Are you healthier than a Roman? These ancient secrets for longevity are still shockingly relevant

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Professor Claire Bubb, an expert in ancient science and literature, joined the HistoryExtra podcast to explain some of the measures that Greco-Roman doctors advised for a healthy life.

Here, we share five tips for maximising your health and longevity, from those ancient Greeks and Romans, as told by Professor Bubb.

Tailor your health to your goals, not someone else’s

Even before the rise of modern wellness programmes, ancient doctors were pushing personalisation.

A healthy regime wasn’t a fixed rulebook. It was a flexible set of principles, adjusted to suit your specific body, lifestyle and ambitions. Want to build strength? There was a plan for that. Want to slim down? A completely different routine applied.

“The Hippocratic approach here is very individualised,” explains Bubb, “and this to me is the thing that ancient medicine can still really help us think through and help us be more aware of.”

“If you, as an individual, feel that you are overweight and you want to lose weight, you're going to do one thing. If you're underweight and you really want to bulk up and you'd rather be stronger and you want more mass, you have to do these other things, so everyone has their own goals.”

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An example of this comes from Hippocrates. Bubb explains he believed that anyone looking to lose weight ought to: “Do all exercise in a state of fasting, and eat while you’re still panting and all sweaty and hot… you want to be exercising when there’s no [food] because then you have to use up bits of your body that are already there.”

However, his advice was completely different for someone with contrasting goals: there was no single ‘one size fits all’ approach to health. What it meant to live a healthy life was relative to you, your situation and your personal goals.

“This intentionality about thinking about, ‘How am I exercising, how am I eating, what am I eating, how are my daily choices keeping my healthy and happy?’ I think that’s a huge takeaway that’s equally [relevant] now as it was 2,000 years ago,” she adds.

Control your intimacy like it’s medicine

In Greco-Roman medical theory, bodily fluids were potent forces that shaped your vitality, and they were to be carefully managed. That made sex, and the loss of semen in particular, something to be taken very seriously.

Doctors worried that too much sex could drain a person’s strength, while too little might cause harmful build-up.

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“Sex is a very specific thing that humans do, that exerts a lot of energy and also does magical things, right?” Bubb says.

“Some people, it turns out, actually are healthier if they have sex more frequently… whereas some people are weaker [if they have sex] and too much sex is going to lead to all sorts of problems.”

Doctors even recommended adjusting sexual activity seasonally, just as they did with exercise. “When it's really hot in the summer … you're already losing a lot of [energy],” Bubb explains. Summer sex, in the minds of the ancients, would probably make that worse. Their advice? “You should avoid it if you can.”

If you want perfect health, you’ll need a lot of free time (and money)

Some ancient wellness advice was aimed at people with immense privilege. The medical writer Diocles laid out what Bubb describes as an “almost minute-by-minute” daily regime for maximally optimising health – from morning stretches and facial cleansing to precisely timed meals and midday naps.

But this level of detail came with a catch.

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The only person who could have possibly done this is “someone who doesn't have or need a job,” Bubb notes. “That is just rich enough that they can devote all of their resources to maximising health.”

Even then, you weren’t supposed to focus on anything else.

“Diocles actually says, ‘If you have to go to work, you could maybe do an hour of work now’, but ideally, you wouldn't even do that.”

The regime also shifted across the seasons – your lunch portion, nap schedule and even evening walk varied depending on the time of year. While most people didn’t have the luxury to follow such a plan, it reflected a wider ideal: that maintaining health was a full-time pursuit, and deserved your attention.

Don’t spend too much time in the gym

Modern fitness culture can often feel like it promotes physical extremes, something that Greco-Roman medicine warned strongly against. Some prominent ancient physicians instead thought that athletes and bodybuilders were pushing themselves into unnatural shapes, and in doing so, risking the balance of their health.

“Contrary to the modern way of thinking about exercise, and very surprisingly, you read some of these authors and they are so down on athletes,” Bubb says.

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“[They think] they've moved themselves way too far to the extreme; that people shouldn't have muscles like that.”

Instead, doctors recommended light, full-body movement. They valued the simplicity of walking, or moderate exercise with equipment like a ball. Over-exertion, particularly if not medically supervised, was believed to disturb the body’s inner harmony.

In their view, says Bubb, “your normal person should absolutely not be doing a sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger weightlifting regime – that’s unhealthy”, Bubb adds.

While doctors competed with gymnastic trainers over control of the body, both agreed: exercise was vital. It just needed to be balanced, purposeful and aligned with individual needs.

Sometimes, it’s healthier to be naked

Some health theories in antiquity sound bizarre to modern ears – but even these had internal logic. Some thinkers, for instance, argued that walking around naked could help with weight loss by encouraging evaporation from the skin.

“Why would it be that walking around naked helps you lose weight?” Bubb reflects. “I think probably it has to do with evaporation.” They had the idea that “more stuff can get out of your body more easily if you’re naked.”

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Culturally, this wasn’t considered anything extraordinary. In ancient Greece especially, nudity in public spaces like bathhouses and gymnasia was entirely normal, particularly among men.

“This is a culture where they did a lot of naked exercise. They were more down with nudity than we are as a culture.”

A wellness legacy with modern echoes

From the vantage point of today’s intricate nutrition plans and wearable sleep trackers, modern wellness might feel like it’s a world apart from the ancient rules and advice of the Greco-Roman cultures.

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However, there are many echoes of ancient themes in what we value today. While the Greco-Roman world certainly didn’t have vitamin supplements or dumbbells, its physicians and doctors did have a firm belief that good health was proactive, holistic and in your power to manage and control.

And while most of us can’t follow Diocles’s daily plan or take long naked walks before lunch, we can certainly still consider the same question that fixated ancient thinkers: what does it mean to live healthily, and be well?

Claire Bubb was speaking to James Osborne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

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