Eight Things That Would Surprise Most People about Life in the Ancient World

There are a whole lot of things that would surprise most people about what life was like in ancient times. As historians sometimes say, “The past is a foreign country.” When reading about the past, we learn about people whose lives were, in many ways, utterly different from our own. Here are a few facts about life in the ancient world that would probably instantly shock a modern person travelling into the past.

How few people there were

The very largest cities in antiquity would barely even register on the maps today. It is estimated by modern scholars that the entire region of Attica, which includes the city of Athens, probably only had between 250,000 and 300,000 people in the fifth century BC when Athens was at its height. The city of Rome at its height in antiquity probably only had between one to two million people, which is fewer people than the Indianapolis metropolitan area has today.

For comparison, the municipality of Athens, Greece today has a population of roughly 664,046—more than twice the number of people that lived in all of Attica in the fifth century BC. The Athens metropolitan area has a population of roughly 3.781 million people according to the latest census records.

The city of Rome, Italy currently has a population of around 2.873 million people. The city of Istanbul, Turkey currently has a population of around 15.07 million people. There are certainly far more people alive today than were ever alive at any given time in antiquity and our cities are correspondingly much more densely populated.

ABOVE: Photograph of part of the modern city of Athens, Greece, including the Akropolis. Athens has at least twice as many people today as all of Attica did in the fifth century BC.

The different sounds

We live in a world that is filled with all sorts of noises from machines of all kinds. If you live in the city, you probably hear traffic, machines, and all sorts of background noise at all hours. Even if you live in the middle of a field somewhere with no one else around as I have lived for most of my life, you probably still hear the sound of your air conditioner or heating unit.

In the ancient world, they did not have any of the machines that we have today that make so much noise. Instead, the noises they heard all the time were noises that most people today are less accustomed to. If you lived in the city, you would have heard the sounds of people talking and walking by out in the streets and probably the occasional noises of livestock.

If you lived in the country, you would have heard frogs croaking, insects chirping, birds singing, horses and donkeys braying, cattle mooing, and so forth. We tend not to hear all those sounds nowadays because they either are not around or are drowned out by the sounds of all our machines.

ABOVE: Tondo from a Lakonian black-figure kylix dating to c. 550 – c. 530 BC depicting a rider on a horse surrounded by different kinds of birds. People in ancient times heard very different sounds than we are accustomed to.

How dark it was at night

Today we are all accustomed to having electric lights. We have them in all our homes. We even have street lights and security lights outside. No matter where you go, there is almost always light pollution of some kind. In ancient times, though, there were no electric lights at all. As William Manchester put it in the title of his bestselling book, the ancients lived in “a world lit only by fire.”

At night in ancient times, the world would have been shrouded in darkness. The only sources of light would have been the hearth, if you had one, or an oil lamp. An oil lamp cannot burn nearly as brightly as a modern electric light, so things were inevitably always quite dark. Fuel for fires and oil lamps could also get expensive.

References to how dark it was at night and how the darkness affected everyday life abound in ancient Greek and Roman texts. For instance, the comedy The Clouds, written by the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BC) and first performed at the City Dionysia in 423 BC, opens with a scene early in the morning, about an hour or so before dawn, of a father named Strepsiades, who has stayed up all night worrying about his debts, waiting anxiously for the sun to rise so he can get to business going over his accounts.

Of course, as a result of the fact that there was less light, there was also less light pollution, meaning people in ancient times usually had a much clearer view of the stars and constellations than people typically do today. This may explain why there are so many stories in ancient mythologies about the stars and constellations.

ABOVE: Photograph of an assortment of ancient Greek and Roman oil lamps. In ancient times, oil lamps like these were among the few sources of light that were available.

The massive age gap between husbands and wives

Women in ancient Mediterranean cultures typically married in their mid-teenaged years, shortly after puberty. Typically, they seem to have married between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. Men, on the other hand, typically married in their early 30s. This meant that the groom was usually at least twice the bride’s age, sometimes even older.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BC) states in his Politics 1335a that the ideal age for a bride is eighteen years old, but that the ideal age for a groom is thirty-seven. Just imagine what it must have been like for a woman in antiquity to have to marry at such a young age to a man often fifteen to twenty years older than herself.

Even wider age gaps were not at all uncommon. The great Roman orator Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC) married his second wife Publilia in either 46 or 45 BC when he was around sixty years old and she was barely even a teenager. This marriage was extremely short-lived and it is thought that Cicero probably only did it because he desperately needed the money from Publilia’s dowry in order to pay back the dowry for his first wife Terentia, whom he had recently divorced.

The bride virtually never had any say in who she married. Instead, marriages were negotiated between the groom and the bride’s parents. At least among the upper classes, marriage was normally seen as something along the lines of a business transaction; for most upper-class people, marriage does not seem to have been something they usually did for love.

ABOVE: Detail from a late fourth-century AD Roman marble sarcophagus depicting a husband and wife holding hands. In ancient Greece and Rome, women typically married in their mid-teenaged years to men in their early thirties.

The smell

You may have guessed that this one was coming. Contrary to popular culture, people in ancient times did, in fact, bathe regularly. Nonetheless, in most ancient cultures, they did bathe less often than we typically do today. To the noses of most modern westerners, many people in antiquity probably would have stunk.

Despite personal hygiene not being too bad, public hygiene was generally quite terrible—often remarkably so. All the cities in ancient times probably would have stunk. Especially in early times, many cities did not have sewage systems or garbage collection and refuse was simply dumped out in the streets.

By the fifth century BC, ancient Athens did have at least some waste management regulations in place. Most wastewater in Athens, however, seems to have drained into cesspools rather than into sewers. By the time of the Roman Empire, most cities did have sewers, but this does not mean cities were clean.

ABOVE: Photograph of a Roman sewer from Cologne, Germany

The widespread acceptability of infanticide

Some methods of birth control and abortion did exist in the ancient world. Most of the methods that existed, however, were of at best questionable effectiveness and many of them were very dangerous for the woman. There was no widely-known method that was both safe and reliable.

The anonymous ancient Greek medical treatise On the Nature of the Child, which dates to the late fifth century BC and is traditionally attributed to the Greek doctor Hippokrates of Kos, describes in chapter 13 how an enslaved woman who was owned by one of the author’s female relatives came to the author seeking to abort a six-day-old embryo and he instructed her to jump up and down, kicking her heels against her buttocks, to induce a deliberate miscarriage. The treatise claims that this method actually worked, but I would not recommend for anyone to try it today.

As I previously mentioned in this article I published in May 2019, if a woman was pregnant with a child that was unwanted, arguably the safest and most reliable way to deal with it was to wait until the child was born and then kill it. Although it was usually considered an atrocity to kill an infant with one’s own hands, at least in ancient Greece and Rome, it was considered completely morally and socially acceptable for parents to simply abandon an unwanted newborn infant somewhere to die. The idea was that the infant had a chance that someone could find it and it could survive, so, if it died on its own, it was the gods’ doing and the parents were not responsible for it. This was, unfortunately, very common.

Sadly, parents seem to have been much more likely to abandon female infants than male. The ancient Greek comic playwright Poseidippos of Kassandreia (lived c. 316 – c. 250 BC) makes a morbidly exaggerated comment on the higher rate of female infanticide in his Fragment 11 (Kock). The fragment reads:

“Everybody raises a son even if he is poor,
but exposes a daughter even if he is rich.”

In the first century BC, a mercenary named Ilarion wrote a letter on papyrus in the Greek language to his pregnant wife in Egypt, telling her that, if she gave birth to a son, she should rear it, but, if she gave birth to a daughter, she should abandon it to die. This letter has survived in fragmentary form and was excavated by the British archaeologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt around the turn of the twentieth century in the trash heap of the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchos. The letter is published as Papyrus Oxyrhynchus IV 744.

The rise of Christianity in late antiquity brought an end to the social acceptability of infanticide in the Greco-Roman world, but, even though it was no longer socially acceptable, the practice of abandoning newborn infants to die seems to have remained fairly commonplace up until the invention of safe and reliable methods of contraception and abortion.

ABOVE: Detail from a mid-fifth-century BC Attic red-figure amphora painting of the shepherd Phorbas carrying the infant Oidipous, whose parents, the king and queen of Thebes, had ordered a servant to leave in the wilderness to die of exposure

The widespread practice of animal sacrifice

Although human sacrifice was extremely rare in the ancient Mediterranean world, animal sacrifice was extremely common and was considered an integral part of most cultures’ religious practices. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the gods demanded animal sacrifices because they loved the scent of the burning flesh and that, if people did not offer sacrifices to the gods, the gods would be angry.

In general, in the ancient Mediterranean world, larger animals were usually considered more precious and therefore better sacrifices. Thus, you might sacrifice a rooster as a small offering. As a bit of a larger offering, you might sacrifice a pig or a goat or a lamb. An ox was seen as one of the best possible sacrifices, because oxen were, of course, enormous and very expensive. Certain animals were seen as sacred to certain deities and were seen as more suitable offerings for those particular deities. For instance, in ancient Greece, doves were frequently sacrificed to the goddess Aphrodite, but they were not sacrificed to any other deities.

After the sacrifice was performed, the non-edible parts of the animal would be burned to the gods. The meat from the slaughtered animal would usually be cooked and eaten. Often there would be a feast after a large sacrifice for people to eat all the meat. It is a recurring joke in ancient Greek comedies that the humans get the good part of the sacrifice; whereas the gods got all the parts that were not good for anything.

Today, we no longer practice ritual sacrifice, so the idea of sacrificing a living animal to the gods by butchering it might seem very strange to a lot of people. Of course, we still butcher animals today; we just don’t ritually sacrifice them when we do it.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 510 – c. 500 BC, depicting two men ritually sacrificing a pig to Demeter

The number of altars, temples, and shrines

On a related note, in ancient Greece and Rome, there were altars, temples, and shrines everywhere. We know this partly from archaeological evidence and partly from the abundant references to altars and shrines in surviving ancient texts. In the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 17:22-23, for instance, Paul the apostle is portrayed as commenting on the astonishing number of altars and shrines in Athens. Here is the passage, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.'”

It is unlikely that the historical Paul ever said this, but the observation that the ancient Athenians had many altars to many different gods is certainly correct. The Greco-Roman world was one in which the presence of religion could be seen everywhere. In many ways, the world of the Greeks and Romans would remind a modern time-traveler more of eastern countries like India than western Christian countries.

The scholar James J. O’Donnell gives a rather memorable description of what the cities of the Roman Empire would have looked like on page three of his popular history book Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity:

“Altars in homes, shrines on street corners, and public ceremonies in the open air made ancient Rome more akin to Kathmandu during festival season than anything we could imagine in modern Europe.”

ABOVE: Attic black-figure amphora dating to between c. 550 and 540 BC, found in the Etruscan city of Vulci in Italy, depicting a priestess and three men preparing at an altar to sacrifice a bull to Athena