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Rome still smells (well, sort of…)

Most civilizations assume they will go on forever, but of course even though they don’t, they usually leave traces of their existence behind for us to puzzle over; its these traces that arouse our curiosity. They often put up monuments of their famous deeds and the battles they’ve won; the educated amongst them write down what they’re thinking or have imagined; and they build temples and buildings they assume will resist the eroding effects of wind and weather over the years. And yet, the significance of these are often lost to those not acquainted with their culture and language. I’m reminded of the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley: And on the pedestal, these words appear: my name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.

Still, buildings and monuments are only the external manifestations of a civilization so I’m not sure how much that enables us to judge what the ancients were really like. Contemporary descriptions are fine, I suppose, but they were usually written by the upper, more educated and powerful classes, and may not be totally accurate reflections the society in which they lived. The surviving monuments are not much better in describing the prevailing zeitgeist either: in ancient Rome, there are an awful lot of carved stones and columns filled with praise for their powerful benefactors, but that’s hardly representative of the population – the emperor Trajan’s column springs to mind with its depictions of his victory in the Dacian Wars, not to mention the inscription at the bottom in beautifully constructed Roman square capital letters that every kid in Kindergarten is taught to imitate when they learn to print… Okay, maybe that’s just a Winnipeg thing.

But as I mentioned, only tangible things have survived the ravages of Time to any extent: middens, outlines of crumbled dwellings, and names on tombstones and monuments. To understand a society more fully, it seems to me that we need to understand its inhabitants and the ways they lived and interacted from day to day; the more evanescent and revealing hints of quotidian life in ancient Rome are far more difficult to find, however. What, for example, did a city street in ancient Rome actually sound like? How might the words emanating from my exuberant Latin teacher in 50ies Winnipeg really have sounded in those ancient times? (He was Scottish, and I rather suspect there was no distinguishable burr in Roman street Latin).

And what did street food smell like? Was it similar to the smell of street food in many of today’s developing cities, and did it cling to their clothes like it still seems to do? Did everybody smell the same so there would be no need to try to disguise it, or were certain foods only eaten by the poor and perhaps the slaves, and therefore avoided by the privileged few?

I’m sure there were unwritten rules about smells; would these also have been marks of status? I, for one, would like to think that I would at least have tried to bathe and change my clothes if I’d been invited out for an orgy after just coming in from a battle somewhere… or  maybe not. You have to know your audience.

Still, if the customs to which all the social classes were accustomed were unwritten, as no doubt was the case, then how could the present day me possibly know what they were? I mean what would the average ancient Roman patrician actually smell like? I suppose I should stipulate whether I mean before or after their strigilation at the bathhouses, of course -I don’t think they had hot showers or anything.

But odours are personal nowadays, private things; some of us are just smellier than others, and in ancient Rome, apart from complaining about the smell of a passing centurion and risking a quick stab with his pugio, I imagine most people simply accepted it. I do wonder about how smell affected their relationships, however. I recall an apocryphal story of more recent times, that Napoleon used to instruct Josephine not to wash before he returned from battle -of course, he may have been into osmolagnia or something (I had to look it up). I’m not accusing the ancients of that kind of stuff or anything, but the word had to come from somewhere, eh?

The thing with odours, however, is that apart from sudden, unexpected accostations, we get used to them and adapt. The odour of the clothes of a smoker may not be as evident to the wearer as to the greeter -speaking as a non-smoker, of course. So if there were battle smells that they preferred to expunge, or other-people odours that that they needed to disguise, apart from dropping into an after-hours bathhouse for a quick oil-down, what then? What would a fastidious ancient Roman smell like?

I remember my go-to deodorant was patchouli oil liberally and strategically applied when I was at university in the 60ies and had a late class or something before a date. It seemed to cover every contingency: every bad  breath smell, every sweaty run-to-make-it-on-time-for-the-date-smell, and every other innocent indiscretion to which I was prey in those naïve times.

Over the years, I grew to dislike the smell of patchouli oil, though; it reminded me too much of my early failures, I suppose. I was very shy in those days and many a girl suspected I was trying to disguise something if I applied it before a date. There were conventions in those days. Rules.

Interestingly, somebody found traces of a musty perfume in a rare and obviously expensive quartz vial buried with the bodies of three men and three women in a Roman tomb from around the first century A.D.[i]  Wouldn’t you know it, subsequent analysis proved it was patchouli oil. In those early days, the plant from which it was derived grew only in India so the oil must have been expensive. At any rate, this was apparently the first positive identification of a probable Roman perfume.

So, maybe patchouli was a better smell than most of the stuff they washed with at the time; or maybe they were all gathered in a university residence for a spin-the-vial party, and had been addled by the lead in the plumbing… Of course, maybe somebody just brought the wrong vial. I’m not saying that any of them weren’t actually using patchouli or anything, just that it would like being buried with a can of spray-on Old Spice deodorant or maybe having a bar of Irish Spring soap in the sink.

Just saying… I mean who would want a patchouli burial?

[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/roman-perfume-patchouli-180982305

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