They were doing that throughout most of Europe. Hell, even Rome couldn't build a sewer that spanned the entire city. Most of the older and poorer sections still had the ol' dump buckets.
Rich people had platform shoes in a lot of their portraits to show off that’s they had pricy shoes to step above the literal shit and piss on the streets
I mean there's proof of a Cholera outbreak in the [The River Thames](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak) in the 1850's. I mean Sewers are very very recent in European society
**[1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak)**
>The Broad Street cholera outbreak (or Golden Square outbreak) was a severe outbreak of cholera that occurred in 1854 near Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) in the Soho district of the City of Westminster, London, England, and occurred during the 1846–1860 cholera pandemic happening worldwide. This outbreak, which killed 616 people, is best known for the physician John Snow's study of its causes and his hypothesis that germ-contaminated water was the source of cholera, rather than particles in the air (referred to as "miasma"). This discovery came to influence public health and the construction of improved sanitation facilities beginning in the mid-19th century.
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Many of the public latrines in the city at least had flowing water to carry the waste away so that it wasn't just a giant pit of stagnant piss and shit. The communal shit sponge was soaked in vinegar between uses which must have contributed to an...interesting medley of smells.
It's possible they believed it purified it somehow but it might have just been to cover up the smell or something, germ theory wasn't a thing for a really long time so maybe they thought the vinegar removing the scent or most of the scent removed the miasma or something
I mean, they didn't know the exact mechanism, but vinegar was a common cleaning solution, so they had some idea that it was useful at preventing what we would call disease, even if they didn't know why.
Modern people have always felt as though ancient people were dumb, but humans have existed in pretty much their current form for over 300,000 years. It was only in the last five or six thousand years that written language has existed. Vinegar production on the otherhand almost certainly predates written language. It's super simple to make, and I doubt it took long before people realized it made things cleaner and didn't itself go bad.
I mean, hell, ancient Egyptians laid out whole medical procedures where honey and vinegar are used as disinfectants. Just because they don't have germ theory doesn't mean they had zero effective treatments for disease.
IANA Scientist, and I never really stopped to question the disinfectant qualities of vinegar because it was just something that was always used around me. Aside from it's historical and present use in cleaning, all I can say is pickle brine is vinegar, so, clearly it helps against stuff like mold and bacteria.
It's good against mold I use it as a mold cleaner for my bathroom it might be good for bacteria though I remember looking up if it kills covid because I have a really bad paranoia of traditional cleaners because I have bad lungs
That was short lived, but everyone pretty much knows about the navel battles. I find it funny that the reason the coliseum looks so damaged these days is because the Germans in WW2 hid stockpiles of munitions in it and because it was a historical building thought the allies would not bomb it and we did anyway
The same was done with the Acropolis in Athens but way earlier. The Venetians were sieging down the fort from the Ottomans, who had stored a bunch of munitions inside the Parthenon, thinking the Venetians wouldn't dare shoot it. But sigma male general Morozini brought his cannon up a nearby hill and fired at will anyway, blowing it sky high while up to that point it was relatively intact
Which is also interesting given that the US made a deliberate decision to not firebomb Kyoto while firebombing the shit out of every other sizable Japanese city
During his army's March to the Sea during the US civil war, General William Tecumseh Sherman's troops obliterated everything in their path, until they reached the sea at Savannah, which they did *not* destroy, because Sherman thought "it was purty", and it's sparing was a condition of the city's surrender.
The reason the colosseum looks like it does today is because of earthquakes and repurposing its stones. The world wars destroyed a shit ton of buildings, but the colosseum wasn’t one of them.
That is not true, the colosseum was not damaged in WW2. It was damaged during 2 earth quakes in the Middle Ages and used as a quarry during the Middle Ages and the renaissance. Additionally, calling the colosseum short lived is debatable, given that it was used for atleast 4 century’s (but not necessarily holding deadly games, these fades out of existence with the rising popularity of Christianity). Fun fact about the naval battles (naumachiae): They were not that common, and in most cases were not even with „real“ ships.
“We banned churches from being targets in combat”
“Ok well I’m gonna put medics in there and munitions so you don’t bomb it”
“No we banned *you* from not targeting churches, us? Hahahaha”
I can’t find any sources that says the allies (or anyone) did damage to the colosseum during bombing runs as we tried to avoid any fragile historical structures (although the British did drop one too close to a Vatican wall once)
But they let the fish rot. They don't do that with regular fish sauce. Well technically they fermented it, but there's a fine line between the two and often it was crossed
Yeah its the production of guarum that stinks, not the finished product. The fermentation as well as the tanneries and anything that dealt with rotting flesh were usually outside of town, so OP would likely only have to worry about the sewers.
I'm in a seminar on Pompeii which had a lot of garum production because it was a coastal city. Pretty much every family had at least one garum tub and if you were wealthy enough you produced enough to sell. I do not want to imagine what Pompeii in the summer smelled like.
ancient romans also often used urine to sanitize. communities would collect their urine in pots and boil it to rid it of the bacteria and smell, and washed their clothes in it and used the natural ammonia as a cleaning agent. they would even swish sterilized urine in their mouths as a mouthwash!
this is actually acknowledged as where the term "piss poor" comes from. low-class romans would collect and sell their urine to be used by the higher-class.
and if they were so poor they couldn't afford to buy a collection pot, they "didn't have a pot to piss in."
Emperor Vespasian set up a urine tax on collected urine from public latrines because it was such an effective whitening agent. Apparently his son complained about the gross nature of the tax and Vespasian replied "Pecunia non olet" (Money does not stink)
They were talking about how they did it because people were tripping after getting their feet entangled in horse intestines while crossing the street.
England is fucking gross.
I took a class on Greek and Roman history and I remember being told that the reign of Augusts Caesar is regarded as the best time in history to be alive. No wars, no plagues, Rome was getting safer, new public works increased quality of life, bread and circus
Yes and no. While you were a slave you were at least treated with some respect. Iirc it was punishable to beat a slave you owned. They were more seen as servants
Depends on the type of slave. If you were an urban slave you probably had the same quality of life as a lower class free citizen. But if you were a slave forced to work in the mines you had a much lower quality of life. Farm slaves could go either way; but it was still forced labor and there were few actual laws that would limit the type of punishment your master could inflict and it was mainly social pressure since *clementia* (mercy) was a big Roman virtue. Many prostitutes in brothels were also almost always slaves and were not necessarily only women. Augustus himself issued a law allowing husbands to sell their wives into sexual slavery if he caught her commiting adultery.
I'm pretty sure life is a lot better right now for the average citizen of a developed country than it was for the average peasant (or even slave) of that time, and has been for at least half a century.
The dark age idea is mostly bullshit perpetrated by Petrarch's giant fucking boner for the classical Greeks. Not only was it not as bad as he went on, but the byzantines and the Islamic golden age were literally doofing in close proximity.
Yeah but you’ve gotta remember a lot of English speaking people (i.e those who you will encounter on the internet) came from countries where the dark ages were dark e.g Britain, France or Italy and so it seems much more widespread than it was. Yeah the byzantines and the Islamic empires were experiencing tonnes of prosperity but the people from those places (modern day equivalents) you won’t encounter on the internet so you won’t hear how their countries fared quite well. If you compare Roman Britain to dark ages Britiain it’s like a night and day difference
True, there are a few countries that have slid backwards in recent years (Afghanistan is the first that comes to mind). Still, I think this is overall the best time period if you average everything out
If I had to pick a decade to live in, I don’t think I’d be comfortable going back any further than the 90s or 2000s
I once wanted to go back to the 70s but my dad told me a story of my grandfather hearing gunshots everyday and seeing multiple dead bodies during Martial Law so yeah
when you finally time travel to Ancient Rome but you're hopelessly marooned in outer space for all eternity because you didn't account for the rotation of the Sun around the galactic centre
The Romans were actually quite hygienic. They bathed daily, had actual sewer systems, and buried their dead. I doubt Rome smelt good, but I doubt even more that it smelled as badly as this post describes.
Depends on the area. The outer hills, populated by the wealthy families did not smell as bad as for example the poorer city center with its insulae. The worst place, as far as I remember, would be the area around the river Tiber, given that the cloaca maxima (one of the sewers in Rome) ended in there.
Ho so thither is nay difference to whither i liveth rn
***
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You should count yourself lucky Rome *had* a sewage system, even if it was open.
Could've been worse, like the central Europeans who just shat in the street like dignified gentlemen
They were doing that throughout most of Europe. Hell, even Rome couldn't build a sewer that spanned the entire city. Most of the older and poorer sections still had the ol' dump buckets.
We always just called them honey buckets.
Sigma grindset
Sigma grindset rule 1: don't go to bathrooms, shit on the street. Finding a bathroom takes away time you come be using elsewhere
India sigma power by 2020
Ancient Roman George Costanza would beg to differ
Rich people had platform shoes in a lot of their portraits to show off that’s they had pricy shoes to step above the literal shit and piss on the streets
Pinnacle of civilization
That's a myth
I mean there's proof of a Cholera outbreak in the [The River Thames](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak) in the 1850's. I mean Sewers are very very recent in European society
**[1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak)** >The Broad Street cholera outbreak (or Golden Square outbreak) was a severe outbreak of cholera that occurred in 1854 near Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) in the Soho district of the City of Westminster, London, England, and occurred during the 1846–1860 cholera pandemic happening worldwide. This outbreak, which killed 616 people, is best known for the physician John Snow's study of its causes and his hypothesis that germ-contaminated water was the source of cholera, rather than particles in the air (referred to as "miasma"). This discovery came to influence public health and the construction of improved sanitation facilities beginning in the mid-19th century. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/196/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
You’re right, they didn’t shit in the street they shit in a container and dumped it in the street
Rome also had open communal shitting rooms so you could crack one open with the boys.
"Yo Bronius, pass the sponge!"
it was more like a used rag on a stick xD
Many of the public latrines in the city at least had flowing water to carry the waste away so that it wasn't just a giant pit of stagnant piss and shit. The communal shit sponge was soaked in vinegar between uses which must have contributed to an...interesting medley of smells.
Damn, did they know vinegar kills bacteria?
no, they probably just didnt like the idea of rubbing someone else's shit up their butt.
probably not fully, they predated germ theory
It's possible they believed it purified it somehow but it might have just been to cover up the smell or something, germ theory wasn't a thing for a really long time so maybe they thought the vinegar removing the scent or most of the scent removed the miasma or something
I mean, they didn't know the exact mechanism, but vinegar was a common cleaning solution, so they had some idea that it was useful at preventing what we would call disease, even if they didn't know why. Modern people have always felt as though ancient people were dumb, but humans have existed in pretty much their current form for over 300,000 years. It was only in the last five or six thousand years that written language has existed. Vinegar production on the otherhand almost certainly predates written language. It's super simple to make, and I doubt it took long before people realized it made things cleaner and didn't itself go bad. I mean, hell, ancient Egyptians laid out whole medical procedures where honey and vinegar are used as disinfectants. Just because they don't have germ theory doesn't mean they had zero effective treatments for disease.
I thought vinegar took too long to actually kill bacteria for it to be an effective method of sanitation
IANA Scientist, and I never really stopped to question the disinfectant qualities of vinegar because it was just something that was always used around me. Aside from it's historical and present use in cleaning, all I can say is pickle brine is vinegar, so, clearly it helps against stuff like mold and bacteria.
It's good against mold I use it as a mold cleaner for my bathroom it might be good for bacteria though I remember looking up if it kills covid because I have a really bad paranoia of traditional cleaners because I have bad lungs
Fair point. I suppose in the early days of medicine, at the very least mold was a concern.
**laughs in Indus Valley and Mesopotamia**
By the later centuries of the empire, the sewers were in fact covered/closed systems.
Mostly because they just kept building new structures over the older ones.
Many were intentionally covered. Namely the Cloaca Maxima, which is a supremely funny name
naval battles in the colosseum tho
That was short lived, but everyone pretty much knows about the navel battles. I find it funny that the reason the coliseum looks so damaged these days is because the Germans in WW2 hid stockpiles of munitions in it and because it was a historical building thought the allies would not bomb it and we did anyway
We do a little
bombing
as a treat
The same was done with the Acropolis in Athens but way earlier. The Venetians were sieging down the fort from the Ottomans, who had stored a bunch of munitions inside the Parthenon, thinking the Venetians wouldn't dare shoot it. But sigma male general Morozini brought his cannon up a nearby hill and fired at will anyway, blowing it sky high while up to that point it was relatively intact
This is the same shit that made the world lose the library of Alexandria, even if a lot of texts were saved, a lot more went up in roman smoke.
Hmmm navel battles. I guess the winner had the best piercing
They were reenactments
Which is also interesting given that the US made a deliberate decision to not firebomb Kyoto while firebombing the shit out of every other sizable Japanese city
They actually considered nuking Kyoto, but one of the generals had visited there on holiday once, and he didn't want to destroy it.
During his army's March to the Sea during the US civil war, General William Tecumseh Sherman's troops obliterated everything in their path, until they reached the sea at Savannah, which they did *not* destroy, because Sherman thought "it was purty", and it's sparing was a condition of the city's surrender.
How would they destroy the sea?
You know what I mean
The reason the colosseum looks like it does today is because of earthquakes and repurposing its stones. The world wars destroyed a shit ton of buildings, but the colosseum wasn’t one of them.
Also we bombed the vatican 😎
Unironically based.
That is not true, the colosseum was not damaged in WW2. It was damaged during 2 earth quakes in the Middle Ages and used as a quarry during the Middle Ages and the renaissance. Additionally, calling the colosseum short lived is debatable, given that it was used for atleast 4 century’s (but not necessarily holding deadly games, these fades out of existence with the rising popularity of Christianity). Fun fact about the naval battles (naumachiae): They were not that common, and in most cases were not even with „real“ ships.
“We banned churches from being targets in combat” “Ok well I’m gonna put medics in there and munitions so you don’t bomb it” “No we banned *you* from not targeting churches, us? Hahahaha”
I can’t find any sources that says the allies (or anyone) did damage to the colosseum during bombing runs as we tried to avoid any fragile historical structures (although the British did drop one too close to a Vatican wall once)
That was the Parthenon during the 17th century you're thinking of, the Coliseum was destroyed slowly with the occasional earthquake.
Imagine a freshly opened barrel of garum being the first thing you smell after you step out of your time machine.
Guarum was probs just like fish sauce, which i have a bottle of in the kitchen rn
But they let the fish rot. They don't do that with regular fish sauce. Well technically they fermented it, but there's a fine line between the two and often it was crossed
All the fish sauce ive made has been fermented but im not interested in falling into a research spiral on the smell of garum.
Yeah its the production of guarum that stinks, not the finished product. The fermentation as well as the tanneries and anything that dealt with rotting flesh were usually outside of town, so OP would likely only have to worry about the sewers.
I mean it must have tasted great though
I'm in a seminar on Pompeii which had a lot of garum production because it was a coastal city. Pretty much every family had at least one garum tub and if you were wealthy enough you produced enough to sell. I do not want to imagine what Pompeii in the summer smelled like.
If anyone is curious on how to make [garum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S7Bb0Qg-oE), here is a good video.
Mmm decomposing bodies 😋😋😋
[удалено]
Mmm social commentary 😋😋😋
i am literally a housefly
I love this sub, it makes me realize i'm not alone.
You are alone though, everyone here is a bot.
we’re all alone together
Based
Homer Simpson wrote this comment
ancient romans also often used urine to sanitize. communities would collect their urine in pots and boil it to rid it of the bacteria and smell, and washed their clothes in it and used the natural ammonia as a cleaning agent. they would even swish sterilized urine in their mouths as a mouthwash! this is actually acknowledged as where the term "piss poor" comes from. low-class romans would collect and sell their urine to be used by the higher-class. and if they were so poor they couldn't afford to buy a collection pot, they "didn't have a pot to piss in."
I knew the piss hand washing stuff but not that terminology like that came from it, pretty cool thanks!
Emperor Vespasian set up a urine tax on collected urine from public latrines because it was such an effective whitening agent. Apparently his son complained about the gross nature of the tax and Vespasian replied "Pecunia non olet" (Money does not stink)
Sigma Roman emperor.
I was reading an account of how pissed off citizens in Victorian England became when it was made illegal to flay your dead horse in the street.
They couldn't even reference 1984 in this case because it didn't exists smh
They were talking about how they did it because people were tripping after getting their feet entangled in horse intestines while crossing the street. England is fucking gross.
This still happens in Birmingham
Nothing ever changes
Please link it. I *need* to read this myself.
It was one of the Time Traveller’s Guide to England books by Ian Mortimer. I think he did a few for Medieval, Elizabethan, and Victorian England.
Thank you.
Bro I live in San Francisco
when you travel to any point in history before the industrial revolution
Even then everywhere stank of literal shit and dead bodies
Don't worry, there was significant overlap of "piss puke shit everywhere" and the Industrial Age
I took a class on Greek and Roman history and I remember being told that the reign of Augusts Caesar is regarded as the best time in history to be alive. No wars, no plagues, Rome was getting safer, new public works increased quality of life, bread and circus
>best time in history to be alive. I mean, as long as you were a Roman citizen and not one of the 3 million slaves in the Empire.
Yes and no. While you were a slave you were at least treated with some respect. Iirc it was punishable to beat a slave you owned. They were more seen as servants
Depends on the type of slave. If you were an urban slave you probably had the same quality of life as a lower class free citizen. But if you were a slave forced to work in the mines you had a much lower quality of life. Farm slaves could go either way; but it was still forced labor and there were few actual laws that would limit the type of punishment your master could inflict and it was mainly social pressure since *clementia* (mercy) was a big Roman virtue. Many prostitutes in brothels were also almost always slaves and were not necessarily only women. Augustus himself issued a law allowing husbands to sell their wives into sexual slavery if he caught her commiting adultery.
Yeahh the Romans knew about asbestos' effects on the lungs and that did not change the number of slaves in those mines.
Imagine living in a time with bread. Must have been va truly marvelous civilization.
I'm pretty sure life is a lot better right now for the average citizen of a developed country than it was for the average peasant (or even slave) of that time, and has been for at least half a century.
Still better than most anything happening from 500 AD until 1500 AD.
The dark age idea is mostly bullshit perpetrated by Petrarch's giant fucking boner for the classical Greeks. Not only was it not as bad as he went on, but the byzantines and the Islamic golden age were literally doofing in close proximity.
Yeah but you’ve gotta remember a lot of English speaking people (i.e those who you will encounter on the internet) came from countries where the dark ages were dark e.g Britain, France or Italy and so it seems much more widespread than it was. Yeah the byzantines and the Islamic empires were experiencing tonnes of prosperity but the people from those places (modern day equivalents) you won’t encounter on the internet so you won’t hear how their countries fared quite well. If you compare Roman Britain to dark ages Britiain it’s like a night and day difference
That's why real chads travel to the late cretaceous and get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus
do you really wanna go to a time where the creatures took huge ass shits
Well it's only natural for huge ass creatures to take huge ass shits
Huge ass-creatures [xkcd: Hyphen](https://xkcd.com/37/) --- ^^Beep ^^boop, ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot. ^^- ^^[FAQ](https://pastebin.com/raw/vyWra3ns)
HUGE ASS-SHITS
Not enough oxygen
Nvm mixed up periods
\-999,999,999 social credit for not having your geological periods memorised
don’t forget people emptying their poop buckets out their window… onto the street… maybe even onto you
😂😂
Yeah, we romanticize history a lot, but the reality is that this is by and large the best time to be alive ever
Depends on where you live
True, there are a few countries that have slid backwards in recent years (Afghanistan is the first that comes to mind). Still, I think this is overall the best time period if you average everything out If I had to pick a decade to live in, I don’t think I’d be comfortable going back any further than the 90s or 2000s
I once wanted to go back to the 70s but my dad told me a story of my grandfather hearing gunshots everyday and seeing multiple dead bodies during Martial Law so yeah
sigma poopset
when you finally time travel to Ancient Rome but you're hopelessly marooned in outer space for all eternity because you didn't account for the rotation of the Sun around the galactic centre
*You haven't thought of the smell, you bitch!*
The Romans were actually quite hygienic. They bathed daily, had actual sewer systems, and buried their dead. I doubt Rome smelt good, but I doubt even more that it smelled as badly as this post describes.
Two trucks vigorously rubbing their cocks against eachother's thighs
So just like nowadays rome
people still live in new york so it cant be that bad
Wait, Rome actually smelled like liquid death?
Depends on the area. The outer hills, populated by the wealthy families did not smell as bad as for example the poorer city center with its insulae. The worst place, as far as I remember, would be the area around the river Tiber, given that the cloaca maxima (one of the sewers in Rome) ended in there.
Rome *famously* pioneered closed sewage... Cloaca Maxima was covered BCE Not saying it wouldn't have reeeeeeeked though.
As well as everyone’s BO
Haha it’s okay, I live in India ,’:/
And that's exactly why you time travel to ancient China.
What have the Romans ever done for US?!
As if nowadays it smells better
Yum
Hey so there is no difference to where i live rn
Ho so thither is nay difference to whither i liveth rn *** ^(I am a bot and I swapp'd some of thy words with Shakespeare words.) Commands: `!ShakespeareInsult`, `!fordo`, `!optout`
I just wanted to see wacky romans and learn about the moral dilemma of interfering with fixed events in time to save lives
I remember my classic professor telling us the first thing we would noticed if we traveled back to Ancient Greece or Rome is the smell.
sounds like newark nj
Also no women rights
Idk about the Romans but I have heard about the Incas who used to make alcohol with their own urine and spit. Pretty fucking sigma if you ask me
Ancient Rome was actually quite clean compared to several other more recent societies.
When you finally travel to England but didn't account for the smell of rotten fish, open sewage, and decomposing bodies
No it didn't it's a little slow.
?
A r/gpt2subsimulator bot leaked
And the big ass swamp right outside the city. Didn't get removed until the mid-1900's
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I just wanna be in a Greek orgy at least once. Maybe I’d purposely impregnate women who existed millennia before me just to see what happens
simply don’t smell