When I consider Rome's filthy, unhygenic streets I can't help but think about Cato, in his black toga, making his way barefoot through the streets for performative reasons.
There's an interesting 19th century book about farming/waste/fertilizers in Asia called "Farmers of 40 Centuries," which talks about the intricate system of waste collection they had, which had been in place since remote antiquity. Because they viewed waste as a resource, people actually paid for the right to collect it, since it could be sold as fertilizer for crops. This meant that their cities were a lot cleaner than European ones.
My limited knowledge of the medieval era indicates that this had taken root in parts of Europe at some point, but presumably not in antiquity, which always struck me as a weird oversight. Why didn't they think of human and animal waste as a fertilizer resource worth collecting?
'Manuring' was the practice of regularly sweeping the top level of mud off an urban street and using it as fertiliser in the surrounding fields and it certainly happened in Europe, too.
If you have a metal detector, the fields around towns are great places to go detecting (with permission, naturally) because that's where all the detritus from the streets ends up. One might wonder how all this stuff ended up in a field, but the reality is that the coins and so on that one finds were never dropped in that field in the first place.
Great article. I will publish my article about street types in ancient Rome on Tuesday morning. Even the wide streets of Rome, such as Nova Via and Sacra Via, were ridiculously narrow by modern standards.
Sejanus was later the subject of a tragic play by Ben Jonson, which I suspect was his attempt to follow up on what Shakespeare had done with "Julius Caesar" and "Titus Andronicus".
Sejanus was a bit of a bugger who got up to all sorts of shenanigans. The intriguing thing is that nobody knows what the final straw was. Whatever he did to make everyone finally have enough of him is lost,
When I consider Rome's filthy, unhygenic streets I can't help but think about Cato, in his black toga, making his way barefoot through the streets for performative reasons.
There's an interesting 19th century book about farming/waste/fertilizers in Asia called "Farmers of 40 Centuries," which talks about the intricate system of waste collection they had, which had been in place since remote antiquity. Because they viewed waste as a resource, people actually paid for the right to collect it, since it could be sold as fertilizer for crops. This meant that their cities were a lot cleaner than European ones.
My limited knowledge of the medieval era indicates that this had taken root in parts of Europe at some point, but presumably not in antiquity, which always struck me as a weird oversight. Why didn't they think of human and animal waste as a fertilizer resource worth collecting?
Anyway, good piece.
'Manuring' was the practice of regularly sweeping the top level of mud off an urban street and using it as fertiliser in the surrounding fields and it certainly happened in Europe, too.
If you have a metal detector, the fields around towns are great places to go detecting (with permission, naturally) because that's where all the detritus from the streets ends up. One might wonder how all this stuff ended up in a field, but the reality is that the coins and so on that one finds were never dropped in that field in the first place.
Great article. I will publish my article about street types in ancient Rome on Tuesday morning. Even the wide streets of Rome, such as Nova Via and Sacra Via, were ridiculously narrow by modern standards.
Sejanus was later the subject of a tragic play by Ben Jonson, which I suspect was his attempt to follow up on what Shakespeare had done with "Julius Caesar" and "Titus Andronicus".
Sejanus was a bit of a bugger who got up to all sorts of shenanigans. The intriguing thing is that nobody knows what the final straw was. Whatever he did to make everyone finally have enough of him is lost,