I’ve come across a large number of questions on Quora asking how people in ancient times managed to survive during the winter without modern central heating. It seems that many people are just outright baffled by the very idea of people living through the cold of winter without central heating.
The answer to the question of how people survived is fairly straightforward, although there are a few surprises. For instance, some people may not have known this, but there are still people living in relatively cold environments today without central heating. Also, even more surprisingly, some wealthy aristocrats in ancient Rome actually did have a kind of early form of central heating system in their villas.
Contemporary people living without central heating in cold environments
Believe it or not, there are still people today who live in cold climates without modern central heating. For instance, I’m from a town in northern Indiana. In January and February, the temperatures can often get well below freezing.
I graduated from high school a couple years ago. During my senior year of high school, I had a friend who told me about how her father’s house didn’t have any central heating or air conditioning at all. She told me that, in the winter, her bedroom would often be twenty degrees Fahrenheit or colder, with ice all over the window.
I was quite astonished to hear this at the time because, although I had already known that many people in town did not have air conditioning, I had assumed that everyone in Indiana at least had heating. I asked her how she and her father kept warm in the winter without central heating.
She said that her father’s house had been built back in the nineteenth century before heating or air conditioning were invented. She said that her father didn’t have a lot of money and it was much cheaper and easier for them to simply make do without heating or air conditioning than it would have been for them to have had those things installed.
She told me that they had a small gas heater that they kept in the living room downstairs that could generate enough heat for the room, but that was the only heating they had. They tried to keep doors in the house open so the heat could spread throughout the house. She also mentioned that they always used “lots of blankets” during the winter.
How people in ancient times made it through the winter
People in ancient times coped with cold temperatures in a similar way to how my friend from high school did it. They didn’t have gas space heaters, but, during the winter, they would almost always keep a fire blazing on the hearth. On especially cold days, people could gather around the hearth for warmth. It was also common for people in ancient times to use blankets and furs for warmth. The colder it was, the more blankets they used.
People who lived in areas that got especially cold during the winter, such as northern Europe, normally built their homes with thick, well-insulated walls to keep in as much warmth as possible. They knew that winters were cold, so they built their homes accordingly.
People in ancient times also adjusted their clothes according to the weather. This may come as a surprise to many people, but even people in ancient Greece and Rome didn’t just wear short tunics all year round. Greece may be warmer than, say, Norway, but it can still get quite chilly in Greece during the winter. The average low temperature for the city of Athens, Greece, in the month of January is 7 °C (44.6 °F).
The Athenian historian Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) portrays his mentor, the philosopher Socrates, as referencing the practice of wearing warmer clothing during the winter and cooler clothing during the summer in his Memorabilia or Memoirs of Socrates 1.6.6. Socrates says, on page 96 of the Penguin edition, translated by Hugh Tredennick and revised by Robin Waterfield:
“As for cloaks, you know that people change them because of cold or hot weather, and they wear shoes to prevent things from hurting their feet and so impeding their movements. Well, have you ever known me to stay indoors more than anybody else on account of the cold, or compete with anyone for the shade on account of the heat, or fail to walk wherever I wanted because my feet were sore? Don’t you know that those who are physically weakest by nature, if they train with a particular end in view, become better able to achieve that end, with less effort to themselves, than the strongest athletes who neglect their training?”
During the winter, many people in ancient Greece probably wore a kind of long cloak made from a single large rectangular piece of heavy woolen fabric known as a himation. This kind of cloak usually covered the body down to the ankles. People of all ages, social classes, and genders wore it. It could be worn over another garment or on its own with nothing under it.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing two statues next to each other in the House of Kleopatra on the island of Delos depicting a woman (left) and a man (right), both wearing the himation
The himation could also be wrapped around the body like a blanket. Depictions of Achilleus mourning for Patroklos in ancient Greek pottery sometimes show him completely wrapped tightly in his himation from head to toe to signify his mourning. It is easy to imagine that people might have wrapped themselves up in a similar manner for warmth on exceptionally cold days in winter.
ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dated to c. 500 BCE depicting Achilleus seated on the chair wrapped tightly in a himation. He’s actually in mourning for Patroklos, but you could imagine someone wrapping themselves up in a cloak like this on an exceptionally cold day for warmth.
Ancient Roman central heating
In the Roman Empire, some buildings, such as bathhouses and villas belonging to extremely wealthy aristocrats, did have an early form of central heating system, known as a hypocaust. Hypocausts may have been originally invented by the Greeks, but they only became more commonly used during the time of the Roman Empire.
A hypocaust operated on a fairly simple mechanism; basically, heat from a wood furnace was conducted through empty spaces underneath the floor of the building and into rooms through pipes in the walls, which were known as “caliducts.”
The hypocaust, however, was an extremely rare and expensive system that was never available to the majority of people in the Roman Empire. The vast majority of people who lived in the Roman Empire lived in buildings without hypocausts.
After the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, hypocausts generally fell out of use in most parts of western Europe for about a thousand years. The technology was never really lost, but, in most places, the system ceased to be used. Hypocaust-like systems continued to be used in the eastern Empire, in the Arab world, and in parts of Spain.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a ruined hypocaust from a Roman villa at La Olmeda in Pedrosa de la Vega, Spain
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a ruined hypocaust from a Roman villa at Vieux-la-Romaine in France
This is an excellent article, as usual, but I’d like to add one thing: until very recently, people of the same sex shared beds, both for warmth and for companionship. This was normal, not just for the poor (who often had only one bed for the entire family), but also for aristocrats. Even people who could afford separate beds or bedrooms often preferred to share beds with someone else, to stay warm or just to talk.
I have also heard that people in northern climates went into semi-hibernation during winter. True?
No. Humans can’t go into hibernation. It is likely that people in ancient times would have slept more during the winter, though, since there would have been fewer tasks and chores for them to do. Most people in ancient times were farmers and you can’t farm crops during the winter if you live in a climate where winters are severe. With no crops to tend to and fewer tasks to do, I imagine people probably would have slept more.
Also, as I discuss in this article I wrote about surprising facts about life in the ancient world, people in ancient times had extremely limited sources of light, meaning their daily activities were greatly affected by the rising and setting of the sun. Since the nights are much longer during the winter, it is likely that people would have spent more time asleep.
Spending more time asleep, though, is different from going into hibernation.