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: Julius Caesar's hellraising youth: did he really defy tyrants and crucify pirates?
items: Female gladiators shocked the ancient Roman world — but not for the reason you think
items: Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise
items: If ancient Romans didn't understand calories, how was their theory of nutrition so accurate?
items: Step inside the ancient Roman empire's gladiatorial arenas, and witness 24 hours of shocking violence
items: Toilets through time: Roman latrines
items: Think you know what an ancient Roman gladiator looked like? The reality will make you think again
items: A day in the life of a gladiator

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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Julius Caesar's hellraising youth: did he really defy tyrants and crucify pirates?
type: item
date: 2025-12-03T09:00:43.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Historical people
subject: Roman rulers
description: Ancient accounts of Julius Caesar’s early life depict an all-action hero who outwitted tyrants and terrorised bandits. But can they be trusted? David S Potter investigates
encoded: The most celebrated of all ancient Romans almost met a watery end before he’d made his big splash in the vast ocean of history. In 75 BC, Julius Caesar – then in his mid-20s and yet to establish himself as the most powerful man in Rome – sailed to Rhodes to study with a famous Greek rhetorician. But on his journey east, he was kidnapped by Cilician pirates from southern Anatolia. There was nothing so unusual about this stroke of misfortune – the waters of the eastern Mediterranean were plagued by bandits all too willing to prey on Roman travellers. But there was certainly something unusual about what happened next. Seemingly oblivious to the danger in which he now found himself, Caesar decisively took control of the situation. According to his biographer, Plutarch, “when the pirates demanded 20 talents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them 50”. While his agents set out to raise the ransom money, Caesar made the pirates listen to his speeches and poetry, assuring them that he would come after them as soon as he was freed. He was as good as his word. Having paid the ransom, Caesar raised a fleet from the cities of the Roman province of Asia (western Anatolia) and captured the pirates. Then, when he discovered that the corrupt governor of Asia was looking to make a profit from the captives, he “took the robbers out of prison and crucified them all, just as he had often warned them on the island that he would do, when they thought he was joking”. It was a brutal act of revenge – softened only slightly by the fact that he slit the pirates’ throats to spare them the agony that would have been their fate on the crosses. Origin stories Caesar’s pirate-slaying escapades represent a truly extraordinary tale. But what are we to make of it? We know a great deal about Julius Caesar in the ‘colossus’ phase of his career – that period stretching from his mid-thirties to his assassination in his mid-fifti…

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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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Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise
type: item
date: 2025-11-28T13:02:32.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Death
subject: Gladiators
subject: Life in ancient Rome
subject: Roman rulers
description: Edward J Watts, author of The Romans: A 2,000-Year History, shares 25 things you need to know about one of the greatest civilisations of the ancient world – from their incredible feats of engineering to their sporting spectacles
encoded: 1. The Romans lived in an independent state for more than 2,200 years According to tradition, Rome was founded in 753 BC, shortly after the beginning of the Italian Iron Age. Its inhabitants were Latin-speaking pagans who lived along the river Tiber in what is now central Italy. The empire of Trebizond, the last independent Roman kingdom descended from that state, was captured in 1461 by an Ottoman army equipped with gunpowder weapons. The people living in Trebizond also called themselves ‘Roman’, but they were Christians who lived in a city on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey and spoke a language they called Romeika (which translates as 'Roman', but which we now call Greek). 2. The Roman empire once included all, or part of, nearly 50 countries At the empire’s greatest extent in AD 117, Roman territory stretched from what is now the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Persian Gulf beaches in Kuwait, from southern Egypt near the current Sudanese border to northern England, and from just south of Casablanca in Morocco to the Caspian Sea shores of Azerbaijan. The land area of the Roman empire was smaller than Australia, but if one included the territorial waters controlled by Rome (as is customary with modern states) the empire would rank as the fifth-largest country on earth if it existed today. 3. As much as one-third of the world’s population lived under Roman control Late during the reign of the emperor Trajan (ruled AD 98–117), it is thought that the Roman empire reached a population of 80 million, out of a total world population of around 230 million. In modern terms, Rome’s share of the world population at that moment would be nearly equivalent to a country with the combined populations of India and China. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2GettyImages-1369193411-fa1bfb0-e1764241964618.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A yellow, blue and red map showing the Roman empire" title="The Roman empire reached its maximum…

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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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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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Toilets through time: Roman latrines
type: item
date: 2025-11-19T07:00:48.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Toilets through time podcast series
description: David Musgrove pays a visit to the revolting world of Roman toilets, in the company of Dr Hannah Platts
encoded: What was it like to do your business in a Roman communal toilet? In the first episode of our mini-series, Toilets Through Time, David Musgrove begins his journey through the bathrooms of British history in the Roman era, with historian Dr Hannah Platts. They discuss dubious ancient ablutions, the confronting experience of sitting alongside your neighbours on the toilet, and why one gladiator reportedly stuck a toilet sponge down his own throat.

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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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A day in the life of a gladiator
type: item
date: 2025-11-03T08:00:05.000Z
creator: Rachel Dinning
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
description: Harry Sidebottom shares what it was like to be a gladiator in ancient Rome, from brutal training to deadly fights in the amphitheatre
encoded: If we were to step back in time on to the blood-soaked sand of the Roman gladiatorial arena, what would we uncover about society, power and entertainment in the ancient civilisation? Speaking to Rachel Dinning, historian Harry Sidebottom guides us through 24 hours in the arena, revealing what life was really like for the gladiators that fought there – and for the crowds who came to spectate. Harry Sidebottom is the author of Those Who Are About To Die: Gladiators and the Roman Mind (Cornerstone, 2025). Buy it from Waterstones

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