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This ordinary ancient Roman object is still used today – and has hardly changed
From dealing with nits to learning the three Rs, ancient Roman childhood bore some striking similarities to the modern experience
Life for children in ancient Rome would have looked very different depending on where in the huge Roman empire you lived, what social class your family was from, and your gender. And while childhood in ancient Rome would have looked very different from the lives of children today, there were a few surprising similarities. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Bettany Hughes, a historian and author of the children’s book There Was a Roman in Your Garden, explains that “there are strange things that connect the experience of being a child in ancient Rome with the experience of being a child in the 21st century.” One overlap between childhood today and in ancient Rome is the fine-toothed nit comb, designed to remove head lice. “Nit combs are exactly the same design as they were in the ancient world – this was obviously the perfect design because it hasn't changed over the millennia,” Hughes says. But while the nit combs of today tend to be made of plastic, the ancient Romans used a different material for theirs: boxwood, a type of wood commonly used for small, carved items. “Boxwood has slight antibacterial properties, which was probably a really good thing [because] if you have nits, you scratch. Boxwood would hopefully prevent the spread of bacterial infection,” Hughes says. “The Romans were very smart, and [people in] the ancient world were much better at understanding nature and us being a part of nature than we are today,” Hughes says. Boxwood wasn’t the only plant that the Romans used for medicinal purposes. According to writings by Dioscorides, a Greek physician who was considered to be an authority on plants and plant medicine in the Roman period, oil made from walnuts was also used on children’s heads – albeit to help with alopecia or baldness, and to make the hair “pleasing.” He also recommended the “scrapings” from various gourds or squashes to help with sunstroke in children, and said that if children ate peonies, it could help to prevent kidney stones. Familiar features of ancient Roman childhood When ancient Roman children weren’t busy catching nits from each other, they might have been playing. Ancient children were given miniature versions of adult items to play with, just like some kids are today. “If you were really wealthy, there were little mini chariots pulled by goats that you could have as a well-to-do Roman child – sort of like how really wealthy kids today get mini Bentleys and Rolls Royces,” Hughes says. Poorer children also play-acted adult actions. Lots of “young boys were given wooden daggers and swords to practice play fighting with,” Hughes explains. Read more | If ancient Romans didn't understand calories, how was their theory of nutrition so accurate? While children might play with swords today, play fighting was more likely to be inspired by the real thing for ancient Roman boys, because ancient Rome was a “very militaristic society.” Girls, on the other hand, might have played with jointed dolls. “We always do that thing of thinking we do things better than people in the past, but actually the dolls that [the ancient Romans] used were really sophisticated, with beautiful moving arms, moving legs, and moving necks,” Hughes says. With their jewellery and hairstyles, historian Fanny Dolansky suggests that these dolls were created as idealised figures of high-status Roman womanhood and meant to help wealthier girls prepare for their roles as wives and mothers. What about Roman education? The basics of ancient Roman education would be recognisable to many, too; focused on the three Rs – reading, writing, and arithmetic. There was no free public schooling, so any type of formal education had to be paid for, whether children were sent to schools or if parents hired personal tutors to teach them at home. Poorer children – if lucky – would be taught the basics at home by their parents. Roman Britain | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | In this four-week course, discover everything you need to know about Roman Britain, guided by Rob Collins, professor of frontier archaeology at Newcastle University. Explore the course now While ancient Roman children didn’t use pens and paper, they did have the ancient equivalent of whiteboards. “You’d do your writing by scratching it into a wax tablet with a pointy stick, a stylus,” Hughes says. “And then you’d erase it at the end of the day just by melting the wax or using a kind of rubber, so you had your recyclable exercise-book-equivalent for the next day.” Read more | 6 ways people stayed healthy in ancient Rome And teachers have been exasperated at the quality of childrens’ work since ancient Roman times, too. The evidence for that was found at Vindolanda – a Roman archaeological site in modern-day Northumberland, England – where some organic remains have been well-preserved. On one tablet, someone has written out a line from the ancient epic the Aeneid – and someone else has added a comment. “The teacher has just written ‘seg,’ which is short for seguta, which means sloppy,” Hughes says. “You can so imagine this poor guy or girl, desperately trying to do their homework and get praised, but the teacher being very dismissive.” Roman schooling was much tougher But while there were some similarities, education has changed a lot in the last few millennia. How you were educated and how long you stayed in school depended on your social status and your gender. Read more | Rome's worst nightmare: the story of Spartacus “Boys were often taught things like arithmetic and rhetoric and lots of other disciplines, and girls pretty much were just taught reading and writing,” Hughes says. If your family couldn’t afford to pay for your schooling, your education would be entirely up to your family – and “as soon as you could walk, you would work as a child in the ancient world,” Hughes says, whether that was taking messages or helping out in the household. Children were generally treated much more strictly, too, Hughes says. “No doubt it was very tough. They were chastised with canes and whips.” Bettnay Hughes was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
The ancient Greeks had six essential tips for health. How many do you do?
With conflicting advice and endless new trends, it can feel hard to keep up with the modern health and wellness space. But ideas about how to live a healthy life are nothing new. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks had their own list of requirements
Wellness might feel like a modern concept, attached to health-tracker apps, screen time, and green smoothies. But the concept of actively trying to lead a healthy life while keeping the body in a good state isn’t new. In fact, systems of preventative health stretch back more than 2,000 years to the medical traditions of the ancient Mediterranean world. Speaking on the Life Lessons from History series from the HistoryExtra podcast, Sasha Handley, a professor of early modern history at the University of Manchester, says there used to be a “fantastic preventative healthcare culture” based on advice that dates back to ancient Greece. As she sets out, there was a list of six lifestyle factors and behaviours that physicians, medical practitioners, and ordinary people alike knew they had to take care of for their long-term health. These were the ‘six non-naturals’ and the ancient Greeks believed that “temperance of all of those six things was key to long-term good health, according to the wisdom of the time” says Handley. The term “non-naturals” described factors external to the body that could be managed or regulated, as opposed to “naturals,” which were the body’s innate characteristics So what were these six factors, and how much do they align with modern thinking? Fresh air The first non-natural to look after was fresh air – that is, “getting enough of it and making sure that you were not taking in fetid or corrupt air,” Handley says. The Greeks thought that ‘bad air’ could cause disease and advocated for good airflow within houses to lessen exposure to stagnant air. Read more | Meet the people the ancient Romans and Greeks desperately tried to hide Today, we know there is no singular concept of ‘bad air’. But there are pollutants in the air that can be hazardous to people, and we do know that some diseases are airborne. Food and drink It was considered important that a person was “eating and drinking the right kinds of things for [their] bodily constitution, but also at the right times of day,” Handley says. Theories about what was good to eat and when were based on the four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Different foods being either cold or hot, or wet or dry, affected the balances of the four humours in the body, which led to different outcomes for people’s health and constitutions. For example, someone believed to have an excess of “heat” might be prescribed cooling foods such as cucumber or lettuce. Galen, a Greek physician and philosopher whom the idea of the six non-naturals is attributed to, thought that warm food led to the production of yellow bile, while cold food led to the production of phlegm. Galen practised in the second century AD and became one of the most influential medical authorities in history. Read more | If ancient Romans didn't understand calories, how was their theory of nutrition so accurate? Now, our understanding of food and diet is more scientific. But we do know that some specific nutrients have particular health benefits; protein helps to contribute to maintaining muscle mass, while vegetables can be a source of different micronutrients and vitamins. Exercise and rest Getting enough exercise and rest was also believed to be important. Exercise was seen as having a drying effect on the humours, and physicians recommended exercises to patients both to prevent and treat disease. The body, in humoural thought, was constantly shifting in balance; movement was one of the tools available to correct excess moisture or sluggishness. Galen thought work and exercise were equal, defining them as vigorous movements that made you out of breath. The exercises that he prescribed to his patients, though, were more moderate. He recommended exercises that involved a small ball. Watch now | Why the Ancient Egyptians WEREN'T ancient Massage and baths were also seen as having a similar effect to exercise, something that would be echoed in wellness modern wellness trends centred around saunas, sports massage, and cold plunges. Sleep and waking Sleep and dreams were important parts of ancient Greek philosophy as well as their medical knowledge. Dreams were deemed to be evidence of the state of the body, and therefore were helpful in diagnosing medical issues. But they were also important within ancient Greek religion. The ancient Greeks believed that the gods could communicate via dreams and that sleep had healing properties through its link with the gods. We might not bring up our dreams in doctors’ offices these days, but research increasingly shows the powerful health impact of sleep on physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Recent studies show that getting enough sleep can be associated with lower rates of chronic diseases such as dementia, diabetes, and heart disease. Excretion and retention The fifth non-natural “sounds fairly graphic, but it’s excretion and retention,” Handley says. “This refers to bowel habits, but also to things like sweating appropriately and keeping the body at the right temperature.” It was thought that excretion, in all its forms, helped keep the four humours balanced. If one humour accumulated excessively, it could be expelled through sweating, urination, bleeding, or purging. Bloodletting in particular became a standard treatment in later medical traditions influenced by humoural theory. Read more | Blood, guts and spectacle: 6 shocking events from the history of ancient Roman gladiators Although we don’t think about regulating our excretions in terms of bloodletting and purging like the Greeks did, the increasing awareness of gut health – and therefore its impact on the bowel – is perhaps a modern descendant of this idea. Passions of the mind “The very last one is usually called the passions of the mind, which we read today as emotions,” Handley says. “So emotional health, making sure that you were not getting too angry, too sad, and keeping your mind and body in a good balance.” Different emotions were associated with excesses of the four humours, so keeping your emotions in check contributed to your humoural balance. Too much blood might make you too happy and too much phlegm might make you too reserved, while too much black bile might make you melancholic and too much yellow bile might make you angry. Read more | Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian Clearly this idea links to our modern understanding of mental health – especially now we know that physical health and exercise are linked to mental health. How similar are the non-naturals to ‘wellness’ today? Nowadays, we think of ‘wellness’ as separate from ‘health’. Where health is the absence of disease, and wellness is a more general emotional and physical wellbeing that we can influence via lifestyle factors. The ancient Greeks thought the same. Health was seen as the responsibility of individuals to regulate their non-naturals to look after their own health, and maybe even avoid having to see a doctor. Read more | Are you healthier than a Roman? These ancient secrets for longevity are still shockingly relevant There was an element of taking personal responsibility for good health, leading to the idea that bad habits could cause certain diseases. But the six non-naturals also worked in tandem with the ‘naturals’ – or the innate factors that we have no control over that also cause disease. Today, we see things similarly: some diseases and conditions are caused by lifestyle factors, whereas others develop independently of how we live. And just like modern ‘wellness,’ ancient Greek health was about more than just the body, too. Medical knowledge was intertwined with ethics, morality, politics, and philosophy – which is why many of the most famous Greek physicians, such as Galen and Hippocrates, were also philosophers, and many philosophers also mused on issues of the body. The ancient Greeks actually thought that achieving perfect health was essentially impossible since it required a precise balance of the humours, which changed every day. Instead, a ‘neutral’ body was the goal – something that doesn’t necessarily align with modern ideas on health optimisation and biohacking. Dr David Musgrove was speaking to Sasha Handley on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Over 70 observers watched this Stuart queen give birth. Why did they still doubt the baby was real?
The struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism came to a head in England when Maria of Modena gave birth to an heir with a claim to two crowns
On 10 June 1688, Maria of Modena, queen to King James II of England and VII of Scotland, gave birth to a son who was heir to both kingdoms. More than 70 observers watched it happen. But while that baby – James Francis Edward Stuart, would grow to adulthood – he would never wear either crown. Instead, scurrilous questions about the birth itself played a pivotal role in the eventual toppling of James’s rule in England. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Breeze Barrington, a cultural historian specialising in women’s history and the 17th century, explained why Maria of Modena’s labour was so closely witnessed and how it became key in ending her husband’s reign. The pressure was on Maria to produce an heir The most important job of a queen was to produce heirs. But there was extra political and religious pressure for Maria to give birth. Maria and James were Catholic, and they needed to produce a Catholic heir if they wanted to keep the ruling of England out of Protestant hands. Otherwise, the throne would go to Mary, James’ oldest legitimate child from his previous marriage, who had been brought up Protestant. Protestant factions at the English court, and in government, hoped that Maria wouldn’t have any sons who could prevent Mary from claiming the throne. “There was constant worry about England going back to Catholicism if there was a Catholic heir,” Barrington says. Read more | Your guide to the Glorious Revolution Maria had been pregnant many times before 1688, but many of those had ended in miscarriage or stillbirth; the few that survived died in infancy. “Maria was really concerned that she needed to have a son in order to secure the line of succession, so she went to Bath to take the waters in the hope that it would help her to become pregnant,” Barrington says. The reproductive health of the queen was in the interest of the nation, and so even Maria’s attempts to improve her fertility were of public concern. Members of the public went to watch her sitting in the waters at Bath from the balconies in August 1687. By December of the same year, Maria was pregnant. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-113494156-4056867-e1768555127208.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This later portrait depicts James II and VII (1633–1701), whose reign was defined by religious tension and political crisis. His marriage to the Catholic princess Maria of Modena proved pivotal: the birth of their son in 1688 raised the prospect of a Catholic dynasty and helped trigger the Glorious Revolution, forcing James and Maria into exile and ending his rule." title="James II and VII (1633 - 1701)." /> People questioned whether Maria was really pregnant “Almost straight away, there were whispers that this wasn't true, or that there was something wrong,” Barrington says. People questioned that she could get pregnant at her age (she was 29), after so many years of difficult pregnancies, and even whether any of her previous pregnancies and miscarriages had been real. She was constantly observed, scrutinised, and assessed during the pregnancy. “Understandably, it's extremely upsetting and distressing when you're heavily pregnant and everyone just wants to gawp at you,” Barrington says. “So she refuses to let lots of people see her when she's changing. At this time, it was quite normal for lots of members of the court to be there in the morning when she was getting up, for what was called ‘levée’ [a formal royal morning reception] and she tried to make this more private.” But this only fuelled rumours that the pregnancy was fake. “These foundations had already been laid. The rumours were already there that there was going to be an attempt to smuggle a different child in,” Barrington says. Read more | A king without a crown: James VII and II’s years in exile Any doubt about the legitimacy of an heir could help to fuel plots against their rule – and because of this it was usual for royal births to be observed. And because of the rumours and political tension, Maria’s labour was witnessed by an unusually high number of people – more than 70 people gave testimonies that they saw it happen, which James later published in a book of depositions. “By the time she goes into labour, the room is filled up. There is something like 80 people there, most of them men, being herded to the end of the bed to have a good look,” Barrington says. If that sounds horribly intrusive, it’s because it was. “Maria says to James, ‘I can't bear to do this with so many men looking at me.’ And he covers her face with his wig so that she can't see them,” Barrington says. When James Francis Edward Stuart was born, he was taken to another room to be cleaned and swaddled, and James made sure people followed him there, too. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-463990175-f376b31-e1768555382384.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This portrait shows Mary of Modena (1658–1718), the Italian-born princess who became queen consort of James II after their marriage in 1673. A devout Catholic, her presence at court — and the birth of her son in 1688 — intensified fears of a Catholic succession, helping to spark the Glorious Revolution that ended her husband’s reign." title="Mary of Modena, Queen Consort of King James II of Great Britain.Artist: S Audran" /> 80 witnesses weren’t enough to quell suspicions But the rumours didn't end just because people saw the birth. A new rumour started to circulate at court: that the baby had been stillborn and switched out for a baby smuggled in a bedpan brought in to heat the bed. “There were witnesses that said they'd seen the pan full of hot coals, and a bedpan isn't anything like big enough to put a baby in anyway,” Barrington says. Nonetheless, it took root. Historians today do generally agree that James Francis Edward was the legitimate child. But at the time, there were multiple reasons it was believed he was an imposter. Firstly, James’s choices of witnesses weren't the most astute. Most of the people who saw the birth were Catholics or otherwise sympathetic to their cause, so it was in their interest to say that he was legitimate whether it was true or not. Secondly, the new heir posed a threat to Protestantism. The majority of people in England were Protestant and viewed James VII and II as a brief Catholic blip in the line of succession – as long as he didn’t have any Catholic sons. Read more | When was England last successfully invaded by a foreign power? But the birth of James Francis Edward changed this. Now there was both motivation for pro-Protestant factions to take action – to stop the cementing of a Catholic dynasty – and a reason why. “The rumour is the pretext for seven politicians and aristocrats to send a letter over to William of Orange, inviting him to invade England and to usurp James from the throne,” Barrington says. Not only was William of Orange James’ nephew, but he was also married to the king’s daughter, Mary. Most importantly, they were both Protestant. And so invade William did, landing in England on 5 November 1688. James fled to France, which Parliament interpreted as him abdicating, and William and Mary were declared joint rulers. “So, it is the birth of this longed-for boy,” Barrington says, “who they had so hoped for, who they thought would cement their future, who would fulfil Maria’s obligations to the Pope, which is their downfall.” James Francis Edward Stuart spent most of his life in exile and became known to his supporters as the Old Pretender, the focus of repeated but ultimately unsuccessful Jacobite attempts to reclaim the throne. Breeze Barrington was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
In post-medieval Scotland, two specific crimes reveal the challenges faced by ordinary women
What do the crimes that women were charged with in a post-medieval Scotland reveal about the lives they lived?
In the court records of post-medieval Scotland, women appear for a strikingly limited range of crimes. While men were prosecuted for theft, violence and disorder, women were charged with offences that spoke directly to their bodies and behaviour. As Dr Allan Kennedy, a historian of early modern Scottish history, explains on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “understanding what kinds of crimes are committed and how they are responded to gives you a really good understanding of the ordering assumptions of any given society”. In early modern Scotland, those assumptions produced a sharp gender divide in the law. “There’s a very strong split between what women were being prosecuted for and what men were being prosecuted for” in Scottish courts, Kennedy says. Women were accused overwhelmingly of two crimes: witchcraft and infanticide. Both were profoundly gendered offences, shaped by contemporary anxieties about women’s morality and place within the social order. And, both crimes expose the pressures faced by ordinary women in Scotland as the country stepped into the early modern era, and the reign of the Stuarts. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-463928361-1-1ef1f6e-e1768479587395.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="Painted in 1621 by Daniel Mytens, this portrait shows James VI and I (1566–1625), a monarch deeply preoccupied with the threat of witchcraft. Convinced that witches were agents of the Devil, James personally oversaw trials in Scotland and authored 'Daemonologie' (1597), a treatise that fuelled persecution across Britain." title="James I, King of England and Scotland, 1621. Artist: Daniel Mytens" /> Witchcraft in early modern Scotaland One of the most common crime committed by women in 1600s Scotland was witchcraft. Between 1560 and 1706, approximately 6,000 people were tried for the crime in Scotland – three times the number tried in England, even though Scotland’s population was a quarter of the size of England’s. The witchcraft craze was encouraged by King James VI and I, Elizabeth I's successor, who set up royal commissions to hunt witches. He also wrote a book about black magic, called Dæmonologie, which was inspired by his involvement in the infamous North Berwick witch trials of 1590. Read more | Tracy Borman explains why King James VI and I was obsessed with witch hunts The majority of people accused of witchcraft were women; estimates say between 75 to 84 per cent. They were accused of renouncing God and their Christian faith, and using powers received from the devil to cause harm – that could be anything from blighting crops and causing storms, to making their neighbours ill. Many of the women accused had acted in a way that disrupted the established social order and gender – behaviours that went against the meek, subservient role expected of women at the time. Witchcraft was suspected as the reason why they were so deviant. Some historians also link the trend to the changing relationship between religion and government. “Scotland had a distinctive reformation in 1559, producing a Calvinist church, which is quite an austere form of Protestantism – much more rigid than the Anglicanism of the Church of England – and a very dense system of church courts,” Kennedy says. “What that means is that religion was very central to pretty much every aspect of Scottish life, and importantly, Scottish governance and administration – much more so compared to England.” Read more | James VI and I and his favourites: what were their relationships like? This could explain why witchcraft, which was a renunciation of Christianity, was seen as so threatening in Scotland at the time, compared to England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-924761818-b2bfc16-e1768479906280.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This mid-16th-century German engraving depicts the ordeal of water, a brutal method used to test suspected witches. Thrown into a river, the accused was judged innocent if she drowned and guilty if she floated — a reflection of how religious belief shaped the persecution of alleged witches in early modern Europe." title="Witch Hunting" /> By the end of the 17th century, a hundred years after the publication of Dæmonologie, the bulk of the Scottish witch hunts were over, and there weren't as many women being accused of witchcraft as there were earlier in the 1600s. Now, the most common crime among women was infanticide. The crime of infanticide Infanticide today is understood as the intentional killing of a child. But in Scotland in the late 17th century, the definition was more expansive. “A law passed by the Scottish Parliament in 1690 made it so that if a woman concealed a pregnancy and the child later died, then it will be assumed in law that she murdered the child, even if there's no hard evidence that she actually did,” Kennedy says. “So, in other words, if you had a stillborn child but you had concealed the pregnancy, the law would assume that you murdered the child.” The practical effect of this law was that there was an upsurge in the number of women prosecuted for infanticide in the 1690s, Kennedy says. “There were a few older women who were prosecuted for having assisted in the murder of a child, such as elderly midwives or elderly relatives,” Kennedy says. Read more | 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Scottish history But the majority of the people accused of infanticide were younger women, usually of a lower social status – like farm workers or domestic servants – who actually bore the children. “Very often the father of the child was their master or a family member of the master,” Kennedy says. “It's implied in a lot of these cases, and sometimes more than implied, that the father of the child attacked the woman and committed sexual assault, leaving her with a child who was going to be illegitimate.” In 17th century Scotland, there was a hugely significant social stigma against illegitimacy. “Often, it was said explicitly in women's confessions that if they concealed their pregnancy and murdered the child, they did so because they couldn't bear the shame or the very significant practical and reputational ramifications that come with having an illegitimate child,” Kennedy says. Meanwhile, the men who fathered these children seldom faced any consequences because they didn’t bear the children. “This tells us some very important things about the particular constraints and social pressures that women were forced to deal with – not just the women who are caught up in the courts, but just women generally,” Kennedy says. Dr Allan Kennedy was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
He was ancient Rome’s mightiest figure – and rumours said he had a secret affair with Julius Caesar
Did Octavian, later known as the Roman emperor Augustus, have an affair with Julius Caesar? That’s precisely what Mark Antony’s propaganda wanted you to think
Politicians’ intimate lives have been used against them as far back as antiquity. In the first century BC, in the midst of a power struggle between Julius Caesar’s potential successors, the suggestion of a salacious scandal was wielded as a potent weapon. Caesar had unexpectedly named his 18-year-old great-nephew Octavian as his heir in his will – much to the chagrin of the older, more experienced, and much more powerful Mark Antony. And, as Octavian and Antony men fought for public approval and political power, theories about why Caesar had chosen Octavian ahead of all others were spread with great interest. One was the “slanderous” rumour, says Edward J Watts – professor of history at the University of California, San Dieg, who was speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, that suggested Caesar and Octavian had been in a sexual relationship. The rumour was started by Mark Antony. Although it’s not true, it illustrates the length to which he was willing to go to discredit his rival, as well as contemporary attitudes towards homosexuality. How Octavian being named heir sparked a slanderous Roman rumour “When Caesar is assassinated, everybody in Rome assumes that his heir is going to be Mark Antony,” says Watts. “So, when they open the will, they're shocked that Octavian – this kid that nobody's aware of – has been named the heir of Caesar. “Caesar had been preparing him and giving him training in Roman politics, probably because he recognised how naturally talented Octavian was. Read more | Step inside a Roman home, and you might be surprised by what you find “We don't have any idea about when or what it was that tipped Caesar off to the fact that his nephew would be a world class historical figure of incredible significance. But something did.” Octavian would later go on to become Augustus, the founder of the Roman empire, one of the most powerful Roman emperors in history, and the namesake of the month of August. While Caesar likely wasn’t expecting Octavian to take his place as soon as he did – it’s unlikely he was anticipating his own assassination – says Watts that even at Octavian’s young age, Caesar “recognised that Octavian could be a very real heir, someone who could take his project and continue it”. There weren’t many figures in Rome who were seriously aware of Octavian’s presence and position, because he was so young and inexperienced. He seemed a strange choice compared to Antony, who had been elected consul alongside Caesar, who was incredibly close and loyal to him, and had had a long military and political career. “Nobody understands why Caesar would make this choice,” says Watts. Read more | The death of Caesar: do we know the whole story? Nor did anyone seem to know much about the nature of the relationship between Caesar and Octavian or how it came about. “Mark Antony capitalises on this idea by saying that the explanation is sexual: Octavian actually prostituted himself to Caesar, and that's why he became the heir,” says Watts. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-517424240-11a5384-e1768319256718.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="This bust depicts Mark Antony, the Roman general and politician whose alliance with Cleopatra reshaped the politics of the late Republic. A rival of Octavian, Antony’s defeat at Actium in 31 BC marked the end of Rome’s civil wars and paved the way for imperial rule." title="Bust of Marc Anthony" /> Roman attitudes towards homosexuality The Romans had a very different attitude towards what we would call homosexuality today. Although same-sex relationships weren’t socially accepted, the act of sex between two men wasn’t always defined in terms of a specific sexuality. The Romans saw sexuality in terms of roles: one more dominant, active, and masculine, and the other more submissive, passive, and feminine. Read more | In bed with the Romans Roman law prohibited sexual crimes against freeborn Roman boys but didn’t forbid all homosexual acts altogether. It wasn’t overtly encouraged, but a male Roman citizen could have sex with another man without it impacting his masculinity, if he took the active role with a man of lower social status – like an enslaved servant. The practice, called pederasty, was inherited from Greek customs, in which adult men would have sexual relationships with upper-class adolescent boys. But where these relationships between older and younger men were part of the rite of passage for high-born Greek boys, the same wasn’t true of a freeborn Roman boy – which is why Antony wanted to suggest Octavian had done just that. The rumour died, and Octavian eventually gets his own back Despite Antony’s best efforts, the rumour didn’t catch hold. Not only had Caesar named Octavian as his heir, but he had also legally adopted him, meaning that he passed on his property and name. This gave Octavian a “significant political advantage that would allow him to launch his political career,” says Watts. It also clearly showed that Octavian and Caesar’s relationship was not a sexual one. Caesar: Death of a Dictator Member exclusive | On the Ides of March 44 BC, the most famous Roman in history was murdered. Julius Caesar's assassination transformed Rome forever, and the image of his bloody toga has haunted monarchs and tyrants ever since. Listen to all episodes now Octavian was able to use the situation to his benefit. Alongside starting the rumour, Antony also tried to block Octavian from inheriting Caesar’s property or accepting the adoption, depriving him of the legitimacy he needed to take power. This was a misstep. Pointing to Antony’s actions, Octavian was able to use this against his rival – demonstrating that Antony was trying to go against Caesar’s wishes and prevent Caesar’s desired heir from taking over. Read more | If ancient Romans didn't understand calories, how was their theory of nutrition so accurate? “Octavian makes it clear to everybody in Rome that's what's happened, and so he turns the people who were pro-Caesar against Antony,” says Watts. Years later, Octavian would get his own back. The two men made a fraught alliance, solidified by Antony’s marriage to Octavian’s sister (who was confusingly named Octavia). Antony then famously fell in love with Cleopatra, the ruler of Egypt, with whom he had a highly public affair and whom he divorced Octavia for. “Octavia gets to be the pious wife who's raising their children and his children with his previous wife in Rome,” says Watts, while Anthony’s libertine behaviour spoke for him. This, in turn, strengthened Octavian. “For most of the 30s BC, there was propaganda bouncing back and forth where Antony is trying to undermine Octavian, and Octavian is trying to undermine Antony – but Octavian was just simply better at it.” Edward J Watts was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Buckingham Palace was the height of royal power – so why did Queen Victoria and Albert hate it?
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had to battle to turn Buckingham Palace into the iconic royal residency that it serves as today
For most young married couples, moving into a new house represents an exciting new start. But for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, their newlywed bliss was marred by their cold, smelly, disorganised new home: Buckingham Palace. Today Buckingham Palace is synonymous with the British monarchy, but this was not always the case. “It’s only in the 20th century [that we get] Buckingham Palace as we know it today,” says Kate Williams, speaking on an episode of her HistoryExtra Academy series: Royal Residences: Secrets and Scandals. Victoria and Albert were the first monarchs to use it as their primary residence, and it took substantial work to turn it into a home fit for a queen. Before Victoria, Buckingham Palace wasn’t an official royal residence Buckingham House first passed into the royal family’s ownership in 1761. It was originally intended only to be a retreat for Queen Victoria’s grandmother, Queen Charlotte, who loved the house and raised 14 of her 15 children there, including Victoria’s father. It officially became known as a palace from the 1790s, but St James’ Palace continued to be the main royal residence. The royal family steadily began to spend more and more time at Buckingham Palace, though it would never become the official residence of George IV and William IV – Victoria’s uncles – either. In fact, William IV thought of it as “something of a white elephant” that he was “stuck with”, Williams says. He tried to pass it on by offering it as a new Parliament building when the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834, but MPs rejected it as too dingy. Nevertheless, work was slowly being done on the palace to expand and renovate it. The main phase of this work was finally finished in May 1837. By this time, St James’s Palace had become increasingly less desirable. The area around the main residence had been built up, so there was less privacy available for royals living there, and its Tudor architecture and fire damage meant it was no longer a comfortable place to live. So, after her coronation in 1837, Queen Victoria moved into the refreshed Buckingham Palace as her primary residence. The Palace wasn’t fit for purpose at first However, Buckingham Palace wasn’t thought of as a “suitable” residence for monarchs even once one was living there, Williams says. The palace was a labyrinth at this time, with lots of dark rooms and corridors with unclear uses. This meant that security was lax, and it proved easy for determined intruders to gain entry to the palace. “It wasn't really surprising that one of Victoria's fans and stalkers known as ‘the boy Jones’ managed to live in the palace for ages, eating a few crumbs of bread and drinking wine, until he was found under the queen's chair by the queen's maternity nurse,” Williams says. In addition to its lacklustre security, it was infamously cold, especially in the winter, because the chimneys smoked so much that the fires couldn’t be properly lit. Read more | Queen Victoria's unhappy childhood: life under the 'Kensington System' The sewer system wasn’t fit for purpose, either, and the palace was badly ventilated and smelly. Commissioners who inspected the palace soon after Victoria moved in found that the rooms weren’t cleaned or dusted often, and that the windows were kept closed, allowing unpleasant smells from decaying food and garden waste to spread. The house was also generally mismanaged, with staff badly organised and a general lack of discipline. For example, in great houses the housework was usually finished by 10am, but the domestic workers in Buckingham Palace didn’t finish their tasks until the early afternoon. “One team washed the outside of the windows, and another team washed the inside of the windows, so the windows were never perfectly clean,” Williams says, in one example of the inadequate standards. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-2193298415-a175ee7-e1766491233251.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This 1920 postcard shows Buckingham Palace with the Victoria Memorial dominating the foreground, a monument to Queen Victoria unveiled in 1911. Set amid early motor cars and pedestrians, the scene reflects how the late queen’s legacy continued to shape the ceremonial heart of London in the decades after her reign." title="Buckingham Palace Postcard" /> Prince Albert's renovations Clearly, there was a lot to be done to make Buckingham Palace fit for a queen, but Prince Albert was willing to take on the job when he arrived in England. “Albert, with his customary German efficiency, set about looking at the workings of the palace and he was very disappointed. It was a total disaster, so he looked into making the palaces much more efficient,” Williams says. Previously, different parts of household tasks were under the jurisdiction of different people, so that, for example, different people were in charge of the laying of a fire and the lighting of it, and six different people had to sign off on simple repairs like fixing a broken window. Prince Albert changed this. He gathered most of the responsibility for the upkeep of the palace into one role: the Master of the Household, who was to permanently live in the Palace. Steadily, with its flaws identified, the state of the building was wrested into better condition. But the royal couple still weren’t satisfied just yet. The royal couple continued to improve the Palace Victoria and Albert also moved Marble Arch from its original position just outside Buckingham Palace to where it sits today, in Hyde Park. There are rumours that they did this because the Arch wasn’t wide enough for Victoria’s state coach to pass through. But that’s proven to be untrue. Instead, it was moved to make room for Buckingham Palace to expand, because by 1847, it was seen as too small to comfortably house her courtiers and ever-expanding family. Read more | Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: what was their relationship like? This expansion was done by Edward Blore, an architect who had previously worked on Westminster Abbey and Lambeth Palace. He built the East Wing, which incorporates the front façade and the famous central balcony still used on important royal occasions. This balcony was Prince Albert’s suggestion, and has played an important role in allowing members of the royal family to be increasingly visible to their subjects ever since. Even once the East Wing was built, the palace wasn’t perfect. Victoria complained of a lack of a space relative to any of her present apartments, so work on a new ballroom began. That was completed in May 1856, nearly a century after Buckingham Palace first came under royal ownership. The history of Buckingham Palace serves as a reminder not to be too jealous of people with bigger houses than you: the bigger the house, the bigger the potential problems that come with it. Kate Williams was speaking on her HistoryExtra Academy series, Royal residences: secrets and scandals. All episodes are available now ad-free on the HistoryExtra app. Start watching today.
A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York
Pioneering journalist Nellie Bly went undercover to expose the shocking conditions inside an infamous Victorian-era asylum in New York
In autumn 1887, a 23-year-old woman checked into a temporary boarding house for working women in New York City. She immediately alarmed the other residents: she didn’t sleep for days, and insisted that she didn’t remember who she was. But for all that it looked as if she might be in need of psychiatric support, the woman wasn’t experiencing any mental ill health. She was, in fact, a journalist. And she was trying to get herself admitted to a psychiatric unit for a story. Elizabeth Jane Cochran, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was working for the New York World newspaper, reporting on the conditions inside the infamous Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in NYC’s East River. The resulting article and book would shock America, and lead to reform. But it also helped to boost Bly’s reputation usher in a new style of sensationalist investigative reporting that would come to be known as ‘stunt journalism’. She became a “proper bona fide celebrity, in a way that almost no journalists of the 19th century were,” explains Dr Bob Nicholson, a historian of Victorian media and popular culture at Edge Hill University, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast about how the story unfolded. How Nellie Bly tricked psychiatric doctors Soon after starting to alarm her fellow boarding house residents, Bly was examined by the police, a judge and doctors at a hospital. “She had the challenge of trying to convince people that she was mad, but not to also terribly mistreat her. [Eventually] the judge sent her to a hospital in New York to be examined. And from there, they were absolutely convinced she's mad. Every doctor was 100 per cent certain,” Nicholson says. Read more | What was life like for 'ordinary' Victorians? “They then send her to Blackwell's Island, which is a small island in the river between Manhattan and Queens.” Her employer, the New York World, promised to retrieve her in ten days – meaning that “for those ten days, she was entirely at the mercy of the people of the asylum,” Nicholson says. Bly dropped the ‘mad’ act once she arrived at the asylum, but the staff just assumed that her normal behaviours were symptoms of insanity. “She can't tell them, ‘I am a journalist and I'm doing all this for a story,’ because that sounds like the maddest thing you could possibly say,” Nicholson points out. With her performance now behind her, it became clear to Bly that she had come upon a big story. “It’s absolutely ridden with abuse, with terrible treatment of patients,” Nicholson says. “Nurses and attendants that looked after them day-to-day were particularly abusive. They would beat and choke patients, they would refuse them food, they would tease them and goad them. They wouldn't give them enough clothes to keep warm.” Bly also “described in vivid detail the terrible food she would have to eat, the times that she would be plunged into an ice-cold bath and scrubbed by one of the other patients, and then placed into just a wet nightgown to sleep in an ice-cold cell,” he says. Read more | Could you survive in the vicious Gilded Age? Here are the original influencer's secrets to success While rumours had been circulating about the terrible conditions on Blackwell’s Island, no one had corroborated them until Bly was able to actually see – and experience – them for herself. “The little details in there really hammer home the horror of it. It's an incredibly powerful expose that she writes when she gets out,” Nicholson says. Reform to New York City’s mental health treatment The story was published in two parts, with the first ending in a cliffhanger as Bly boards the boat to the asylum, and then later as a book titled Ten Days in a Mad-house. It piqued people’s curiosity, and they were astonished by what she had managed to do. There was also a “journalistic frenzy” around the story, Nicholson says, because lots of papers had unwittingly reported on Bly’s admission to the asylum at the start. The New York Times had called her a “mysterious waif,” and other papers wrote about the unknown attractive girl who had appeared with no knowledge of who she was. “She had fooled the journalists, and they'd written all these reports about her. So, one of the first reactions from the other papers who've been duped is embarrassment,” Nicholson says. “They desperately then try to get in first, before her next instalment comes out a week later.” As well as causing a sensation, the buzz around the story led to real change in the way the facility was run. “The conditions in the asylum that she uncovers are so shocking and horrifying to people, that it is enough to put pressure on the government to invest more money in the asylums to make sure that they are reformed,” Nicholson says. The reforms included a new requirement for female physicians and ‘properly trained attendants’ to be present at patient assessments, new sanitation regulations, and the firing of abusive staff members. Life in Victorian Britain | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | This six-week course covers everything you need to know about Victorian Britain, guided by historian Ruth Goodman and filmed on location at Black Country Living Museum. Explore the course now Nellie Bly was a pioneer of a new style of journalism Bly’s journalism created change in real people’s lives – but Nicholson thinks that it wasn’t just the coverage that allowed this change to happen. It was her unique approach to the story that gave it so much power. “Ultimately what makes that story so compelling is not just what she finds, it's her narrative. We really become fascinated with her and with her journey. And the jeopardy of going undercover becomes just as important as anything else,” he says. Other papers soon followed suit and a new trend in journalism arose. Ten Days in a Mad-house became an early example of investigative journalism with a performative element, designed to attract more attention. Read more | She exposed the horrors of Britain’s secret concentration camps – so why was she demonised? “The vast majority of journalists in the 19th century would have been completely anonymous,” Nicholson says. Bly’s story “broke the mould of what a conventional journalist would do”. But it wasn’t just the experiential element of her reporting. Bly also broke the mould as a female journalist. She wasn’t the first or only woman working as a journalist at the time, but others were mostly confined to covering subject matter like weddings, fashion, and society. Bly showed that women were capable of much more, and inspired other young women to become stunt journalists in the 1880s, Nicholson says. “She threw herself into absolutely everything, whether it was learning to fence or to be a chorus girl, being admitted to a ‘madhouse’, or reporting on a war. In the end, she ticks off almost every aspect of journalism. All the things that people told her a woman couldn't do, she did.” Bob Nicholson was speaking to Kev Lochun on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Step inside a Roman home, and you might be surprised by what you find
What did Roman houses look like, and how did they vary depending on a person's social status? Even with some considerable archaeological biases, there's a lot that historians have pieced together
The people of ancient Rome lived in a wide range of housing, from grand urban mansions to crowded flats and makeshift dwellings attached to shops. Where and how someone lived depended on geography, social status and wealth – but Roman housing across the social spectrum looked very different from anything built to modern regulations. On an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Hannah Platts, a senior lecturer in ancient history and material culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, explained what ancient Roman homes would have been like for different members of society. However, as with many things in history, there’s one big bias: historians know the most about the wealthy when it comes to Roman houses. Large and better-build homes survive far better in the archaeological record than modest dwellings, but that’s not the only reason. “Archaeologists were very keen to dig out the big and the lavish – or indeed to dig out the urban – because that’s where they would find the mosaics, the big structures and the statues,” Platts explains. But that doesn’t mean that historians haven’t learned plenty about Roman homes. Here are three essential facts you need to know about Roman housing, with expert insight from Platts. The houses of wealthier Romans had lots of different rooms A wealthy Roman’s house could have 50 rooms or more. They tended to be multifunctional, but there were certain rooms that were found in most of the bigger houses. On first walking into a Roman house, you’d be greeted by an atrium. Read more | He was ancient Rome’s mightiest figure – and rumours said he had a secret affair with Julius Caesar “An atrium is like a front hall today – it's where you would walk in and receive guests,” Platts says. “It had a very important architectural feature within it: a hole in the ceiling.” This hole allowed natural light in as well as rain, which would collect in a basin on the floor of the atrium, called an impluvium. This was designed to help to cool the building and provide water that could be used for washing, cleaning or watering plants. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-171420993-963d550-e1767617368898.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This illustration of a Roman household centres on the atrium, the heart of domestic life, where light, water, and social ritual came together. With its fountain, open roof, and formally dressed figures, the scene reflects how elite Roman homes balanced leisure, display, and family life within carefully ordered architectural spaces." title="The Roman Empire - the Roman home." /> Just off the atrium were smaller rooms called cubicula, often used as bedrooms, as well as a room called the tablinum, which started off as a master bedroom but over time began to be used for a different purpose. “It was used almost as the library or the study, where you would store ancestors’ records, keep any business documents, or where the master of the house might do elements of the meet-and-greet salutatio process,” Platts says. Then there were the dining rooms, which were used to entertain and were an important way for elite families to signal their wealth. “They could be very opulently decorated with amazing wall paintings, furniture, and couches that would be festooned in fabrics and cushions. Guests would be arranged according to perceived status and would be served food that would be brought to them by the enslaved members of the household,” Platts says. Wealthier families often had two dining rooms – one for winter and one for summer – which faced different directions for the optimum temperature and light. Meanwhile, the kitchens that supplied the diners weren’t nearly as nice. “The kitchens were often located at a distance from the main reception areas,” Platt says. “These were noisy, dirty, dark areas where the enslaved members of the household would be working to produce the food for the household. They were often windowless or had a very small window.” Many ordinary Romans lived in apartment buildings There were plenty of other types of home that existed in ancient Rome, too. “The house sizes that I found the most of, in Pompeii and Herculaneum, have between 10 and 19 rooms. They're called domus, and they are for single family occupancy,” Platts says. “They might be two storeys high and that was it.” Although not as big as the largest Roman villas, domus houses were still occupied by members of the upper classes. Most ordinary Romans in cities would have lived in tall, densely packed blocks of flats. There are useful remains of these flats in Ostia, the ancient port of Rome, dating from the second century AD. These buildings were called insulae and were common in cities. Historians have estimated that between 800,000 and one million people lived in insulae in Rome in the early imperial period. The lower storeys of these buildings were typically constructed from brick or concrete, while the upper floors were often made of wood, which was lighter but more vulnerable to fire and collapse. Some insulae rose to five or even six storeys, though the wooden upper levels have not survived well. Living conditions varied widely. Some apartments were relatively comfortable, with access to running water and private toilets. Others consisted of a single cramped room, particularly on the upper floors, where rents were cheaper, plumbing was less likely, and the danger of structural failure was greater. Read more | If ancient Romans didn't understand calories, how was their theory of nutrition so accurate? For the lowest status members of society, it was a different story again. “A lot of people might have lived, for example, in their shop,” says Platts. “They would have a shop and then have a room, or maybe two, behind their shop that they would then live in. It could be a family of six more living there, in some really small spaces.” There’s also no direct evidence left of where homeless people lived, although we know that there certainly was homelessness. “There was no support. You could go and sleep in the archways under bridges or in the archways of the amphitheatre, or you could try to get into large tombs and sleep there,” Platts suggests. Roman Britain | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | In this four-week course, discover everything you need to know about Roman Britain, guided by Rob Collins, professor of frontier archaeology at Newcastle University. Explore the course now No matter where they lived, Romans didn’t expect privacy at home “The Roman house really blurred the boundaries of what we think of as public and private,” Platts says, because they defined the two ideas very differently. “The Latin word privatus translates as of or belonging to an individual, apart from or away from the state or the community. The Latin term publicus, where we get public from, means belonging to the people, the state, or the community. So, it's not where an act takes place, but the nature of the act itself and whether it's relevant to the state or the community that defines whether something is public or private,” Platts says. Community or state-related activities often took place in people’s houses, because there weren’t necessarily spaces that were reserved just for public or private activities. They did have doors and curtains that would separate spaces off within a house, and the front doors of big houses would be shut at night or when there had been a tragedy in the family – but mostly they were open for people to look in from the street. Many aspects of Roman housing across the classes mirrors how many people live today. But the way Romans used their domestic spaces, and the limited expectation of privacy within them, can feel strikingly unfamiliar to modern eyes. Hannah Platts was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
If ancient Romans didn't understand calories, how was their theory of nutrition so accurate?
The people of ancient Rome didn’t have access to modern science, but they still developed complex – and incredibly intuitive – theories on how nutrition worked
Macronutrients, calories, and antioxidants all seem like very modern concepts, and, today, we certainly know a lot more about nutrition than the ancient Romans did. But while the Romans didn’t understand the science as well as we do now, they absolutely had an intuitive understanding of many of the key concepts behind how best to fuel ourselves. Across the Roman empire, ancient thinkers developed a sophisticated theory of nutrition which allowed them to understand some of the basic principles behind the science of food and diet long before the discovery of recommended daily allowances and other modern standards. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Dr Claire Bubb, assistant professor in the study of the ancient world at New York University, explains that “there are parallel ideas [in ancient Roman thinking] that are expressed with different words, observing some of the same things, but within a totally different theoretical construct of how food and nutrition works.” The Ancient Roman theory of nutrition was surprisingly intuitive Roman ideas about nutrition centred on the blood. They generally thought that food went into the digestive system after it was eaten, and then broken down. Then, “the bits that are useless, we would excrete”, Bubb explains. “But anything in food that could potentially be relevant to our bodies, we would digest and turn into blood. Read more | He was ancient Rome’s mightiest figure – and rumours said he had a secret affair with Julius Caesar “So your food becomes your blood and then your blood becomes any part of your body that it needs to – the building block of your body,” she says. “Say if I'm wearing down my muscles because I'm using them all the time, the blood will go to the muscles, and it'll build new muscle.” Romans classified foods by their qualities, not their nutrients The ancient Romans associated different properties of foods with different impacts on the body, whether that was healing or strengthening. Rather than thinking about the amounts of protein or vitamin C in a food, they were “thinking about the qualities in food.” Some foods were thought to be more nourishing than others, and able to help build muscle. This is what we would think of as protein, Bubb says. Meanwhile, other foods were thought of as “drying,” or as having “good juices in them”. “Some foods have really good humours in them, and that leads to good blood versus bad blood that might make you unhealthy,” she says. The theory of humours suggested that people’s bodies were ruled by four fluids in the body – blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each humour was associated with the elements: blood was air, phlegm was water, yellow bile was fire, and black bile was earth. And different balances of each humour created different qualities – warm, cold, moist, or dry – which led to various diseases. For example, people with diseases that were seen as hot and dry would benefit from eating foods that were seen as cold and wet. Read more | The Antonine Plague: the killer disease that devastated the Roman empire Whether foods were cold or hot, wet or dry, was based on flavour and texture. Cucumbers were cold and wet, for example, whereas bread and roasted meat were dry and hot. Foods with a bit of a kick to them, like onions, garlic, and rocket, were hot, too. Because they believed that the body was ruled by what people ate, they also believed that foods had the power to transfer their characteristics to whoever ate them. Their ideas are understandable, if not scientific “The cool thing about it is how intuitive it is. You can understand if you eat too much, you feel full and kind of gross the next day,” Bubb says.news “It's not surprising that they noticed things that we're also noticing. There are some foods that are refreshing and some foods that really sit heavily in your stomach and are harder to digest, and the ancient Romans experienced those same feelings. “These are intelligent people who are really paying close attention … It's a very empirical approach to how all of this works and how health works.” Read more | Why did the ancient Romans think these foods were disgusting poison? “What they got wrong is in how they explained these things that we still observe – the methodologies that they had. They didn't have microscopes; they didn't have the ability to send things to a lab and figure out what they're composed of.” Instead, they thought about the composition of food in terms of the elements. It may seem “crazy for us to think about there being little bits of fire in our food,” Bubb remarks, but she notes that we talk about calories – which we convert into heat. “They just think about it in a way that, when you really boil down exactly what they're saying, feels just odd and difficult for us to imagine,” she says. The way the Romans thought about food fed into their greater worldview The system of humours didn’t just apply to food and medicine – humours were also thought to rule people’s personalities and emotions. People who had too much blood in them were thought to be cheery and friendly; those with too much yellow bile were considered bitter and daring; too much black bile meant you were melancholic and fearful; and too much phlegm made people placid and forgetful. The way that the ancient Romans thought about food also influenced how they thought about different people in society, about age, and about seasons. Older people were seen as colder, and so needed less warmth and less food, while growing people (such as children and athletes) needed more warmth and more nourishment. They thought people in general should eat more in winter and spring, when the body needs to produce more warmth and therefore, they believed, needed more nourishment. The Romans knew less about food science than we do now, and many of their ideas seem misguided to the modern perspective. But thinking about food, medicine, wellness and constitution as all interlinked is a surprisingly modern way of thinking, paralleling how we think about nutrition today. Claire Bubb was speaking to James Osborne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.