The Contexts of Roman Society, part 4-2: The Importance of Manure
Early modern Roman cities are not necessarily centers of manufacturing, as much production is spread out across the countryside, whether as small local operations or as part of a putting-out system. However a Roman city will have at least some manufacturing, although the amount can vary wildly, and this can be another source of pollution. Tanneries, dye works, and butcheries all produce substantial amounts of waste, another trouble for city residents.
Not all pollution in cities is physical. There are many who see cities as sources of moral pollution as well. The large concentrations of population, both residents and travelers, provides the market, while the mass of urban poor provides the workforce. Constantinople and Smyrna in particular are infamous for their red-light districts (although the red lights themselves don’t exist at this time), but every Roman city has one.
Sex workers, like all aspects of Roman society, contain variety. The majority are female, but there are male workers, both boys and adults, for female clients as well as homosexual male ones. In 1649 there is a scandal in Antioch when it is discovered that a brothel there has been working with the 1st Syrian tourma garrisoned in the city, some of the soldiers, from drummer boys to some older hands working as sex workers for some extra money. What makes this truly scandalous though is that some of the officers were acting as pimps. [1]
Some sex workers are trafficked, while others do it because the alternative is starvation. And there are others who prefer this life, for a variety of reasons. Some would say it is because they are licentious and promiscuous. But the women might reply that they prefer it to other alternatives; they view it as no more degrading, or less so, than working as a domestic (where they quite possibly have to put up with sexual pressure from their master), and for a high-end, the pay can be quite substantial.
Sex workers cater to all walks of Roman life, although the richer the clientele, the better-off the sex workers typically are. Soldiers can sometimes be the workers, but they are also an extremely common customer as well. Officers sometimes encourage soldiers’ use of brothels, as they believe it a good way to avoid sodomy. Sex workers who cater to that type of clientele also have their ways to drum up business. Starting sometime and somewhere in the 1640s, but continuing to this day, they’ll say to soldiers passing by “Come you back, you Roman soldier, come you back to the aplekton!” [2][3]
The effects of pollution and the harsh living standards of the poor did not go unnoticed, and there were efforts to mitigate them, even if those were grossly inadequate by modern standards. The grain dole has already been mentioned, and charities managing soup kitchens and distributing food, old clothes, fuel, and even shelters were common. There were regulations regarding waste disposal, such as where one could empty one’s chamber pot (emphatically not in the street), and the need for regular cesspit coverage and drainage. Soap manufacturing was a massive industry by the standards of the day, with its products always in demand.
Another element was the provision of medical services. By the 1600s, the Romans had a tradition of public hospitals dating back uninterrupted to antiquity, with certain practices in use having a pedigree centuries old. Public hospitals were typically charitable foundations, whether by clerical or lay patrons, and were a common form of public largesse in urban environments. Some of these were located in the cities themselves, while others were situated in the suburbs or nearby towns to avoid unhealthy city air. Demetrios III may have founded his hospital in Athyra, outside Constantinople, as a gesture of annoyance with the people of Constantinople, but he was not making a true break with precedent there.
Doctors at the public hospitals worked six-months-on and six-months-off. During their six-months-on, their salary was only comparable to that of a regular unskilled laborer, although they were guaranteed regular employment for the period and also given rations, the main expense of a typical laborer. Thus their pay wasn’t quite as low as it would seem, but it was still decidedly on the small scale.
However working at a public hospital was the way to build up a medical reputation for oneself, and that medical reputation could be leveraged into clientele and high service fees for the doctors on their six-months-off. Then they operated a private practice, which was when they made their real money. But the opportunity required working cheap at the public hospitals.
This was an indirect way for the richer classes to subsidize medical care for the poor. The public hospitals catered primarily to the poor, while the middle and rich preferred the comfort of being treated in their own homes. Plus private care ensured regular attendance and service; the public hospitals operated on a first-come first-served basis and did not necessarily have enough space. But despite those weaknesses, the low wages of doctors when they worked directly at the public hospitals helped those institutes be able to provide cheap medical care to the poor.
The mesoi and dynatoi weren’t always absent from the public hospitals. For emergency care, certain types of surgery, post-op recovery from said surgeries, and long-term care requiring specialized services they would use the public hospitals, although they would have to pay regular rates, not the cheap rates from which the poor benefitted. Since these fees went to the hospital (possibly being split with a doctor who used hospital facilities to perform surgery on a private practice patient), this was another way the mesoi and dynatoi indirectly subsidized cheap medical care for the poorer levels of society. [4]
The importance placed on public hospitals (where practices showed distinct Hospitalier influence) is a clear illustration that Romans of the early modern period were not blind to health concerns. But they faced far more difficulties in handling them compared to modern societies. They had no knowledge of germ theory and instead believed that diseases were spread by bad air and bad smells. Aromatics that could cover up the bad smells were thus viewed as a valuable health service, with civic authorities making efforts to ensure their provision similar to their efforts to ensure availability of grain, vegetables, and mutton. And while rosewater wouldn’t do anything to guard against dysentery, smoking cannabis or tobacco was a good counter to malaria as the smoke drove away the carrying mosquitoes.
The main factor in ensuring the general unhealthiness of cities though was not resolvable by the means of the early modern period. That was the presence of huge amounts of animal and human waste. Even if the infrastructure was put into place to flush that all away had been available, the Romans could not afford to do so. That waste material was far too valuable, too essential, to be just thrown away. It needed to be kept so that it could be used.
Waste was needed for certain processes, such as tanning. Urine was used in several areas, including the cleaning of laundry (because of the ammonia content) and the production of saltpeter (the urine of wine-drinkers was said to be the best for this). But the main use for all this waste matter was as fertilizer for the fields. Basically, the smell of the cesspits was the necessary cost to pay to ensure that the markets had enough food.
Transporting foodstuffs from afield was a necessary part of provisioning cities, but even so urban centers drew intensively on their local hinterlands for sustenance. Nicaea and Antioch were especially prominent in this regard, as their inland locations made large-scale imports much more difficult, but even the great seaports of Constantinople, Thessaloniki, and Smyrna were no exception.
This was an era before artificial fertilizers. Manure was the only game in town in this regard in the early modern period. The peasant farmer would ideally fertilize his fields with manure from his farm animals, but usually the garden would be fertilized by the night soil produced by him and his family. The Roman city operated on the same model, but on a vastly bigger scale.
The fields near the great cities were the most agriculturally productive lands in the whole Empire, and that was entirely due to their receipt of far more fertilizer in the form of urban night soil and street sweepings than other lands. The costs of shipping in this fertilizer was minimal because of proximity, while the cost of shipping the many products of their productive fields to a massive market was also minimal. Thus agricultural lands near the larger cities was of extremely high value, with even small holdings able to produce surpluses and profits unimaginable in areas that depended on far more meager supplies of manure.
This resulted in an aspect of the early modern Roman city that moderns find truly bizarre. Cesspit removal was thus a big business, as landowners outside the cities were willing to pay, and pay well, for the contents of said cesspits. The Bothros family, famous now for the massive chemical company they founded that still exists today, had their start here. While the laborers who did the actual work of emptying the cesspits were viewed as some of the lowest of the low, the managers such as the Bothroi could make serious money. As the saying goes, ‘the Bothroi don’t shit gold, but they can turn shit into gold’.
This resulted in another incentive for people not to want to flush their waste away, as the Bothroi and others in the same business were literally willing to pay for night soil. They’d still make a profit from it. The sale of the contents of civic cesspits went to the city (or Imperial government in Constantinople), while communal cesspits for apartment buildings were split among the tenants on pre-determined settings, such as by suite or by number of occupants.
One aspect of this business model illustrates possibly the most disgusting example of the adage ‘you need money to make money’. Fecal matter from richer neighborhoods and households commanded higher prices than that from their poorer neighbors. This wasn’t class snobbery at work either. Given their better economic status, the producers of the more expensive fecal matter were better fed, which meant their waste contained more nutrients, and so it actually functioned better as fertilizer. Hence the higher price it would command. [5]
Early modern Roman cities were hardly unique in this aspect. Chinese cities made even more use of night soil for fertilizer, much to the disgust of Andreas Angelos, but rice paddy country didn’t allow for grazing of much livestock, so animal manure was less available as an alternative. Nor were they unique in Christendom; Valencians claimed the fertility of their suburban orchards was based on their fertilizing from the sweepings of the street offal. [6]
Modern cities would eventually resolve these issues and stop being demographic black holes. The use of motorized vehicles, replacing defecating draft animals, and the development of artificial fertilizers and improvements in agriculture, obviating the need for huge volumes of night soil, made cities much more sanitary. But those were not available to Romans in the mid-1600s. They recognized the issue and dealt with it as best they could, given their limited means and options and knowledge, but it just wasn’t enough until the rules changed in the modern era.
[1] The OTL example comes from, of all places, Victorian Britain. See Simon Heffer,
The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain 1880-1914.
[2] An aplekton is a fortified army base, commonly used as a major storage facility. Given that it is used to store weapons, it has morphed into a slang term for another place to store (male) weaponry.
[3] This is adapted from OTL as well. In Burma under the Raj, Burmese sex workers would try to entice British soldiers by quoting Kipling: “Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay.” See David Gilmour,
The British in India: A Social History of the Raj, pg. 290.
[4] These hospital practices are from the OTL Byzantines. See Timothy Miller, “Byzantine Hospitals” in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984).
[5] This is also from OTL, although the example comes from China. See Daniel Headrick,
Humans Versus Nature: A Global Environmental History.
[6] OTL. See Fernand Braudel,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1.