An Archaeology for the Five Senses: A Lyceum Evening

This talk was organized by the St. Stephen’s Lyceum, our Institute of Roman Culture which organizes guided tours of cultural sights led by current faculty and lectures given by visiting scholars.

The talk was entitled, “An Archaeology for the Five Senses: Sniffing Around the Ruins of Pompeii, Ostia, and Rome.” Professor Kolosky-Ostrow’s research on this topic is part of her forthcoming publication, Making Sense of Pompeii and Herculaneum: Daily Life and the Sensorium of the Roman City (Cambridge University Press.)

Through her research, Professor Kolosky-Ostrow has discovered that excavating the smells of the Ancient World can tell us a lot about how Roman cities functioned and what it was like to live in cities such as Rome, Ostia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum. The talk was full of surprises. For example, we know that the Romans embedded finely constructed sewer systems in many of their cities and we, modern people, might assume that these sewers were used for sanitation. The archaeological evidence, however, tells a different story. The sewers’ primary function was to drain water from low lying areas of the city when the rivers flooded (which happened frequently in Rome), providing protection from flooding.

While it would have been easy and perfectly legal for the Ancient Romans to connect their private toilets to the public sewer system, most opted for private septic tanks that had to be regularly cleaned. Perhaps they chose this option because it meant they could recycle their own waste and use it as fertilizer in their gardens or sell it to farmers. Professor Kolosky-Ostrow also suggested that another reason Romans resisted connecting their toilets to the public sewer system was that the sewers had no traps so there was no telling what might climb through the pipes, out of a toilet, and into your kitchen (where toilets were frequently located). One Roman writer tells a frightening story of a giant octopus that climbed through the house’s copper pipes every night and emerged from the toilet to eat all the pickled fish in the pantry. After having an experience like that, you might think twice about connecting your toilet to the public sewer.

An Ancient Roman city was far from a sanitary place. On the same block, you might have residential villas belonging to upper-class families, shared apartments housing poorer families, a goldsmith, a leather tanner, a carpenter, a baker with a stable next door, and a particularly smelly fullery where clothes were laundered in urine and sometimes even in sulfur.

In an Ancient Roman public market, smells of fruits from the countryside would have mixed with the smell of animal sacrifices at nearby temples and meat at the butcher stands. There were no zoning laws in these cities so it was not unusual to build a bakery attached to a house attached to a stable across the street from a Thermopolium, a kind of fast food joint where the stench of old meat was masked with a popular fish sauce known as “garum” and sold to hungry Romans. Everyone wanted their shops in the center of the city so they could attract the most customers and families built their houses by the markets to maximize convenience, making an Ancient Roman City quite the melting pot of sights, smells, and sounds.

The Roman Colosseum must have had a particularly pungent odor during the 100 days of gladiator fights, executions, and re-enacted naval battles that accompanied its opening in 80 CE. Over the course of those 100 days, we are told that 9,000 animals were killed. Today, you can visit the physical evidence of these spectacles (such as horse and bear skulls) in the Colosseum Museum.

So, what was it really like to live in an Ancient Roman city? According to Professor Kolosky-Ostrow, “Ancient Roman life stimulated all five senses...Roman cities were colorful, smelly, somewhat confusing places.” One attendee, Professor Valerie Higgins from the American University of Rome, wondered aloud if disgust is a universal trait? Professor Kolosky-Ostrow considered this question and answered that there are few if any, universally disgusting smells, at different times in our lives we may find a particular odor unbearable only to become used to after days or months of exposure.

Each city has its own sensorial profile. Just think of Rome; here, whirring motorini engines, ambulances, and shouting food vendors, blend with cigarette smoke, the smell of espresso, and freshly baked bread, creating a concoction of smells and sounds that are unique to this city. And when we leave we Rome, these noisy, aromatic features of the city are often what we miss the most.