Hygiene in the Roman Empire

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Hygiene played a major role in the Roman Empire from the late Republic onwards. Ruins of aqueducts , thermal baths , sewers and latrines in even the most remote corners of the empire still bear witness to this today. The hospitals were used to care for wounded soldiers in the ancient Roman Empire.

Research has only recently dealt with the subject of hygiene in the Roman Empire . This is not due to a lack of sources, but rather to the overwhelming variety: In addition to texts of all genres and artistic representations, there are ruins and, above all, a myriad of small finds of all kinds, waste and soil findings. In the past, the impressive ruins of the thermal baths and aqueducts created the cliché of the “clean Roman”, which should even have been the “cleanest nation in the world”. Modern studies , on the other hand, focus on the ancient Rome of the "little people", away from large thermal baths and elegant villas, and produce results there that contradict this cliché.

Housing conditions

The living conditions in ancient Rome did not differ significantly from those in the major cities of the 19th century. While the poor lived crammed into unhealthy apartments in the Subura , the rich owned spacious villas on the hills of the city.

City cleaning

Although four aediles were responsible for cleaning the streets, there was no publicly organized rubbish collection . Various labels have been found that prohibit or order the unloading of rubbish at certain locations. Nevertheless, there were wild garbage dumps everywhere , especially along river and lake banks and on the city walls. The Monte Testaccio is the best known of them. The amphorae disposed of there, which had become unusable for further use after the transport of oil and garum , were regularly covered with lime to reduce the stench . Sewers and cesspools were also used for waste disposal, as archaeological finds prove. Often the residents, although obliged to dispose of it, simply threw their waste out of the window, as testified by laws against it and various traditional legal disputes relating to property damage or even physical injury.

During excavations, the remains of rats were found both in garbage heaps and in the sewer system. Mice between leftovers are depicted on various mosaics. The ancient literature names pigs, cats, dogs, vultures and corvids as well as the ibis among the animals that fed on the scattered waste .

The archaeozoology has in sewers, cesspools and waste places fleas , lice , flies demonstrated and various other insects and insect larvae. Ancient writers such as Pliny were already aware that these vermin turns into a nuisance due to the ubiquity of garbage , as well as that lime not only curbs the stench, but also the spread of pests in the garbage. It was believed that the vermin originated through spontaneous generation in the rubbish. It was also believed that disease spread through the miasm that rots when it rots . Despite this knowledge, the many wild garbage dumps with their residents in the densely populated areas contributed to epidemics such as the Antonine and Justinian plagues .

The residents were also responsible for cleaning the streets. Laws regulated their duties and city inspectors controlled them. The water from the public fountains was used to flush the streets, as Sextus Iulius Frontinus described in his De aquis urbis Romae . The tall curbs and stepping stones found in Pompeii enabled pedestrians to get through the city on dry feet.

An important source for the official order of city cleaning is recorded on bronze tablets that were found near Herakleia . These bronze tablets contain copies of the Lex Iulia municipalis . I.a. it is said that the carts that bring rubbish out of the city were exempt from the otherwise usual curfew for wagons during the day. Since these are probably the same carts that carry goods into the city in the evening, it can be assumed that the farmers took food waste and the contents of dung pits with them as fertilizer for their fields on the way back. The tasks of the aediles and the city prefect, who was given the task of cleaning the city in the 3rd century AD, are also described in more detail on the same boards.

Apartments

Ruins of an insula in Rome

Most of the Roman population lived in very cramped conditions. The cheaply raised insulae only had amenities such as running water and latrines on their lower floors. There were public fountains and urinals all over the city, but according to the list by Polemius Silvius around 450 there were only 1,352 fountains and 144 public latrines for more than 30,000 insulae . In addition, the residents of the upper floors had to carry everything up and down, sometimes over 200 steep steps. The contents of the chamber pot and other waste were therefore often disposed of directly through the window.

The apartments in the insulae , some of which were up to twelve stories high, were narrow, poorly ventilated and often considerably overcrowded. Because of the risk of fire, they were not allowed to have a fireplace, only a brazier. Wooden shutters were used to protect against the cold or direct sunlight - rather unlikely given the very narrow buildings. Only the rich could afford glazing. The room climate was hot and humid or cold and humid depending on the season. Since the apartments were often behind the shops, light only came in through small windows in the corridor. Most Romans lived and slept in gloomy, unventilated rooms. In the third book of his satires, Juvenal impressively described the misery of the residents of the tenements, which are constantly in danger of collapsing and fire, and the narrowness of the overpopulated Subura, which is threatened by frequent floods and fires.

Augustus passed laws that were supposed to limit the height of the houses, and Nero enforced wider streets and fire walls after the great fire , but Tacitus reports that the inhabitants feared for their health because the sun's heat now reached the ground unhindered.

The sleeping chambers in the domus of the wealthy were also mostly windowless to keep out the noise of night traffic and the mosquitoes, for which the water basins ( impluvia ) in the atria were ideal breeding grounds. In the imperial era it became common practice to retreat to the countryside during the summer months.

Brooms, brushes and sponges with sawdust, ash and plaster powder were used as abrasives for cleaning the house.

kitchen

In many houses, the toilet was in the kitchen so that a shared dirty water drain could be used. The kitchen waste was also disposed of there or in pits created inside the house or in the garden. While advisors like Cato the Elder and Columella recommended daily cleaning of the kitchen, archaeological finds show that not everyone was so careful with it. Some of the waste was simply kicked into the clay soil together with the ashes.

A popular mosaic motif showed the "unswept dining room", on which mice cavort between gnawed bones and other leftovers. But even if the floor looked like this after a party, the hosts had enough slaves available for cleaning.

Food was brought into the city from afar. They could be stored and preserved in various ways . Columella gives instructions on this in his guide De re rustica . Meat was dried rather than cured because salt was rare and expensive. Fruit was pressed into must and boiled down or dried, vegetables were preserved in vinegar. Vitruvius recommends storing grain in northern areas because less pest infestation is to be expected there. With astonishing logistics, it was even possible to transport sensitive foods such as oysters and live fish through half of Europe with the help of fresh water containers and ice.

The residents of the insulae had no stoves and had to buy food from cookshops.

Since the smoke from countless cooking fires and workshops in the city of Rome was accompanied by the burning of corpses in front of the walls, the air pollution in the urban agglomeration of Rome was quite high.

personal hygiene

In the Roman royal era and the early republic, the Romans were probably hardly cleaner than their "barbaric" neighbors, as Seneca described:

Because the writers about the ancient customs of Rome tell us that arms and legs, which were soiled at work, were washed off every day, but the whole body was only bathed every eight days.

Bathing and hairdressing came into fashion from the third century BC. Hair care, brushing teeth, daily body washing, depilating armpits and legs with wax or tweezers and plucking eyebrows were soon considered normal not only for women, as Ovid describes in his Ars amatoria and numerous finds of tweezers and combs prove. Cosmetics and perfume were of course part of everyday life. In addition to mirrors, make-up boxes and bottles for fragrances, ointments and oils, several works on beauty care have come down to us. And there was also no lack of critics who castigated the daily anointing of the body and artistic hairstyles as unmanly or as superfluous luxury. Soap ( sapo ), which was made from goat fat and ashes, or soap herb, on the other hand, was used initially to dye hair and only later to cleanse the body. Before doing this, you scraped sweat and dirt off the oiled body with the Strigilis or scrubbed yourself with pumice stone or sponges. Then you perfumed yourself with anointing oil.

Not only the wealthy slave owners enjoyed a well-groomed appearance: a visit to a bath cost only a quarter of ace . Hairdressers had their shops in every public place. There were even professional hair pluckers ( alipili ) whose services could be used in the thermal baths.

Water pipes

Supplying a large city like Rome with a daily water consumption of around 370-450 l per inhabitant with sufficient water was a major technical and logistical achievement. While such aqueducts are not Roman inventions, the aqueducts that carried water into the city from up to 90 km away are some of the greatest remnants of Roman culture.

Water was considered a common good, the administration of which required one of the highest Roman offices. The first Curator aquarum was 33 BC. BC Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa , who had several aqueducts, some of which still function today, built at his own expense, the first large thermal baths, the so-called Agrippa thermal baths, as well as hundreds of cisterns and wells. Corresponding laws were only created after his death.

Aqueducts

As early as the 4th century BC, water began to be channeled into the city. Later aqueducts added to the underground lines. The pipes were made of wood, lead or leather, but mostly stone channels and pipes made of “precast concrete”. As excavations in Pompeii have shown, the pipes leading into the individual houses were usually made of lead. Some aqueducts were multi-story and each had water from a different source. Since the water had to flow steadily, the aqueducts were built so that they had a slight gradient .

Ruins of the Aqueduct of Aspendos , Asia Minor seen from the upper town

Water quality

It was known that the water quality depends on where it is taken. Tales sunt aquae, qualis terra, per quam fluunt - the waters are like the earth from which they spring, wrote Pliny. The architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio recommended filtering the water stored in cisterns. He was also familiar with chemical methods to examine the quality of the water. He also warned of the consequences of lead poisoning from the lead water pipes. Galen and Pliny recommended that boiled water be more digestible.

Fountain

Within the cities, the water drawn from the aqueducts in castella was led through lead pipes to the public wells. A sophisticated distribution system ensured that water always flowed from these, even if the supply of the private water connections and the thermal baths was interrupted by drought. The population supplied themselves with drinking and industrial water from these public wells. Since the water kept flowing, the overflows also gushed, washing the streets in this way. There was a penalty of 10 aurei for contamination of the well water .

Outside the big cities, the water was obtained from draw wells. As archaeological finds show, dried out well shafts were often filled with waste, whereby the contamination of the groundwater always represented a great danger.

Thermal baths

Main article: Thermal baths

General

Thermal baths (plural, lat. Thermae ), occasionally also thermal baths (singular), were the name of the Roman baths. According to a census around 400 AD, there were eleven public baths and 856 private baths in Rome.

The Roman thermal baths developed from various forerunners such as the Greek bath ( βαλανεῖον balaneion , Latinized Balineum , Balneum , Balnea ) and local sweat cures. Since the middle of the 2nd century BC The building of public baths is known in Rome in the 3rd century BC, and bathing gained great importance as a social center of life and a ritual that was part of the daily routine during the 1st century AD. Since people bathed or saunas naked, there was a strict gender segregation during the republic, mostly according to time (women in the morning, men in the afternoon), but very rarely also through separate rooms. During the early imperial period, the separation was apparently lifted, as Hadrian forbade mixed use of the thermal baths (balnea mixta) . While Marcus Aurelius confirmed this prohibition again, Elagabal lifted the decree, which was in turn instituted by his successor Severus Alexander .

Bathing in the thermal baths was not limited to physical cleansing, but included as a so-called otium according to the motto mens sana in corpore sano everything that is useful for physical and mental recreation: sport, relaxation, but also culture. The function shifted from a sports facility with an attached pool to a leisure and adventure pool.

Augustus' friend Agrippa, who built the first large thermal baths in Rome on the Martian field , even decreed in his will that her visit should be free of charge. All later built balnea publica , public baths, were financed solely through taxes or donations from the rich. Even the visit of the balnea meritoria , splendid baths , could at least occasionally afford the poor due to the low entrance fee of a quarter to half an ace - women had to pay more.

construction

Floor plan of the Diocletian Baths in Rome 1 = Caldarium 2 = Tepidarium 3 = Frigidarium 4 = Natatio 5 = Palaestra 6 = Entrance

Thermal baths consisted of at least four sections: the changing room ( apodyterium ) , the halls for the cold baths ( frigidarium ) , halls for the lukewarm baths ( tepidarium ) and the warm bath ( caldarium ) . In larger facilities there was also a laconicum or sudatorium , a room in which a dry heat was generated (similar to the Finnish sauna ). Sometimes there were also swimming pools ( natatio ) and sports fields ( palaestra ) . In addition, alipili (hair pluckers) and masseurs offered their services.

An important part of the ancient bathing process was also the oiling between the individual baths and finally, the oil was scraped off again with Strigilis and sweat and dirt were removed.

Some large baths had separate sections for men and women, while others had separate bathing times.

The heated rooms

The Romans used both floor and wall heating with hot air in their thermal baths ( hypocaust ). Both techniques were initially developed and used for the thermal baths.

The heat of the Roman baths was almost always steam heat, with the exception of the laconicum which was sometimes present , in which a dry heat prevailed. It could be much hotter in this room than in the traditionally heated caldarium , which is why the length of stay here was shorter.

meaning

Sea horse mosaic from Bath

The literary and epigraphic sources show that the popularity of bathing among the Romans grew strongly in the period between Cicero (106–43 BC) and Martial (approx. 40–104 AD). The question of the reasons for this growing popularity is difficult to answer, as many factors may have played a role: on the one hand, the increase in the population in Rome in the 1st century AD and the increased need for washing and washing options Escape from poor living conditions. Another reason can be seen in the spread of medical theories that recommended bathing as beneficial to health. The importance of this facility is confirmed by the large number and splendid furnishings of the Roman bathing buildings - be it private or public.

The importance of bathing as part of a Roman's life is also clear from the many baths that were built in new provinces soon after the conquest. If one takes the north-west provinces as an example, it becomes clear that thermal baths were built almost everywhere soon after the Roman conquest. Its rapid spread in the province, even in places that were not exclusively inhabited by Romans, shows that the local population soon adopted the custom.

Latrines

Not every Roman house had a flush toilet or a connection to the sewer system. In the simple tenement houses ( insulae ) there was usually only a large bucket under the stairs. Other houses, however, had individual toilets of a high standard. In addition to the large latrines, which could accommodate up to 80 people, the Romans were also familiar with the Hockabort, which is still used today in the Mediterranean and France. In Alba Fucens in central Italy on the Via dei Pilastri, such a latrine has survived to this day. There were no partitions, and gender segregation is seldom detectable; mostly the users, women, men and children of every class, simply grabbed their tunic (and palla or toga ) and thus also covered their privacy.

latrinae in Ostia antica

It is not known exactly when the first latrines were set up in Rome. Probably the first ones were built in the late Republic. An indication of this is provided by an assembly of the Pompey Theater on Largo Argentina, where a latrine can be seen. But Julius Caesar also had a toilet installed in the forum named after him. Most of the excavated sites date from the 1st to 4th centuries. Obviously private needs of social groups determined the construction of the latrines. Apparently it was not oriented towards the needs of the urban Roman masses. The construction of latrines was mostly privately financed, but as always, money was only invested in toilet facilities if there was a measurable benefit. This is why there are no latrines in large public buildings like in the amphitheatres. The social classes also split up when going to the toilet. So the plebs eased himself into the sewer system or to the next corner of the house. Inscriptions from Pompeii suggest that concerned residents encouraged passers-by to please urinate on the neighboring house. The middle class sat across from each other in grand latrines or visited their own quiet place at home.

In the regional register of Rome from the 4th century there are 144 latrinae and 253 necessariae , which also include urinals. They were permanently flushed with overflow water from thermal baths, aqueducts and wells. Sewers ran under the marble or wooden toilet seats and flushed faeces into large collecting channels or straight into the Tiber. In the middle of the room there was another water gutter which took in splash water and urine. The still widespread assumption that this was fresh water for dipping the xylospongium (a stick with a sponge attached) must be contradicted.

Foricarii collected user fees in the more upscale public lavatories . Those who couldn't afford that were left with the amphorae in angiporto - amphorae in the side street that the tanners and fabric walkers set up because they needed the urine for their work. The emperor Vespasian even had the erection of such amphorae taxed. Hence the saying: " pecunia non olet " - "money doesn't stink".

Latrines in forts

Military crew toilet in Housesteads Fort on Hadrian's Wall, the flushing water tank can be seen in the background.
Detail of the Housesteads latrine, the rows of seats themselves were made of wood and have gone.

In contrast to urban Roman conditions, there were latrines in the forts in the most distant corners of the empire . The Roman military leaders were very well aware of the connection between hygiene and sick leave, disease prevention and the efficiency of the army. In addition to hospitals, plenty of fresh water and baths, hygiene prevention also included latrines. The latrines and baths in the forts were in no way inferior to those in the Mediterranean cities. The best researched in Great Britain is the camp latrine at Housesteads Fort on Hadrian's Wall . It lies at the lowest point within the defense of this garrison, so that all sewage could be used for flushing. During a second construction phase, the crew toilet from Housesteads received its own water catchment basin for flushing and was thus independent of the castle's own sewer system. The feces were led with the sewage through the fort wall into the ditch. So there was no need to build a septic tank. Similar facilities existed in neighboring forts and small towns along this military border.

Sanitation

With the Cloaca Maxima , Rome already had effective drainage in its early days. Originally it was created by Lucius Tarquinius Priscus to drain the boggy area between the seven hills and make it habitable. As a result, the malaria , which before - and again after the fall of the Roman Empire - had made the Campagna uninhabitable, could be pushed back. The method of draining swamps through underground channels came from the Latins and Etruscans .

From the beginning, the Cloaca Maxima also served to transport rainwater and sewage into the Tiber. Expanded into a wide network, it is still in function today. Following their example, the Romans built a sewerage system wherever they founded cities or built larger legionary camps. However, since the sewers were only cleaned by flushing with rainwater and the sewage flushed into the sewer system, the sludge was deposited due to the low gradient and still stank of faeces in the cities. As a result, she was regularly flushed with water from the pipelines that was not suitable for drinking. Frontinus emphasized: "The causes of the unhealthy climate are being washed away, the streets are cleaner, the air you breathe is cleaner, and that atmosphere is removed that always earned the city a bad reputation with our ancestors." It also had to be cleaned of slaves, the canalicolae become. The Cloaca Maxima had its outflow into the Tiber within the urban area. When the Tiber rose due to flooding, the sewage was also pushed up in the sewer system.

In 1842, after a visit to the sewage system in Rome, a royal British commission found them to be more hygienic than those in the then Great Britain.

No Roman city had a complete drainage system. In many places there were only aboveground, open channels for draining the dirty water. Most households were not connected to the sewer system anyway, but instead channeled their dirty water onto the street, where in the best case scenario it could seep into the gully. They disposed of waste and faeces in pits, as is common practice in smaller settlements. These cesspools were occasionally emptied and their contents sold as manure. Urine was used for tannery or dyeing , which is why such companies often had their own tanks or set up amphorae in which residents and passers-by could relieve themselves. In smaller settlements that did not get their water remotely through aqueducts and cisterns, there was a risk of contaminating the groundwater through cesspools.

Water pollution

Rivers and lakes near cities were so badly affected by the discharge of sewage and the habit of dumping garbage on the banks that Pliny the Elder recognized: “ We poison our rivers and the basic elements of nature, and the same that we live on, we turn into coffin nails. “The Tiber was so dirty that no fish, or at least no healthy fish, lived in it. The doctor Galenus warned against their consumption and the war theorist Vegetius also advised that legionary camps should be moved regularly because the polluted water is harmful to health.

medicine

Since the poor mostly only had the clothes they wore and slept on sacks of straw that were seldom changed, vermin was widespread. Epidemics often killed many and child mortality was high, while the rich often lived to a fairly old age .

Treatment of the sick with medicinal herbs and diets traditionally belonged to the family in ancient Rome. For a long time, the Romans were therefore skeptical of scientific Greek and Egyptian medicine . Contempt for the doctors, who mostly came to Rome as slaves, mixed with mistrust of the unknown. Cato the Elder saw the noble traditions endangered by effeminacy and recommended cabbage as a panacea in “ de agri cultura ” . Pliny the Elder even said that the Romans could have got along well without doctors for six centuries. For him it was immoral to make a living from the suffering of others.

Nevertheless, from the 3rd century BC onwards, doctors gained a greater reputation, mostly Greek slaves or freedmen. For example, with the Greek Alexio , Cicero had his own family doctor. When the doctors under Emperor Augustus were exempted from the taxes that were compulsory for the rest of the citizens, the Romans also turned to the study of the healing arts for the first time, but the scientific development remained firmly in Greek hands.

The area of spa medicine (in addition to surgery among military doctors) was the most developed branch. The physician Asklepiades of Bithynia prescribed around 50 BC Baths, healthy eating and exercise as remedies. By the time of Caesar at the latest , the Romans found more and more taste in medicinal baths and spa treatments. The sulphurous medicinal springs of Baiae and Puteoli were extremely popular. Many baths that were built back then, e.g. B. Baden-Baden , still exist today.

Under Emperor Antoninus Pius , medical officers were hired for the first time to treat the poor free of charge. There was a hospital in every military camp . In the cities, doctors specialized in surgery , gynecology , bladder problems and the like. Ä., Whereby the ophthalmology was particularly popular. Various ophthalmologist stamps have been found that were used to mark the ointments.

Doctors such as Aulus Cornelius Celsus and Galenos possessed remarkable anatomical, surgical, and pharmaceutical skills. Marcus Terentius Varro already suspected that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms.

But it was not yet possible to apply this knowledge to the prevention and control of infections and epidemics . To some extent it succeeded in the field of the military. The simple Romans preferred to trust their gods Hygieia , Panakeia and Asklepios , amulets and obscure remedies such as Theriac - and shared the xylospongium , the sponge attached to a wooden stick for cleaning after visiting the latrine.

malaria

Malaria made the Campagna area around Rome uninhabitable for centuries. The Latins had already created effective drainage systems, but the long absence of the peasants due to the ongoing wars against Carthage and the subsequent flight from the countryside by those displaced by soil speculators led to the canals being neglected. The land was bogus. The deforestation of the original forests to build the fleet accelerated this development. Cassius Dio reported repeated epidemics. Cicero and Pliny the Elder mention a large number of temples of Dea Febris (fever goddess). The intermittent fever was even found in satires and comedies.

Marcus Terentius Varro reports of nets that were fastened in front of the windows to keep the mosquitoes away, for which the ornamental waters in the gardens of the wealthy represented an ideal breeding ground.

graveyards

It was forbidden in the Twelve Tables Act to carry out burials in the city. But while the corpses were usually cremated outside the city and buried in more or less luxurious tombs along the main streets, dead slaves, abandoned children and the carcasses of animals were disposed of in puticuli , rotting pits , directly behind the city wall. Excavations on the Esquiline alone have found 75 such pits. In warm weather, no one in town could escape the stench. The spread of pathogens was restricted by regularly pouring lime into the pits.

Summary

Finally, it should be mentioned that the Romans achieved a hygienic level with their technology of latrines and sewage management, which - apart from medieval monasteries - only returned to Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the general introduction of the water- flushed and public toilets Toilet facilities in the cities was achieved. The forerunner of our modern, odor-proof toilet was not invented until 1775. It is also significant that the establishment of disposal systems was based on the large ancient buildings when the construction of an alluvial sewer system began in London in 1842 . Until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, only a minority therefore benefited from the advanced hygienic achievements and medical knowledge. Hamburg was hit by a bad cholera epidemic in 1892 due to poor hygiene . In 1964 Herbert Lewandowski gave a section of his Roman moral history with the heading “The purest nation in the world”.

In ancient Rome, as in the major European cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the cramped living conditions of a large part of the population caused the spread of diseases and high mortality. Almost half of the children died before they reached the age of ten. The wealthy who had extensive living space, their own bathhouses, slaves who did the housework, and sometimes their own doctors, on the other hand, often lived long.

See also

literature

Remarks

  1. ^ Günther Thüry: Garbage and marble columns. Settlement Hygiene in Ancient Rome. 2001, p. 59; see. Interview with Thüry ( Memento from October 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Claudius Aelianus : De natura animalium 10, 28.
  3. ^ Günther Thüry: Garbage and marble columns. P. 54.
  4. ^ Frontinus: De aquis urbis Romae 103.
  5. ^ So Günther Thüry: Garbage and marble columns. Settlement Hygiene in Ancient Rome. P. 6ff.
  6. ↑ Ingemar König : Caput Mundi. Rome - world city of antiquity. WBG, Darmstadt 2009, pp. 30–33.
  7. ↑ Juvenal: Satires 3.
  8. ↑ Tacitus: Annalen 15, 43.
  9. ^ Günther Thüry: Garbage and marble columns. P. 31.
  10. ↑ Illustration of an "asaroton" (old Gr. = Unswept) - mosaic ( Memento of October 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), another example from Canterbury
  11. ↑ Columella: de re rustica XII in the Latin Wikisource
  12. ^ Vitruvius: de Architectura. Liber II
  13. ↑ a b In the following, however, he makes fun of his contemporaries who, instead of washing themselves, cover everything with anointing oil. Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales 86, 12 From Seneca's letters.
  14. ^ Ovid: Art of Love. Chapter 14, 200ff
  15. ↑ Toilet cutlery
  16. ↑ z. B. the satirical epigrammata of Martial
  17. ↑ Seneca Epistulae morales 56, 2.
  18. ^ Vitruvius: de Architectura. Liber 8, 6, 15 (engl.)
  19. ^ Vitruvius: de Architectura. Liber VIII 6.10 + 11
  20. ↑ Ne quis aquam oletato dolo malo, ubi publice saliet. Si quis oletarit, sestertiorum decem milium multa esto. - Frontinus: De aquis 97
  21. ^ Notitia regionum urbis Romae
  22. ↑ For comparison: the daily wage of a legionnaire at the time of Augustus was 10 aces.
  23. ^ Richard Neudecker: The splendor of the latrine - On the change of public lavatories in the imperial city. Munich, 1994.
  24. ↑ Gilbert Wiplinger: The use of the xylospongium - a new theory on the hygienic conditions in Roman latrines. In: SPA. SANITAS PER AQUAM. Proceedings of the International Frontinus Symposium on the Technical and Cultural History of the Ancient Thermal Baths Aachen, March 18-22, 2009. Frontinus Society eV & Peeters, Leiden 2012. ISBN 978-90-429-2661-5 . Pp. 295-304.
  25. ^ Suetonius: Vespasian 23, 3; Cassius Dio 65, 14 [1]
  26. ↑ Winkle in Hamburger Ärzteblatt 1984 ( Memento from October 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.6 MB)
  27. ^ Frontinus: De aquis urbis Romae 88
  28. ↑ Nos et flumina inficimus et rerum naturae elementa, ipsumque quo vivitur in perniciem vertimus. - Pliny naturalis historia 18, 3.
  29. ^ Galenos: de alimentorum facultatibus
  30. ↑ Vegetius: Epitoma rei militaris 3.2
  31. ^ Mary Harlow / Laurence Ray: Growing up and growing old in ancient Rome. A life course approach. London / New York: Routledge 2002, ISBN 0-415-20201-9 - including detailed tables on the age of death and life expectancy
  32. ^ Roman medicine
  33. ^ Ophthalmologist stamp from Augusta Raurica
  34. ↑ animalia quaedam minuta, quae non possunt oculi consequi et per aera intus in corpora per os ac nares perveniunt atque efficiunt difficiles morbos (animals that are so small that the eyes cannot see them and that enter the body through the air through mouth and nose and cause serious diseases.) - Varro: Rerum Rusticarum 1, 12.
  35. ↑ see #Latrines in military forts and medicine in the Roman military
  36. ↑ Cicero: de legibus 2, 11.
  37. ↑ Pliny: Naturalis Historia VII
  38. ↑ St. Winkle ( Memento of October 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.6 MB)
  39. ↑ Varro, Rerum rusticerum 7 ( fenestrae reticuletae nequod animal maleficium introire queat - the windows draped with nets so that no animal can bring anything bad into them)
  40. ↑ Roman burial customs
  41. ↑ Everyday life in ancient Rome. Life in the city , a lexicon by Karl-Wilhelm Weber, p. 113.
  42. ^ Herbert Lewandowski: Römische Sittengeschichte. Hans E. Günther Verlag, Stuttgart 1964, pp. 255-257.