Roman History from the Bottom Up . . .

[Chris]

Continue to work my way through the detail-dense but enlightening and readable chapters of POPULUS: Living and Dying in Ancient Rome.

Getting ready to immerse myself in Chapter 11 - "Enfeebled by Baths."

Approximately 120 pages remain.

Anyhow.

Read this interesting if also graphic/gross passage at the bottom of page 224:

   Rome's sewers were used to dispose mainly of sewage and excess rainwater, but
   waste of all sorts ended up in them too including the corpses of animals and people. An
   adult can produce at least 400 g (0.9 lb) of fecal matter per day, and a child somewhat
   less. Allowing then, say, an average of 325 g per head daily Rome's population of up to
   around one million at its height could generate at least 325,000 kg per day or 325
   metric tonnes (358 US tons), which makes for 118,625 tonnes annually. The figures are
   only estimates . . .


This writer has covered the aqueducts and other aspects of Roman life such as food preparation and the practice of doctors. Based on previous reading (both non-fiction and historical fiction), I had some knowledge of the complexity of Rome's sewers (Agrippa and the Cloaca Maxima and all that), but this particular statistic, even though an estimate, was something that I had never thought about.

Forgive me for not searching for more military or wargame relevant entries, but it occurs to me that sanitation would be a challenge for camps and marching forts, etc.

At the risk of repeating a point, I recently refought Gaugamela. Estimates put the Macedonian army at around 50,000 men. The strength of the Persians is unknown, but at least 1.5 that number. Then, let's add the contribution of the horses.

I wonder if there have been any Pen & Sword books written on this specific subject? I suppose that I will have to take a look at Academia to see if anyone has written a paper about military sanitation.

Pondering to which sub-forum I should post this . . .

Cheers,
Chris

[Ian61]

Bit worried about the 4000g that's 4 Kg I suspect a typo for 400g from what follows.

[Ian61]

Don't know about Pen & Sword but Ben Kane leaves little to the imagination in his description of Cannae. Folks who talk about wanting to go back in time to 'see' things would definitely want to avoid 'smelling' them.

[lionheartrjc]

Absolutely.

Motor cars reduced the pollution in major cities at the start of the 20th century.  Horses produce a lot of fecal matter and dead horses in the streets were a major issue. 

[Imperial Dave]

 

[Jim Webster]

Absolutely.

Motor cars reduced the pollution in major cities at the start of the 20th century.  Horses produce a lot of fecal matter and dead horses in the streets were a major issue. 

The problem was known in London and New York

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/

And this

https://omf.ucsc.edu/london-1865/dust-heaps/dustmen.html

But if you walk down some of the older backstreets of my Barrow in Furness (where pretty much everything is after 1830) you can see occasional cast iron doors at a low level. These are what is left from the old earth closets. Somebody with a shovel would open the door, empty the toilet and load the contents onto a cart Families would drop broken crockery, ashes and similar into the toilet as well which probably helped bind it

It was then carted out to local farm land and spread as fertiliser. We have fields which, when ploughed, have so much broken crockery on them that literally pieces are never more than a foot apart.

Further south there were barges carrying it out of the major cities and people made a living selling or acting as brokers
Yes Night Soil Broker was a profession, my lady wife was doing somebody's family tree and back there in 18 something they had a night soil broker in the Midlands handy for the canal network

There's a Japanese paper on it here for those who want their Samurai army authentic 

https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/a/49661/files/2017/08/Howell-How-Green-Was-My-Night-Soil-OSU-Oct-2012-2j81g65.pdf

[Imperial Dave]

Where there's muck there's brass as they say

[Erpingham]

Bit worried about the 4000g that's 4 Kg I suspect a typo for 400g from what follows.

Indeed.  The imperial weight of 0.9lbs (we seem to have abandoned ounces) fits this.

[Keraunos]

Not quite in period, if on topic, is that the first sewer in Hong Kong in the 1860s was used by some enterprising gentlemen to break into the vaults of a local bank and make off with the gold.  This led to a reluctance by the local authorities to build more sewers - though the enemies of the Governor, Pope-Hennessey, a man with many enemies, said that he had taken a back-hander from the night soil merchants who sold this alternative form of gold to farmers around the region in return for stalling on more sewer construction.  Some of my career was spent trying to defend funding for a massive building scheme in the early 2000s to make up for the backlog in sewers and treatment systems that had been a feature of this 'Pearl of the Orient' before that.  Happily these efforts are being rewarded in water quality today.

[Erpingham]

I was reminded of this remark by Bernard S Bachrach discussing the logistics of medieval cavalry

"As we have seen, horses eat and drink large amounts; however, they retain relatively little of what they consume. A horse each day produces on the average 4.5 lb. of feces and .56 gallons of urine per 100 lb. of body weight. Thus a horse weighing about 1,500 lb. would produce about 65-70 lb. of feces per day in a mixture that is about 75-80% liquid and an additional 8‑8.5 gallons of urine.  These excretions, of course, are extremely dangerous to both the animals and the men whom they serve, especially when a military force is encamped for a lengthy period of time or is besieging an enemy stronghold. Urine, while not toxic in healthy animals or humans, does in the process of evaporation produce ammonia, which is highly detrimental to horses' hooves. Feces, by contrast, are highly toxic and if not adequately dealt with can lead to health problems of epidemic proportions. At Dives-sur-Mer, where William of Normandy encamped with some 2,000 to 3,000 war horses for at least a month, a mountain of from 3,600,000 to 5,400,000 lb. of horse feces and a river of from 480,000 to 720,000 gallons of horse urine had to be, and were, disposed of safely."

from Caballus et Caballarius in Medieval Warfare

On the subject of water and sewers, I was at Rievaulx Abbey this week.  The Cistercians had a bit of a reputation for water management and Rievaulx has a system that brings in fresh water at the top, channels waste into a "Great Drain" that runs under the abbey, including the output of the latrines but also the fulling and tannery operations out the bottom of the site.  This foul water was then channeled into the mill pond (recorded as stinking) before being returned to the river Rye for the people of Helmsley to use a couple of miles down stream. I bet a few blunt comments were directed at the monks by the townsfolk.

[Chris]

Fixed the embarrassing typo. Appropriately enough, I muttered "oh sh#$"    upon discovering the error.

[Imperial Dave]

 

[Nick Harbud]

The question of poo and its impact upon military camps was one of those unresolved discussions that I had with the late Patrick Waterson.  Essentially, my arguement used 19^th century British Army guidelines as described by Garnet Wolseley for the area and approximate layout of a military camp on the grounds that this is what they discovered was needed to prevent outbreaks of typhoid, cholera, dysentry and sundry other debilitating ailments.  Patrick, of course, held to view that whatever was written in the ancient texts, even if it described much smaller camp areas for equivalent numbers of troops, must have been what was used.

There are a couple of ways that one can reconcile the two positions.

• Roman camp descriptions generally make little mention of non-combatants, wagons, draught or pack animals and food-on-the-hoof livestock that accompanied the fighting soldiers, whereas the Wolseley layouts explicitly show where they were billeted.  Note that all Roman armies also tended to be accompanied by a motley group of traders and entertainers providing comforts for the troops.  These were definitely not allotted space within the camp walls.
• The Roman army was either a lot cleaner than later ones and therefore less prone to mass outbreaks of disease.  (I don't believe this - it took time to construct bath houses.)
• The Romans were more tolerant of losing soldiers through disease and/or had no idea of the relationship between camp density and infection rates.
• Normally, not all the troops, animals and hangers-on lived within the camp walls.  Instead, they would be billeted loosely outside the fortified enclosure and only drawn inside upon the approach of hostile forces.  For example, Cicero's camp during the attacks by the Euberones.

Some of the above also apply to towns and cities.  Sundry historians note that European cities only started their modern expansion following the introduction to the masses of cheap tea, which required drinking water to be boiled in its preparation.  Up until this point, frequent outbreaks of disease tended to impose a maximum size upon a conurbation.

[Erpingham]

I recall Nick recommending Wolsey's book.  If you haven't seen it, there is a copy https://archive.org/details/soldierspocketbookfs1874/mode/2up .  It is amazingly detailed.  The section on camps starts on p.158.

[Imperial Dave]

but who is the camp commandant...?