How smelly was ancient Rome?

Dr Thomas Derrick from Australia’s Macquarie University specialises in the everyday lives of people in the Roman Imperial period.

Derrick is especially focused on its artifacts, perfumes, cosmetics and medicines.

Rome would have smelt pretty bad, he told RNZ’s Sunday Morning.

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“You would probably smell human waste, you'd probably smell wood smoke, animal waste, things rotting, decaying.”

While the Roman’s had toilets, they weren’t plumbed in, he says.

“You probably would have had a toilet and potentially maybe some kind of cesspit or something in the house as well.

“Toilets in houses were not plumbed into the sewer because there wasn't a valve on the toilet. So, in modern toilets, there's a valve that stops things coming up from the sewer. That wasn't present on those toilets so, any dangerous methane gas or something from the sewer would come into the house and the Romans used lamps for lighting, so fire lamps. So that could be quite explosive and dangerous.”

The Romans didn’t waste what ended up in the sewers either, he says.

“Faeces in sewers for would go out as fertiliser in the fields, and then the urine was used for a range of things, including cleaning cloth, for example, the ammonia that you can get out of it. So, it's used for a range of industrial cloth and fabric processing.”

The streets were pretty filthy, but the Romans had an ingenious solution, he says.

“There were stepping stones in the streets, not just cobblestones.

“They enable people to avoid water, the muck, but also allow traffic. They're really pretty genius for the time, actually.”

Romans would have encountered some shocking sights as the moved around the city, he says, including decaying bodies.

“If you're going to be buried or cremated, or inhumation in the later Roman period, someone has to pay for that. You don't get that free.

“There's a story of a dog taking a severed hand that's presumably from one of these corpses that's been left out for whatever length of time to the Emperor Vespasian's dinner table.”

As well as bodies in the streets, body odour would have been pungent, he says, and Romans believed purging was the solution.

“There's one that's boiling golden thistle root, which is a type of herb in fine wine, a Falernian wine. This is one of the most expensive types of wine.

“If you make this solution and you drink it, it was thought to flush out odour. It's a diuretic, so it makes you urinate. And that was the mechanism that many ancient doctors thought would flush out odour.”

The image of public baths in ancient Rome is a sanitised version from what would have been the reality, he says.

“When people talk about ancient Rome, they always think about the baths, you go to the baths, you come out completely clean. And we also know that there's a lot of communal bathing and kind of small tubs that had lots of people.

“Also, if you had people with kind of skin illnesses or kind of open wounds, they're going into the same environment as you.

“So, it probably wasn't as hygienic as we think when we go now and it's all been polished up for tourists. It probably would have been pretty, pretty grotty in some cases.”

Baths were also a place where Romans interacted, not just bathed, he says.

“We have lots of evidence of people eating at the baths. Bath drains are fantastic archaeological sources. And we can see things like seafood, seafood shells. We know from authors it was a place that you could go and eat.

“There are people playing games…we find evidence of gaming and gambling at the baths. People talk about doing business deals at the baths.

“So, I think while it might have not been the best way to get clean, I don't think it was really about that in a lot of cases.”