HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-12-18T11:22:44.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Did the ancient Romans wear underwear? The truth is surprisingly complicated
items: Ancient Roman culture would be baffling to modern eyes – and their toilet habits prove it
items: Female gladiators shocked the ancient Roman world — but not for the reason you think
items: If ancient Romans didn't understand calories, how was their theory of nutrition so accurate?
items: Long before Dracula, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation raised the world's oldest vampires
items: Step inside the ancient Roman empire's gladiatorial arenas, and witness 24 hours of shocking violence
items: Think you know what an ancient Roman gladiator looked like? The reality will make you think again
items: This ancient goddess commanded a Wonder of the World – but why did she have thirty breasts?
items: The ingenious Roman invention that sparked the ancient empire’s obsession with luxury
items: Ancient Roman theatre was a powerful weapon of empire, so why were actors' lives so tragic?

Did the ancient Romans wear underwear? The truth is surprisingly complicated
type: item
date: 2025-12-18T11:22:44.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: A seemingly simple question opens up difficult debates about ancient Roman beauty ideals and social hierarchy, and reveals how differently the Romans thought about their bodies
encoded: At first glance, it seems like a question with an obvious answer. Surely the Romans, famed for the complexity of their social culture, engineering prowess, elaborate fashions and careful etiquette, must have worn underwear? It’s hard to imagine that members of the civilisation that built aqueducts and amphitheatres wandered along their famously straight roads without anything beneath their tunics. Yet as professor Ursula Rothe explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, the reality of Roman underwear is very ambiguous, and exceptionally tricky to pin down. “This is quite a controversial topic,” she says. The debate begins with what the people of the Roman empire wore (or didn’t), but morphs into more complex questions about how they viewed the body, beauty, modesty and status. Roman writers left detailed descriptions of clothing, hairstyles, jewellery and elite fashion, but almost nothing about underwear. “On the whole it’s not really something Romans talk about,” Rothe notes. “It’s not something that is depicted.” Most organic Roman textiles have vanished from the archaeological record, not being something that preserves over two millennia. The few surviving garments and images that have survived are often inconclusive. This scarcity of evidence has led to competing interpretations of Roman underwear. But what’s the answer? As Rothe explains, looking at the clues reveals as much about Roman values, as it does about Roman clothing – or lack thereof. 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 Roman fashion and the purpose of the strophium There is one thing we can say with relative certainty about underwear: there was something like a bra. “We do know that women wore a band around their bust called a strophium,” Rothe says. This was a simple cloth band th…

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Ancient Roman culture would be baffling to modern eyes – and their toilet habits prove it
type: item
date: 2025-12-09T14:24:45.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Ancient Roman ideas of privacy differed radically from our own, and their communal toilets reveal a mindset almost impossible for modern people to imagine
encoded: The right to privacy is a pillar of modern human rights. It’s a concept so deeply ingrained in our society that it can feel universal. We assume that certain spaces like our homes – especially their bedrooms and bathrooms – are inherently private while streets, workplaces and public buildings are for communal life. But these distinctions haven’t always existed. And in the culture of the ancient Roman world, the definition of privacy was entirely different. How, then, did the people across the Roman empire conceive of privacy if not through physical seclusion? Why were communal latrines the norm? And what does this reveal about Roman values? Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Dr Hannah Platts explains how understanding those answers requires stepping into a cultural world where the individual was less important than the collective, and where privacy meant something very different from what it does today. What “public” and “private” meant to the Romans “It is really important not to conflate the urban realm of the city and the domestic realm of the house with our modern notions of urban as public and domestic as private,” she says. Today, closing a door marks out a sphere of personal privacy. In Rome, that wasn’t the case. Instead, Romans distinguished between the private and the public based on the activity itself, rather than the place where the activity was happening. Read more | If ancient Romans didn't understand calories, how was their theory of nutrition so accurate? Confused? You’re right to be. It’s a tricky distinction, but Platts thinks a lesson in Latin can help illuminate what’s going on. “The Latin word privatus translates as ‘of or belonging to an individual’, apart from the state or the community.” By contrast, publicus meant “belonging to the people, belonging to the state, belonging to the community.” So whether something was public or private depended on whether it affected the civic body, not where it happened. A legal consultation in someone’s …

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Female gladiators shocked the ancient Roman world — but not for the reason you think
type: item
date: 2025-12-02T11:13:22.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Though rare, female gladiators did appear in the Roman arena, challenging ancient Rome’s expectations and revealing how spectacle, politics and social boundaries shaped life in the empire
encoded: “There were female gladiators and there’s no doubt about that.” That's the assessment of historian Harry Sidebottom, author of Those Who Are About to Die: Gladiators and the Roman Mind, speaking on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. A female gladiator is an image that challenges what many think they know about the role of gladiatorial combat in the Roman empire, and the role of women in ancient Rome more broadly. Or does it? In fact, Sidebottom argues, the role of female gladiators wasn’t a subversive example of female empowerment. Instead, it was designed as a spectacle to shock and delight audiences, intentionally playing with preconceptions – and upholding them. Still, it’s a hard image to reconcile with what we know of the gladiatorial games, and women’s lives across the Roman empire. So how should we understand the presence of female gladiators in a society that imposed such strict regulations on women’s behaviour? And how does it fit into the broader story of gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome, and the way in which it evolved through antiquity? Sidebottom has some of the answers. Gladiatorial combat: a Roman spectacle with mysterious beginnings Even the Romans were unsure how their most famous form of entertainment began. “Ancient writers said it was an import from the south, from Campania. [Others] said no, it was an import from the north, from Etruria,” Sidebottom explains. Their disagreement reflects how far back the practice reached, well before gladiators became imperial icons. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152190511-fe3456d-e1764672038606.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This detail from the 'Ten Girls' mosaic at the Villa del Casale in Piazza Armerina shows young women training with hand weights and a discus. Dating to the early 4th century AD, the scene highlights the place of athletic exercise in elite Roman life." title="Detail of the Ten Girls Mosaic depicting women athletes" /> De…

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If ancient Romans didn't understand calories, how was their theory of nutrition so accurate?
type: item
date: 2025-11-27T13:08:17.000Z
creator: Serafina Kenny
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: 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
encoded: 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 | Meet the people the ancient Romans and Greeks desperately tried to hide “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 …

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Long before Dracula, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation raised the world's oldest vampires
type: item
date: 2025-11-25T16:26:25.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Fear of the living dead, in the form of vampires, is a near-constant trope in modern popular culture – from the regular reinterpretations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to 20th century Buffy. But the tradition has far deeper roots. Discover how ancient Mesopotamians shaped these beliefs and spread the world’s earliest vampire traditions – and why young women were the most terrifying of all
encoded: The vampire is an archetypal symbol of late-medieval folklore and gothic literature. However, the idea of the restless dead: spirits of the prematurely deceased who were believed to walk again and cause harm to the living, is ancient, seemingly entangled deep within the fears of the human psyche. But just how far back does the story of vampires really go? That’s the question that historian John Blair, author of Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to The New World discussed on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. As he reveals, the origin story of vampires and other images of the living dead emerged not with Bram Stoker in 19th-century Europe, nor even in the medieval period, but in the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, where some of humanity’s earliest surviving texts describe a fear that's been present through thousands of years. And, it might be even older than that. Mesopotamia's living dead Humans seem to have feared the dead long before the first written languages were created. Archaeologists have uncovered prehistoric burials that appear intent on keeping the dead in the ground, with bodies pinned beneath stones, decapitated, or bound tightly – actions that seem designed to prevent them from rising again. Read more | This ancient Mesopotamian civilisation predicted one of the Bible's most famous stories Blair refers to this practice, noting that “there is some archaeological evidence from prehistory, including way back to the Palaeolithic.” But it’s only with the emergence of writing that more concrete evidence becomes available. The beliefs “first appear in written sources, and the earliest written sources are from Mesopotamia.” Mesopotamia, a network of the world’s most ancient civilisations found in what it now modern Iraq and parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran, was home to the world’s first cities of Uruk, Ur and Babylon. It was also where the first writing system, cuneiform, emerged. The earliest Mesopotamian texts are silent on the undead. …

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Step inside the ancient Roman empire's gladiatorial arenas, and witness 24 hours of shocking violence
type: item
date: 2025-11-20T10:38:18.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: From ritual parades to blood-soaked duels, explore a single day in the life (and death) of the most brutal entertainment in the ancient Roman empire
encoded: It’s a hot morning in ancient Rome, and the city is simmering with anticipation. Crowds stream toward the amphitheatre, and by mid-morning, more than 50,000 spectators are packed into the stands, ready for a day of spectacle. As a symbol of the Roman empire, the gladiatorial games were both civic ritual and political theatre. But for those taking part in this vicious entertainment, that symbolism had a very tangible cost. For the Roman gladiators who made it to the arena, what was the experience like ahead of, and after, the great event? Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Harry Sidebottom, author of Those Who Are About to Die: Gladiators and the Roman Mind, explains what life as a gladiator would have really been like in the 24 hours surrounding the games. The night before as a Roman gladiator “The day of a gladiator started the night before the fight,” Sidebottom explains, “with a weird social ritual called cena libera, meaning ‘the free dinner’. The public was allowed into the gladiatorial school to watch the gladiators eating.” The ritual meal took place in the ludus, or training barracks, where fighters sat at long tables under the eyes of the spectators. “There are some incredibly pretentious explanations behind this ritual,” says Sidebottom, “but I think it is a very simple one. There was gambling on gladiatorial fights, and the guys who appeared calm and in control were going to have the shortest odds.” Read more | Think you know what an ancient Roman gladiator looked like? The reality will make you think again For the fighters (mostly enslaved men, prisoners of war or convicted criminals) this would have been a final test of composure before the fight itself. After the dinner, once the spectators had left, the gladiators would have gone off to bed, with guards keeping a watch over their doors. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-639163578-2-0c28aae-e1763634537128.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Thi…

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Think you know what an ancient Roman gladiator looked like? The reality will make you think again
type: item
date: 2025-11-06T10:15:52.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Ancient Roman gladiators are often imagined as chiselled, bronzed heroes of the arena, akin to today’s top athletes. But the truth was far more complex
encoded: The gladiators of ancient Rome are nearly always imagined as figures of perfect physical presence. They’re popularly pictured as lean, muscular and bronzed from their bouts under the Mediterranean sun. But as classical historian Harry Sidebottom explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, the reality was far stranger, and more complex. Sidebottom, the author of Those Who Are About To Die: Gladiators and the Roman Mind, says that Roman gladiators were impossible to compare to professional athletes today. They were brutalised, scarred, physically lopsided and, as Sidebottom reveals, surprisingly well-padded. Their appearance, and the way Romans responded to it, reveals much about the ancient Roman world’s obsessions with violent spectacle. “On the one hand, gladiators are the lowest of the low,” Sidebottom says. “But on the other hand, they're very glamorous figures; even sex symbols.” A brutal Roman tradition Gladiatorial combat had deep roots in Roman culture. In the third century BC, aristocratic families began to honour the dead with munera; ritual combats staged in memory of the deceased. Over time this would evolve into public entertainment, sponsored by politicians seeking popularity. By the time of the late Roman Republic, games were vast civic events. Julius Caesar staged spectacles featuring hundreds of pairs of fighters, and by the early Roman empire, Roman emperors from Augustus to Commodus used the arena as a means of displaying their power and prestige. The most famous venue, the Colosseum in Rome, commissioned by Vespasian and opened under Titus in AD 80, could seat 50,000 spectators. Gladiators came from across the empire. They were prisoners of war, condemned criminals, and enslaved men trained in state-run martial schools known as ludi. The largest, including sites like Ludus Magnus and Capua, housed thousands of fighters under the watch of strict trainers. Though most entered unwillingly, some free men also volunteered, tempted by the prospect of fame. Di…

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This ancient goddess commanded a Wonder of the World – but why did she have thirty breasts?
type: item
date: 2025-10-24T12:00:22.000Z
creator: Isabel King
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Gods
description: The strange and powerful symbol at the heart of one of history’s greatest temples reveals the importance of the goddess Artemis in ruling fertility, childbirth and nature
encoded: When we think of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may be the first examples that come to mind. However, the oldest-known versions of the list start with a landmark that is often forgotten: the Temple of Artemis. Located in the ancient city of Ephesus (near modern-day Selçuk, Turkey), this remarkable place of worship was renowned for its size and scale, standing at least 20 metres tall and boasting an enormous tile-covered roof supported by 127 marble columns. With a floor plan of some 6,000 square metres, the temple was also nearly three times as large as the famous Parthenon in Athens. But some of the most startling archaeological evidence from Ephesus isn’t concerned with the dimensions of the temple, nor its complicated history of destruction and rebuilding. Instead, much attention has been directed towards a collection of statues depicting the temple’s patron deity, Artemis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/BAL957668-36357fc.jpg" width="7715" height="4533" alt="A large temple with a triangular roof and many columns holding it up. It sits on top of a large flight of stairs. The roof has a mural of the goddess sitting in the middle and surrounded by crowds of people and two golden horses" title="A 20th-century depiction of the Temple of Artemis, dedicated to the goddess Artemis (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Rather than portraying the goddess as a conventional Greek beauty, the sculptures display Artemis in an altogether different guise. And, according to classicist and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, these statues bear a particularly striking physical characteristic. Read more | On the steps of a sacred temple, Cleopatra's feud with her sister came to a blood-soaked end “[This] is not the Artemis that you probably have in your heads… this image of a beautiful young woman in a tiny Greek chiton, artfully pulling a bow and arrow,” reveals Hughes on an episode…

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The ingenious Roman invention that sparked the ancient empire’s obsession with luxury
type: item
date: 2025-10-21T09:53:22.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Beneath the mosaic floors of Roman villas, an ingenious system of underfloor heating transformed warmth into a mark of power
encoded: Think of Roman engineering, and it might be the grandest feats that first come to mind: the towering aqueducts bringing water to towns and cities, the amphitheatres filled with cheering crowds, and the paved roads that stitched the Roman empire together. The hypocaust – the Roman system of underfloor heating – may be less staggering in its scale, but it remains one of the most recognisable features of Roman domestic life. Archaeologists still point to those distinctive stacks of bricks beneath villa floors as a mark of Roman sophistication. “The hypocaust system is really important for us to think about when we consider Roman homes,” explains Dr Hannah Platts on the HistoryExtra podcast. “It was important to them: that it heated their baths and their other spaces.” But they weren’t for everyone. Who owned homes with underfloor heating? And what did such comfort say about status and power? “I should reiterate, having your own bathhouse or having a hypocaust was a luxury,” says Platts. Rome’s underfloor miracle At its simplest, a hypocaust worked by circulating hot air through a hollow space beneath the floor. A furnace, or praefurnium, was stoked outside the building; hot air from the furnace was funnelled into a network of small brick pillars (pilae) that supported a raised floor. But it wasn’t just about heating the floor. Read more | How and why did the Roman empire fall? “The hypocaust was used to heat houses via underfloor heating, but actually we’ve got a number of houses where we’ve got evidence of box flue tiles in the walls,” says Platts. “So we know that hypocausts could heat the walls of the rooms as well.” In the context of ancient Rome this was engineering of incredible sophistication. Archaeological remains from sites such as Pompeii and Ostia, and across Roman Britain, show entire suites of rooms heated by the system. Stepping barefoot on a mosaic floor, warmed from underneath, was quite literally to step upon Roman ingenuity. <img src="https://images.…

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Ancient Roman theatre was a powerful weapon of empire, so why were actors' lives so tragic?
type: item
date: 2025-10-09T11:59:20.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: They performed before thousands and could become celebrities, yet actors in ancient Rome were stripped of their civic rights. What was life really like for the men who took to the Roman stage?
encoded: Roman society was acutely hierarchical. Every occupation carried a moral weight, and the line between dignity and dishonour was a stark one. A senator who spoke in the law courts could win eternal repute, but a gladiator who risked his life to entertain the masses was branded socially devalued, and the same was true of actors. No matter how dazzling their performances in front of a packed theatre might be, their profession consigned them to the lowest rungs of society. By law they were infamis; people of ill repute, stripped of civic rights and grouped alongside the enslaved. But what was this paradoxical life of stardom and shame really like for the actors of the Roman empire? Roman theatre’s golden age under Augustus “When we talk about a golden age of Roman theatre, we tend to be talking about Emperor Augustus’s reign and the beginning of the Roman empire,” says Jessica Clarke, author of A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “This was a period with new cultural, religious and political structures being implemented.” Augustus was the first emperor of Rome, ruling from 27 BC until AD 14. And he grasped how useful theatre could be as a political tool. Read more | The worst Roman emperors Spectacle was part of a strategy that Romans would come to call panem et circenses, or bread and circuses: free food and entertainment offered to the populace in return for loyalty and social cohesion. Drama and performance helped bind audiences into a shared Roman identity and provided a stage (quite literally) for imperial ideology. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-122211671-b717d9b-e1760010634986.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This 1st-century AD mosaic from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii depicts the staging of a theatrical performance. Such scenes highlight the importance of theatre in Roman cultural life, blending entertainment with expressions of myth, satire, and soc…

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