If the question is “how ancient Rome smelled” the answer is “yes”

Smelling a colony, a room or a plate of food causes our mind to jump and travel over time. It is something tremendously powerful And that has led to investigate ways to smell video games, The cinema either to the Internet. These systems existed And, although it would be the definitive immersive experience, None finished curdlingPerhaps the problem is that we don’t want to sniff certain things.

And, definitely, something we would not want to experience is the smell of ancient Rome.

It smelled strong. Thomas Derrick, a doctor at Macquarie University in Australia, believes that ancient Rome would have been extremely smelly for Anyone of today. In statements a RNZthe researcher specialized in people’s daily lives during that historical period in Rome believes that “it probably smelled quite bad.” Ok, but … to what extent?

“You would smell human waste mixed with smoke resulting from the burning of firewood, animal droppings and other things rotting and decomposing.”

And the sewers? The problem is that there was not a single source of those bad smells, being the result of a stinky combination not particularly pleasant. Rome had a sewer system (the ‘Maximum sewer‘It is an example), but not some sewers like the ones we can imagine to carry the waste of the latrines to a black well or something like that, but something more similar to a river drain to evacuate the stagnant water of the public areas.

Derrick says in an article to The conversation that “we can assume, with enough security, that the owners did not have latrines connected to the sewers in the big cities, perhaps by fear of the entrance of rodents or the bad odors.” In addition, they did not have valves such as those that currently prevent things from the sewer, so the gases that originated from the waste, such as methane, could enter the houses. And considering that lamps with a flame were used, The danger of explosion was there.

Nothing was wasted. Most likely, the most humble had a nearby black well. And, in addition to the feces, it must be taken into account that the garbage could also be thrown into the same place … or directly to the street, as was the case with urine, thrown from the windows of the buildings of several floors. Apart from human waste, there were work animals that were used regularly in cities that They did their things in the streetsas well as decomposition corpses of both these animals and people.

And what is garbage for the vast majority, for others it is a “treasure.” There were professionals who collected stool to use them as fertilizers, but urine could also be used to wash clothes. That urine is still rich in ammonia, so could be used to disinfect.

Patches for poop. If the streets were up of excrement (and what are not excrements, another question that arises is how they could walk through them without ending up to the stool knees. The answer they found was the placement of large stones in the streets to dodge both the mud and the waste.

Pompeya is one of the places where you can see these “stones to cross”, a cobblestone that also allowed a simpler step for animals that were used to load or for tasks such as moving the large stone mills that were used in the bakeries. Again, more animals … and more waste.

Humanity. Derrick says that this nausebound smell of the big Roman cities was not only due to the feces of each other. “Roman settlements would have strongly smelled of body sweat,” he says. Also demystify that Image of Roman public bathsaffirming that they were not as hygienic as we can think if we visited the ruins of some of them.

And yes, although they were places where you could carry out hygienic activities, especially were meeting points in which it defined and ate, pulling the remains to the ground. In addition, although the Romans knew the soap, they preferred to scratch the skin with a bronze curved tool called strígile and use perfumed olive oil for personal hygiene. And the mixture of oil and dead skin was thrown (again) to the ground or water. And since water and oil are not mixed, when the water disappeared, only that greasy mejunje remained. The author comments that the bathrooms, “were surely quite dirty places.”

There were always classes. The elites could have more refined customs and even use perfumes that, yes, existed in ancient Rome. To elaborate them, they mixed animal and plant fats and they were impregnated with aromas such as roses, cinnamon, lilies, incense or saffron. They could bring spices to India thanks to the vast Commercial networks of the Empireand if these perfumes were applied in the human body, they mixed with body smell to work for something … different.

Where they were used with more olfactory success it was in the statues, since they sought to enhance that aroma of the gods and goddesses with perfumes that exalted the cult of deities. What is clear is that what for us would be something nauseabundo, for the ancient Romans was everyday, the smell of the home. Do you remember the Maximum sewer? That class difference was also there: while the popular classes had blind wells, some Domus rich did have direct connection with the sewerage system.

And now I can’t stop imagining how to smell some lentils reminds me of winter afternoons when I was little … and how for a Roman legionary away from home, smelling a swamp could make him think “as at home, nowhere.”

Images | Pinterest (Peter Connolly), Featuredpics

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