gstafleu

In this forum one occasionally meets the idea that pagan civilization was a vibrant one and that Christianity wrecked utter havoc upon it. One thinks of glorious Rome with its aquaducts, bath houses and sewers, or Antioch with its celebrated main thoroughfare, and then compares this to the squalor of later medieval cities. So, let us look at squalor in Greco-Roman cities for a moment. The following is summarized from The Rise of Christianity (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Rodney Stark, Chapter 7.

Stark starts by looking at Antioch. It was very small by our standards, starting out at about one square mile and eventually growing to something like one by two miles. The total population was about 150,000 (city proper). This puts the population density at 117 per acre. But in Greco Roman cities between 30% and 50% of the space was dedicated to public buildings, monuments and temples. Putting Antioch at an average 40% in this respect raises the density to 195 per acre. Compare this with Manhattan Island at 100 per acre (and they spread out vertically) or Bombay at 183 per acre. And in those cities people usually don't share their living space with livestock, and the streets usually aren't full of horse and oxen shit.

Your image of living conditions in Rome may be one of these atrium houses you see in the movies, but that was only for the elite. There was one private house for every 26 blocks of apartments, and these apartments frequently collapsed. They were build too lightly, and the poor lived on the less desirable upper floors (no elevators), and subdivided these beyond the structural capacity of the buildings. And if the buildings didn't collapse they were likely to catch fire, as cooking was indoors over wood or charcoal braziers, with no chimneys. If a building caught fire it was likely to spread, as streets, such as they were, were narrow. Antioch's famous avenue was only 30 feet wide. The Via Appia and Via Latina in Rome were somewhere between 15 and 20 feet wide! By law streets in Rome had to be at least 9.5 feet wide, but many parts of the city contained only foot paths.

With such population densities sanitation--water supply and sewer systems--becomes a major concern. Such densities cause problems in modern cities, and ancient cities did not exactly have our technology at their disposal. Sure, Rome had public baths and public latrines (next to each other!), but you don't really think that the poor shared these with the senators and other elites, do you? And, baths or not, soap did not yet exist. People walked around with dirty, icky, sticky smelly skin, and their hair was a yucky greasy mess on top of their heads. Toilet paper hadn't been invented either, so people squishily walked about with remnants of shit between their buttocks and on their hands. This no doubt added to their general fragrancy. Not that you would notice, because what their was of sewers was usually open. Plus people dumped the contents of their chamber pots on the streets (you don't really think everyone took a walk to the public latrines every time nature called, do you?).

So how about the water that came in from the fabled aquaducts? Couldn't it be used for washing and cleaning? Well, it had to be stored in cisterns, and stagnant untreated water rather soon turns into a stinking mess. Plus, except if you were very rich, you had to carry it home in jugs. So no, there wasn't a lot of it available for washing and cleaning floors. And did I mention that people often left corpses, both animal and human, on the streets as well? That was part of a general garbage problem. Just imagine if your garbage doesn't neatly get picked up once a week, but rather just gets thrown onto the street, there to mingle with various types of human and animal piss and shit (remember those horse and oxen carts). Of course it is questionable how much of that you would smell amidst the miasma rising from your own body.

So Greco-Roman cities were a smelling, rotting, stinking, disgusting mess. If anyone from this forum located a time machine and took a trip back to ancient Rome, I doubt if you would see many of the fabled sights. Your eyes would be watering from the stench and you probably would be too busy just throwing up too notice much of anything. If you survived for any length of time, that is. Because under those conditions disease is a real problem.

Life expectancy at birth was less than 30 years. People were sick all over the place. An analysis of decayed fecal remains from a cess pit in Jerusalem found an abundance of tapeworm and whipworm eggs (pub. 1991). "Swollen eyes, skin rashes, and lost limbs are mentioned over and over again in the sources as parts of the urban scene." Letter writers were "obsessed" by health issues, leading to many statements like "I am astonished that so far you have not written to me about your health."

As a final note, Greco-Roman cities were not unusual in this respect, cities have always been so. "It was not until the twentieth century that urban mortality was sufficiently reduced that the cities of Western Europe and North America could sustain their populations without additional in-migration from rural areas."

So, in conclusion, we will have to modify any rosy views of ancient civilization. Except for some oases among the elites, these civilizations were a disgusting mess. And by our standards even the elites were a smelly lot, no wonder they were so fond of incense, perfumes and fragrant body oils. Plus, everyone was sick, disfigured and scarred. To drive this home on a personal level, if you were there and considering having sex with someone, I doubt if you would be able to overcome your revulsion enough to get closer to your prospective partner than a few feet at best. I'll spare you a detailed description of what you would find when they took off the greasy smelly mess of fabric that passed for clothes--but you can probably imagine.

[I have written this in a more or less journalistic style, not bothering to provide references. The book itself does include these references, so I refer you to it for this background.]

Gerard Stafleu

gurugeorge

Great post gstafleu, a salutary reminder of the realites of the times we are talking about.

mountainman

Dear gstafleu,

I am working on the time machine, but where in your description is the rise of the lotus?

Best wishes,


Pete

Casper

You have such a way with words.

Fragrance indeed.

So much for the idea of the "noble savage".

premjan

Pagan != savage.

bacht

Makes it easy to understand why the "good life" included a country villa, away from urban problems - wasn't plague usually spread by city rats?

Clivedurdle

Don't forget the frequently deadly fish paste!

gstafleu

Contagious diseases are in general spread via contact, sometimes via intermediaries like rats. In a situation where everyone in a city was sitting in each other's lap, cemented in place by layers of icky goo, no doubt it was a good idea to move out of the city, if you had the money. Which of course nobody except a very small elite had.

Filth and disease weren't the only problems, natural and social disasters were pretty effective as well in making life miserable. Stark provides the following list for Antioch during its about 600 years of intermittent Roman rule. It was taken by unfriendly forces 11 times and plundered or sacked on 5 of these occasions. At two other times the city was put under siege but did not fall. It burned entirely or in large part 4 times. Remember how close together the apartments are, and they were built of wood (only monumental buildings were built of stone). There were six periods of major rioting, often also accompanied by fires. There were lots of earthquakes, eight being so severe that nearly everything was destroyed. There were at least three killer epidemics with mortality rates >25%. And there were 5 really serious famines.

This amounts to 41 natural or social catastrophes, or on average one every 15 years. Now, if you are American, think of your country's reaction to 9/11, a fairly insignificant event where a couple of buildings were destroyed and a small number of people died. Sure, 9/11 was a relatively large event because nothing like it had happened in recent memory, but it may give you some idea of the prevailing mood of the people in e.g. Antioch. Canadians may want to think about the SARS "epidemic" that struck Toronto, killing a handfull of people: the city was avoided like, well, the plague, for months! These two examples may help you understand the difference between our current conditions an the ones prevailing, oh, say 200 years ago.

Romans also had some interesting habits that we might these days experience as slightly off-putting: they killed babies in large amounts. Infanticide was quite legal, and practiced regularly on girls (a Roman household would generally raise a maximum of one girl) and deformed boys. The babies were left at the roadside ("exposed") so that someone might pick them up (fat chance), or they were thrown in the sewer (Google Ashkelon babies for an interesting example).

Gerard Stafleu

credoconsolans

No one on this board has ever claimed that the classic civilizations were just as good as 21st century cities/civilizations.

I think the author of this book missed the point. In ancient times, Greco-Roman cities/civilization were much better in comparison to those around them and what came after in the Dark Ages.

Yes, they didn't have toilet paper, but slaves stood around the public latrines which were connected to public sewers with sponges on sticks ready for their masters or for sale to anyone who wanted to wipe their asses.

Yes, the latrines were next to the public baths. Why is this a big gasp? Don't you find toilets in every single public swimming pool you go to?

The Romans were very economical. Why waste dirty bath water? They used the dirty bath water from the Baths to flush the latrines.

As opposed to later Dark Ages people who simply shat where they squatted and probably didn't wipe at all, much less have a latrine with a type of toilet paper.

Yes, they didn't have soap, but they had other materials - the Greeks had some sort of clay dust that emulsified on the skin and the Romans of course used olive oil to melt the dirt and sweat which they then scraped off before getting in the water.

I imagine the fabled Roman baths smelled like dank water and rancid oil. But then everyone did.

But again, that's opposed to later Dark Ages people who bathed perhaps once or twice year instead of daily.

Don't know about Antioch, but while the ancient Romans might have left dead dogs/cats in the street to rot, larger animals were too valuable to be left to rot when their meat could be butchered and sold as pet food if nothing else and it was pollution both secular and religious to leave dead human bodies in the street so those were hauled off as well. Probably dumped outside the city.

The ancient Romans did believe in 'bad air' causing disease, so they were pretty hip about removing dead bodies from living areas.

Yes, the water in the cisterns in wealthy homes could turn stagnant, but I imagine people in those homes could tell when the water was going bad - they mostly drank wine anyway. They had much more experience with it. Plus the aqueducts also provided pressure based water in fountains for the public. It never stopped running so was fresh all the time.

As opposed to later Dark Age people who pissed/shat and drank and ran their cattle and did laundry all in the same waters.

The ancient Romans had law courts - the "barbarians" around them had clan loyalties and blood-feuds.

I could go on and on.

Yes the ancient classical civilizations were not the most odor free and clean ones around - but compared to their less fortunate neighbors? They were head and shoulders above.

gstafleu

How so?
IOW, for the elite only, a very small fraction of the population.
Yes we do, and with current infrastructure technology that is no problem. I'm not so sure that the Romans could have avoided problems with leakage, seepage and/or leeching.

This was exactly the situation in the ancient cities (except for the numerically insignificant elites).
And that was easily available for the whole population? I would think it was a luxury only available to the elite. And "getting in the water"? Who exactly got into any kind of water? Certainly not the 99% of the people who lived in apartments. Just the few elites did that.
In Rome nobody but the elites based daily, he others did just what people in the "Dark Ages" did.

Yes, it was fresh at the aquaduct. Then you had to haul it all the way to your apartment, where it would sit in a jug. That did not help freshness. Plus the hauling business was so time consuming that it wasn't used much for washing and cleaning.
As did all Romans except the elites. Apartment dwellers dumped the contents of their chamber pots onto the street below. If a passerby got splashed, too bad. This was so frequent an occurrence that the courts didn't even bother to prosecute upon complaint.

Gerard Stafleu