of the greatest empires in human history. Unfortunately, it was also pretty terrible in many ways and life in the Roman empire was anything but a pleasurable existence. Here are some unsettling facts that prove how life in ancient Rome was far from a toga party.
1. There was no toilet paper... instead you had a communal sponge to wipe with.
Not only did ancient Romans have to make due without the invention of toilet paper, but people in public bathrooms had to share a communal sponge on a stick. That's right, Romans had to clean their bums with a sponge that every other Roman had also used.
2. Using a public toilet could easily bring about your own death.
Rats, snakes, other sorts of unwanted creatures often lurked inside the public toilets. Sitting on one could easily result in a painful and potentially deadly bite. Not to mention that they often had a buildup of methane gases that would occasionally ignite.
3. Toothpaste wasn't around, so the Romans had an alternative teeth-whitening remedy... urine.
Urine actually had a multitude of uses in ancient Rome from tanning leather hides to yes, teeth whitening. The bodily fluid was so practical that the government had a special tax for it so that people could bottle and sell the urine. Gross!
5. Eating until you were sick was actually encouraged.
Some testimonies of royal Roman feasts describe people eating until they became sick and vomited. Only instead of going to the bathroom, buckets were kept at the tables so that people could vomit without getting up. A slave would then empty the bucket while the dinner guests continued their gluttonous meal.
6. Most Romans has numerous parasites living inside their bodies.
Hygiene was shall we say, lacking in ancient Rome. Archaeologists have been able to examine fossilized poo specimens of ancient Romans and found all sorts of nasties, ranging from roundworm to dysentery. This is largely because human excrement was often in the streets and used as a crop fertilizer.
10. Some emperors were real perverts.
Because it was pretty common for children to be sold into marriage, there was quite a bit of sexual abuse happening -- especially among the royal elite. Emperor Caligula was said to have orgies with his own family members while Tiberius was said to sexually abuse young boys.
11. Capital punishment was a horrible way to die.
Crucifixion was just one of the ways ancient Romans used to carry out executions. Priests who broke their vows might be buried alive. And if you killed a relative... well, you would be sewn into a sack with a monkey and dog and then tossed into the river!
13. The Roman army wasn't opposed to slaughtering its own citizens.
It wasn't just outsiders who feared the Roman army, but Roman citizens too. The emperor Tiberius killed more than 35,000 of his own people during his reign, and the emperor Maxentius killed thousands of his senators so that he could take their property.
14. Being a gladiator meant an almost certain horrible death.
Rome didn't look up to its athletes the way the modern world does. Instead, it murdered them by the thousands. Some historians believe that in a single year, nearly 10,000 gladiators were killed by each other or by the starved animals that were tossed into the ring with them.
15. Bathhouses were filthy places.
A spa day in ancient Rome meant heading to a bathhouse that likely had water filled with human urine and excrement. If that wasn't gross enough, Romans would coat their bodies with oil before a slave would use a brush to scrape off the dead skin. As for the oil? It was reused for the next guest.
16. Most people didn't even make it to their teenage years.
Women who were lucky enough to survive to adulthood often had as many as 10 children, this is because most of them died before even hitting their teenage years. Historians estimate that as many as 75% of people born in ancient Rome died before the age of 10.