Ancient tips for health and happiness

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Ancient Tips for Health and Happiness" Summary

Release Date: June 17, 2025

---

Introduction

In the episode titled "Ancient Tips for Health and Happiness," hosted by James Osborne and featuring Claire Bubb, Assistant Professor of Classical Literature and Science at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, listeners are taken on an insightful journey into the health and wellness practices of ancient Greece and Rome. Drawing from her book "How to Eat: An Ancient Guide for Healthy Living," Claire explores the intricate relationship between diet, lifestyle, and well-being as understood by Greco-Roman thinkers.

---

Food and Diet in Ancient Greece and Rome

Claire Bubb begins by addressing the perennial issue of dietary advice, noting its presence both in ancient times and today. She states:

"With social media, a lot of us today are bombarded by constant and often contradictory advice on what to eat and what not to eat. I assumed this was a modern phenomenon, but it might not be." ([03:18])

The discussion highlights that, contrary to popular belief, ancient cultures were equally swamped with diverse and often conflicting dietary recommendations. This lack of consensus stemmed from variations in time, geography, and differing philosophical and medical perspectives.

Geographical Influences:

Claire explains how geography played a pivotal role in shaping dietary preferences:

"In ancient Greece, barley was a staple because wheat didn't thrive near Athens. Conversely, Rome's fertile lands favored wheat, leading to a preference for bread over barley." ([05:13])

This shift not only influenced the types of food consumed but also sparked debates among physicians and philosophers about the best dietary practices.

Understanding Health and Nutrition:

The ancient Greeks and Romans possessed a rudimentary but insightful understanding of nutrition and its impact on health. Claire elucidates their perspective on digestion:

"They believed that food becomes blood, the building block of the body. Thus, the qualities of food directly influenced the body's health and composition." ([07:18])

While lacking modern scientific concepts like macronutrients, their observational approach allowed them to recognize the nourishing and humoral properties of various foods.

---

Views on Specific Foods

Lentils and Social Class:

A significant portion of the episode delves into the contentious views surrounding lentils:

"Lentils are an economic marker—affordable and accessible, making them an ideal food for philosophers who emphasize simplicity and austerity." ([13:11])

Conversely, medical practitioners of the time warned against an overreliance on lentils, citing potential nutritional imbalances. This dichotomy reflects broader societal attitudes linking food choices to social status and intellectual ideals.

Basil's Reputation:

Basil, a commonly used herb today, was viewed with suspicion by some ancient physicians:

"Galen wrote that basil is extremely unwholesome and should be avoided because it rots easily, potentially harboring harmful creatures like worms or scorpions." ([17:59])

This aversion likely stemmed from observations of basil's decomposition and the prevalent belief in spontaneous generation.

---

Lifestyle Habits: Exercise and Daily Routines

Ancient texts provide a comprehensive guide to maintaining health through daily routines and exercise.

Structured Daily Regimens:

One notable passage from Hippocrates advocates for a highly structured daily routine:

"Any stout people who wish to become thin should do all exercise in a state of fasting... They should take only one meal a day, avoid bathing, sleep on a firm mattress, and walk around in the nude as often as possible." ([22:50])

Claire connects these ancient practices to modern trends like intermittent fasting and the importance of personalized health regimens.

Moderation in Exercise:

The ancient physicians emphasized moderation:

"Everything in moderation. Don't do anything extreme or sudden. Find the middle ground that's right for you." ([35:50])

This principle underpins both ancient and contemporary approaches to exercise, highlighting its timeless relevance.

---

Views on Sex and Health

Sexual activity was intricately linked to health in ancient medical thought. Claire explains:

"Sex was seen as a potent activity that expended a lot of energy. Regulations were advised based on individual constitutions and seasonal factors." ([31:10])

For instance, Celsus recommended against daytime sex and advised moderation during certain seasons to prevent the depletion of vital fluids.

---

Modern Relevance and Insights

Despite the vast temporal gap, many ancient health practices resonate with today's wellness trends. Claire notes:

"The Hippocratic approach is very individualized, much like modern personalized medicine. People today are still exploring how diet and exercise impact their well-being, similar to ancient practices." ([24:42])

Additionally, the intentionality towards health maintenance, driven by limited ancient medical capabilities, parallels today's proactive health measures.

---

Conclusion

The episode underscores the enduring nature of health and wellness concerns, revealing that while the scientific understanding has evolved, many foundational ideas remain consistent. Claire Bubb's exploration of Greco-Roman health practices offers valuable insights into how ancient wisdom can inform and inspire modern health paradigms.

Notable Quote:

"The big takeaway is an intentionality about how am I exercising, how am I eating, what am I eating. How are my daily choices keeping me healthy and happy?" ([36:12])

This emphasizes the universal and timeless commitment to personal health through mindful daily practices.

---

For full access to more episodes and exclusive content, visit HistoryExtra.com.

Transcript

[State Farm Advertiser]

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Knowing you could be saving money for the things you really want is a great feeling. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state.

[State Farm Agent]

Coverage options are selected by the customer.

[State Farm Advertiser]

Availability, amount of discounts and savings and.

[State Farm Agent]

Eligibility vary by state.

[Claire Bubb]

This episode is brought to you by polestar. There's only one true way to experience the all electric luxury SUV Polestar 3 and that's to take a test drive. It can go from 0 to 60 in as little as 4.8 seconds with the dynamic handling of a sports car, but to truly understand how it commands the road, you need to be behind the wheel up to 350 miles of range. The 3D surround sound system by Bowers and Wilkins. It's all something you have to experience to believe. So book your Test drive for Polestar 3 today at polestar.com.

[Lowes Advertiser]

Craftsman days are here at Lowes with big savings on the tools you need right now. Get a free select tool when you buy the Craftsman V22 pack battery kit. Whether it's the backyard, the bathroom or beyond, Craftsman has the tools to help you power through and get the project done right because diying is unpredictable. But your tools shouldn't be. Shop Craftsman at Lowe's today valid through 618 while supplies last. Selection varies by location.

[State Farm Advertiser]

Summer is coming right to your door with Target Circle360 get all the season go tos at home with same day delivery snacks for the pool party delivered sun lotion and towels for a beach day delivered pillows and lights to deck out the deck that too delivered just when you want them summer your way quick and easy. Join now and get all the summer fun delivered right to your home with targets. Circle 360 membership required Subject to terms and conditions Applies to orders over $35.

[James Osborne]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. The science of health, well being and living a long life is one of the most contested and controversial topics of the modern age. And and it was no different for the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. From what you should eat to how you should exercise and when you should and shouldn't have sex, these cultures developed their own highly specific set of rules to live by to maximize health and happiness. In this episode, Claire Bubb examines the logic behind these rules alongside James Osborne and reveals what insights they can give us into the Greco Roman Mindset.

[Claire Bubb]

Clare, your book is a compilation of translations from writers and thinkers from ancient Greece and Rome, all on the subject of healthy living. I wanted to start with food and with something that I think will be really relatable for a lot of listeners. You write in the book that especially with social media, a lot of us today are bombarded by constant and often contradictory advice on what to eat and what not to eat. I assumed this was a modern phenomenon, but it might not be.

Yeah, I think this is a surprising thing about thinking about antiquity. You know, it feels so distant, and it's over 2,000 years ago. It feels like, you know, could not be more remote from us, but actually we have so much material and so many voices from this period. And you can really embed yourself in some places and sometimes in what it was like to live there. And I think food is really one of those. Because this is something, you know, it's a daily human activity. All of us eat food every day, and we all have to pick which foods to eat, assuming we have the luxury of choosing. And so people think about that, and we've got doctors and philosophers and all sorts of people talking about daily food choices and what you should do and what you shouldn't do. And there's lots of advice circulating and lots of really contradictory advice circulating.

Yeah. And you've got all these voices in the book, and all those voices come through differently with their own ideas. And just as you say, a lot of those ideas are contradictory, aren't they? There isn't a single unified consensus in the Greco Roman world about what we should be eating, is there?

Yeah. And part of this, you know, it's easy for us from the perspective of the modern world to say, oh, yeah, the Greco Roman world, sure, the past, it's one thing. But of course, in the book, I draw from over 700 years of authors and thinkers. And if you think about what people were eating 700 years ago, you know, it's not exactly the same. Right. So both from a time perspective, you get a lot of variation. You get changes in ideas, scientific ideas, and sort of fads and even available foods. And from a geographic perspective, we've got people in ancient Greece, we've got people in Italy. Once you get the Italian Empire, you've got this huge range of new types of foods that are available that grow places that you couldn't used to get before. So you get a lot of just substantive variety in what's available, and then also massive varieties of opinions because we're talking with different people. Who have different theories, and theories change over time. And even in the same time period, two people could radically disagree about things.

I think that perhaps we're all guilty of falling into the trap of assuming these ancient cultures just fit into, like, this monolithic block of ideas. But actually, that's a really good reminder that these are spread over really vast geographical distances. And as you say, this is across a really substantial time frame as well. Can you map on how the differences in geography specifically are changing the way that these thinkers are considering diet and food?

I mean, there are tons of examples of this. So when we look at the earlier authors that I pull out in the book are Greek authors from 5th, 4th century Greece. And really focusing on the place, this is an area where it's kind of hard to grow wheat. Wheat doesn't thrive in wet environments. So it's much easier to grow barley near Athens than it is to grow wheat. And as a result, barley is a big food. So when you read ancient Greek dietetic texts, it's all about the amazing things barley can do for you. Fast forward and move our pawn on the map. And once we're in Rome and we're talking to even Greek doctors living in Rome, wheat grows great in Italy. It's a beautiful place to grow wheat. And wheat is easier to turn into bread. Barley doesn't have gluten in it, so it's hard to turn into a real loaf of bread. And once you can start having bread, people are much less enthusiastic about eating barley. And so you get all these Romans saying, what is with these crazy old Greek doctors who say that barley is what you should eat because bread is so much better? And so. And that's just one example of the kinds of just practical, logistical things that can shape what people think of as good food.

Let's take a step back and look at the intersection between nutrition and health. The ancient Greeks and Romans were clearly aware that these two things are indeed linked, but they weren't aware of the concepts that we know now, like macronutrients or micronutrients or polyphenols or antioxidants. So how were they assessing whether or not something was healthy? What categories were they using?

So this is a great question. The thing that drew me to this topic was thinking about how do they understand how digestion works and how food works and why we eat food in the first place and how it affects our bodies? Their theories are certainly very different than ours, but they have very detailed theories. So basically, I'm going to do a little bit of A deep dive for you here. I'm going to generalize broadly, but I'm going to give you sort of the most common, generally agreed upon approach, which is that essentially when I eat food, or any of us eats foods, it goes into our digestive system, we break it down. The bits that are useless, we will excrete, but anything in that food that could potentially be relevant to our bodies, we will digest and turn into blood. So your food becomes your blood, and then your blood actually becomes any part of your body that it needs to. It's sort of the building block of your body. So, so say my liver has been working really hard and it's kind of worn down and eroded a little bit. I need more liver material. And so my blood will actually go to my liver and become new liver. Same thing with muscles. If I'm wearing down my muscles, because I'm using them all the time, the blood will go to the muscles, it'll build new muscle. So really the big picture is you really, truly are what you eat. So the food that I'm eating, I am breaking down and I'm turning into my body. So therefore, it becomes really important to think about, well, what are the qualities of this food that we're eating and what kind of body are they going to make, right? Am I going to get a different kind of flesh if I eat one food or a different food? And so then they start focusing on the effects of food and how food change your body. So while you're right, they don't talk about, oh, this has lots of protein, or there's lots of vitamin C in this, or, you know, you're not getting enough fats in your diet or whatever. They are thinking about the qualities in food. Some foods are more nourishing than others, which I think is pointing to what we think of as protein. You know, what builds more muscle. Some foods are drying. Some foods have really good humors in them so that they've got good juices in them and that lead to good blood versus bad blood that might make you unhealthy. So I think there are parallel ideas that are expressed with different words, observing some of the same things, but within a totally different theoretical construct of how food and nutrition works.

What surprises me is that so much of that kind of seems intuitively correct and actually like there are grains of truth in a lot of what you just outlined. With regards to their thinking, what do you think they did actually get right, and what do you think that actually they were just completely, completely off base.

With.

The cool Thing about it is how intuitive it is, right? We eat food today, we're still eating food. You can understand if you eat too much, you feel full and kind of gross the next day. There's some foods that are sort of refreshing and some foods that really sit heavily in your stomach and are harder to digest. And they're experiencing the same things. And it's a very empirical approach to how all of this works and how health works. So I think it's not surprising. These are intelligent people who are really paying close attention. It's not surprising that they're noticing things that we're also noticing. And so really what they get wrong is in how you explain these things that we observe. And this is part of just the methodology that they have. Really, all they can do is explain and kind of think about it. They don't have microscopes, they don't have the ability to send things to a lab and figure out what their composed of. So they have to have their own way of thinking about this. Now they do think about these things, so they think about composition, but they break it down into the four elements, right? Earth, air, fire and water. So what do they have in them? And I think to us that seems like both in some ways intuitive because we like to think about the molecular composition of food, but also it's crazy for us to think about, oh, there's little bits of fire in our food. That's not how we express expressed. Now we do talk about calories, which are heat. We can convert calories into heat. They think about it in a way that I think when you really boil down exactly what they're saying feels just odd and difficult for us to imagine.

With all these different foods they're talking about. It does seem that there are still these recurrent themes that they keep coming back to when they're considering the impact of what they're eating. And one of those I was kind of surprised by. They constantly mention flatulence and gas and about whether something promotes or helps with flatulence. What's going on there?

Well, it's very noticeable, right? If something causes gas, that's going to have social implications and you're going to notice it. And I think for them it is indicating that there are different ways the digestive process can go. And either could be going really well or maybe something is a little off. And so if most foods don't give you gas, but then you eat a bunch of beans and suddenly the flatulence is out of control, that's going to suggest to you that beans are doing something in your digestive tract that other foods aren't, and maybe there's a problem. And it's also air, one of the four elements. Right. So thinking about things that seem to produce a lot of air, why is there so much air in my digestive tract? Maybe that's not good. So this is. It's an easily observable thing that requires thought and consideration. So something that we don't focus on as much. But for them, this is like, how do you know if you're digesting properly? Well, how does it sound? They also talk belly gurgling all the time. You know, if your belly's making too many noises, then something's gone wrong.

I'd love to talk about some specific foods and I'd love to start with lentils. Now, I love lentils. They're a big part of my diet. But they seem to be generally, and there is some disagreement, but they seem genuinely to be quite frowned upon as quite a miserable food. Is this a kind of class based attitude driven by a kind of elitism? Because lentils are seen as more accessible working class food? Because on the flip side of that, these writers seem to unanimously love the more expensive pork and chicken, for example.

Yeah. So you can never exclude the social economic background that is shaping all of these ideas. You know, like we were talking about with barley, what is available to you and what people are eating is going to form the basis of what you think about as the good foods. So lentils are a fabulous case because. Exactly. They have this economic marker to them. They're very affordable, they're easy to eat. And so we get this interesting polarity where philosophical writers and we get a lot of philosophical dietetics, so philosophers talking about what you should eat and what makes you a good person, and it's kind of food for the soul instead of food for health. And so they pretty much universally say you shouldn't spend a lot of money on food and it's wrong to be decadent, it's wrong to be getting all these fancy exotic foods and we shouldn't be spending so much money. And the ideal diet really is whatever keeps you going. You just need food to be alive and keep you basically healthy and you shouldn't be eating extravagant things. So lentils then for them are like, yes, this is ideal diet because it means you're not spending a lot of mental or economic resources on pampering your body when you really should be thinking about your soul. So if you just do the bare minimum to keep yourself functional and healthy, then you're great doctors take a completely different take on it. And here again, this is part theoretical, part observational. It's not obvious exactly how they've landed on what they've landed on, but their view of lentils is that lentils are really bad for you. They're fine in moderation. But if you go all in on the lentil diet, like the philosophers are telling you to, you're going to get all these things building up and you're not going to get the right quality of nutrition and flesh in your body. And they believe that they lead to all sorts of issues because they have a very unusual balance. There's too much of some things and not enough of other things. And if that's all you eat, it's going to build up wrong in your body. So we have a sort of medical take that doesn't care so much about how expensive foods are. And then you get the philosophical take that's really focusing more on that.

[Shopify Advertiser]

If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. You know that purple shop pay button you see at checkout? The one that makes buying so incredibly easy? That's Shopify. And there's a reason so many businesses sell with it. Because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the U.S. sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com promo. Go to shopify.com promo in case you.

[State Farm Agent]

Haven'T heard, it's officially in Abercrombie Summer. The A and M vacation shop has everything on your packing mood board. I desperately need their new one piece, the A and F Marina. It's strapless, so flattering and paired with denim shorts will be my go to beach outfit this summer. Finally, your suitcase isn't complete without finding that dress. You know the one for the photo shoot. Abercrombie's boho dresses have that perfect beachy romantic look. Make it an Abercrombie summer shot. Their newest arrivals in store, online and in the app.

[Lowes Advertiser]

My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink. Then straight to the gym pre K pickup back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius. Gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits.

[Claire Bubb]

I'm ready.

[Lowes Advertiser]

Celsius Live Fit. Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate [e-mail].

[Claire Bubb]

So they're talking and they're thinking about health and diet. But also this is being tinted by economics, the kind of social perceptions of. Of food.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the doctors land in an interesting middle ground between these things, because they're not so obsessed with the economics as the philosophers are, because they're really thinking about, let's think about what's in this food and why it therefore affects the body the way it does. And so they're down on lentils, for sure, but they're equally down on crazy fancy foods. So there's all these gourmet fads, particularly around really fancy food. So we have this amazing cookbook book that survives from antiquity that's by a Greek cook who's working for really rich people and saying, how do you prepare flamingos? So you have this crazy food, how do you prepare it? And you also get doctors saying, no, no, no, that's ridiculous. That's gone too far in the other direction. So too much money is bad and too little money is bad. From the medical perspective, philosophers have a different take.

The Roman physician Galen, he writes about basil and says that it is extremely unwholesome and basically should be avoided at all costs. I was wondering if there's something about modern basil that's different from the basil that they were eating, because to me, modern basil seems quite nice and pleasant. Or was this just based on superstitions or something like that?

It's a great example. We get a couple different authors who tell us that basil's terrible. And the reason is because if you leave it out in the sun, you let it rot. Either worms or scorpions, depending who you talk to, will spontaneously generate from the basil. And so imagine then when you're digesting it, does that mean you get little, like, you know, tiny scorpions? So avoid at all costs. And I think, actually. So if you've ever had basil that you've ignored that, you pick. When it rots, it goes black and it smells vile. I mean, it's really gross. It goes from delicious to really pretty gross pretty quickly. And I think that's exactly what they're picking up on, that rotten base. Basil is foul. And it is the kind of thing, I guess we had a big clump of that insects might lay their eggs in and you would get things hatching out of. So I think they smell the decomposition of it and think, is it decomposing in my body? Is that what's happening when I eat it? We should avoid this at all costs. But, yeah, you could imagine someone observing something that led to this theory, because there is a pretty robust theory of spontaneous generation in antiquity. Surprisingly complex organisms, they think, can spontaneously generate from weird and nasty rotting things.

You mentioned the recipe book. I wanted to know if there are any recipes from this ancient Greco Roman tradition that you personally have tried and what your opinion of them is.

If so, there is a fabulous modern edition of this cookbook that is, it was published with directions for how you could cook these and with ideas for substitutions for things that are harder to find. I personally haven't actually done any of them literally that way, but some of them are remarkably just normal. So my favorite one is the recipe for ham. And this is the ham that I make for Christmas every year. Right. It's just boil a ham, and then you cut it in that classic score pattern so that you've got the crisscross on it, and then you put some yummy honey on it, and you put a nice pastry crust on it, and you bake it, and then you serve it with a pastry crust. This is totally recognizable, the kind of food that we make today. Some of them are crazy, but there definitely were some, particularly in the desserts that I want to try. There's some delicious baked apples with milk that just look. I mean, they look like baked apples with a little bit of a twist.

Yeah. On desserts, I think I've seen what are supposedly ancient Roman recipes for dates with pistachios and honey on top. And like, that just sounds absolutely, absolutely delicious to me. But then again, in the book, through your translation, you point to the fact that they were pretty down on fruit. And I wonder if that's also coming back to the component about preservation and whether or not something rots easily because there's a lot of sugar in, for example.

Yeah. Yeah. Fruit is pretty universally viewed with skepticism, and I think part of it is that it rots. So when Galen talks about peaches, he says these just decompose like crazy. And anyone who's tried to eat a peach at the perfect right moment, you know, you have a window about two hours before it just becomes gross. And so he says, look, it's also decomposing in your stomach, and it's causing everything else in there to decompose. So you need to be thoughtful about eating it. But also, very importantly, when he was a child, his father dictated his diet and said, well, you can only have this. You know, you only are allowed to have this one time a year kind of thing. You've got to be thoughtful about it. And then when he was a teenager, he and his friends just went crazy. He had these bad influence fruit loving friends and so they would go carousing and just gorge themselves on fruit when they were teenagers. And then he develops some sort of chronic infection which he links to the fruit eating that takes forever to heal from. And then he swears off fruit and his adult and says, my dad was right, I should never have done it. And so I think part of the hesitation around fruit has to do with cleanliness and that if we're not washing fruits or you're washing them in contaminated water, that is going to lead to a contaminated fruit that could indeed give you some sort of either short term or long term stomach upset.

The book isn't just about diet and I'd love to touch on some writing that you've translated on lifestyle habits more broadly. I'd just like to read out a very short passage that you translated from Hippocrates and then I'd love for you to unpack some of it. So he says any stout people who wish to become thin should do all exercise in a state of fasting. They should take their meals while breathing hard and not yet having cooled down. And they should drink diluted, not very cold wines before they eat that. You should prepare their dishes with sesame sauce and other similar sorts of seasonings. And these dishes should be high in fat so that they feel satiated after the smallest amount. Further, they should take only one meal a day, avoid bathing, sleep on a firm mattress and walk around in the nude as often as possible. Now that's just such a fascinating cocktail of ideas. Can you please examine some of the thinking and some of the ideas that are going into this and contributing to this kind of wild list of rules?

Yeah, that's one of my favourite passages. And I think the fun thing about reading this in the 21st century is we have people who are arguing for lots of these things, right? Intermittent fasting is a big thing. Now, the idea that you should eat high fat so that you're satiated and actually that that might help you lose weight if you just eat high fat meat, but less of it. So lots of these ideas are resonant and still things we're thinking about and playing with and trying to figure out how to use use. So the Hippocratic approach here is very individualized and I think this to me is the thing that ancient medicine can still really help us think through and help us be more aware of. They had a hugely individualized and hugely seasonal approach to life in general. If you're thinking about it From a medical perspective, right? So if you, as an individual feel that you are overweight and you want to lose weight, you're going to do one thing. And then immediately after this passage, he has the passage on the flip side, like, if you're underweight and you really want to bulk up and you'd rather be stronger and you want more mass, you have to do these other things. So everyone has their own goals. There's no sort of all adults age 30 should do this. And so this specific set of goals really pulls on how this author thinks the body works. So the stuff about you have to do all exercise in a state of fasting, and then you eat while you're still, you know, panting and all sweaty and hot is because he has a very surprisingly caloric understanding of how burning food works, that you want to be exercising when there's nothing in you, because then you have to use up bits of your body that are already there and you're going to wear down what you already have. Whereas if you have food, it'll just make you digest the food faster rather than kind of digesting your body. Right. So when you get the worldview that they're thinking this through, it makes total sense why they would think it would be this way. And the fascinating thing is that it still resonates with some things that we're thinking about and trying.

That's what struck me, is the amount of the advice that is similar to advice that you'd see today. Very little comes from a consensus, but a lot of the advice that you see on social media and places like that kind of resonates with what he's talking about. But then as much as he's talking about fasted cardia or intermittent fasting or one meal a day, he's then talking about walk around in the nude as much as possible. So there's some grains that are definitely relatable, but then there's stuff that I can't make sense of.

Yeah, no, this is the joy of these texts, Right? Some of it is 100%. Yes. Wow. Oh, my goodness. I can't believe someone 2,000 years ago was thinking the same thing. And then some of it is like, what? Why would it be that walking around naked helps you lose weight? What is that thinking here? I think probably it has to do with evaporation, that it lets you sort of more stuff can get out of your body more easily. But it. It's also. This is a culture where they did a lot of naked exercise. They were more down with nudity. Than we are as a culture. And so I think this would have, they would have taken this in their stride. Whereas to us it's like, okay, I'm with you, I'm with you. What? This makes no sense.

So that already helps to explain it for me a bit. Diacles. He also has a very rigid, step by step guide to how someone should go about their day in a health orientated manner. And it's so specific. It begins when you wake up and it ends when you go to sleep. Could you outline some of that for us?

Yeah. The Diocles passage is amazing. And this is him saying, all right, if your only goal in life is, is to be as healthy as possible, I'm going to walk you through almost minute by minute how you achieve this. And I'll go through it in a second. But I think one thing it really highlights. We were talking a little about economics. The only person who could possibly do this is someone who doesn't have or need a job that is just rich enough that they can devote all of their resources to maximizing health. Because he actually says, I guess if you have to go to work, you could maybe do an hour of work now, but, but ideally you wouldn't even do that. All you're going to think about is health, otherwise you can't be healthy. So he basically starts you off in the morning. You've got your morning stretch routine. When you get out of bed, you've got your moisturizing and your facial cleansing, you've got to brush your teeth, you've got to comb your hair. I mean, all the day to day stuff that we all do every day, but maybe don't have recommended to us by our doctors. And then he goes through a series of stretching, relaxing, bathing, lots of walking, a nice gentle exercise. He talks through exactly, exactly when you should have meals and how big they should be. And this will change according to the season. So in the winter you're going to do one thing, in the summer you're going to do another. Do you have a big lunch, do you skip lunch, do you take a nap after lunch? All of this is going to be variable from person to person and time of year to time of year. And he talks through exactly what kinds of foods you should be eating and what times of year you should be eating, the specific kinds of foods. And then when you should go to sleep and do you go to sleep immediately after you eat, do you take a walk first? All of it is very carefully modulated so that you can be as healthy as possible.

You mentioned something that I wanted to pick up on, which is that this passage in particular, it seems to be a real luxury and almost out of touch with how people actually live their lives. So the bit I love the most and I would love to incorporate into my own routine is when he says, you should, once you wake up, you should stay in bed for a short period of time and just kind of contemplate the day and let yourself be awake, but remaining in bed for a little while. So how much of this advice is actually filtering down to the average Greco Roman citizen? Is this just for the elites or is it just the actual writers and thinkers kind of just working these things out for themselves?

Yeah, I think it's a mix of all of those options, really. And so Diocles doesn't get into it as much. He does have the. I guess if you have a job, you have to skip this part because you should probably go do your job. But he doesn't deal with those people at all. But then we have other authors who do give us sort of dual version. So there's a Hippocratic text that says, okay, most people, I know you can't all spend forever talking about health. So this is the rough way to live your life that can fit in with all sorts of economic and professional circumstances. And then if you have all day to devote to this, I can make you a superhuman and make you live forever. And so that, you know, you get one chapter for everyone and then 20 chapters for people who can really go all in. And likewise, Galen does the same thing. He says, look, if the world were perfect and we were able to spend all day doing nothing but keeping ourselves healthy, what would that look like? But then I also recognize the world's not perfect and some people don't have control over their time, and some people have a job that keeps them busy all day. And so how do you manage that? So there is some acknowledgment that this is unrealistic for most people. But I also think a major section of the audience for these doctors and the people they were treating were astonishingly wealthy and astonishingly powerful and in fact had whole staffs of people there to massage them and cook the food and do exactly what needed to happen. So I think there's definitely an audience for the all in on health, and there's an awareness that not everyone has the resources or the time or the freedom to be able to do it.

Listeners might be familiar with someone called Brian Johnson, who is very, very rich, and he spends all of his Time monitoring his health and living in what he believes to be the healthiest possible way. Are you saying that some of the advice they're giving is for people like this, but in the ancient Greek and Roman world.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And some of it is, you know, the doctors obviously are invested in health. This is their profession, this is what they want. They want you to be thinking about it. That doesn't mean that all elite Romans carefully calibrated every hour of the day. Right. This is going to be very individualized, specific thing. You know, all of our doctors tell us to exercise. That doesn't mean all of us are really into exercise. This is an option that if you wanted to go all in, you certainly could.

There's also a lot of thinking and rules for sex and the role that sex plays in a healthy life. Diocles has some rules for that, as does Celsus. Celsus, for example, says sex during the day is worse for you. Sex at night is healthier if you do it during the day, don't follow it with a meal. He also says sex is not a good idea in the summer or in autumn. What's your explanation for this one?

Yeah, so sex is a very specific thing that humans do that exerts a lot of energy and also does magical things. Right? So they're fascinated by how reproduction works and the idea, how could you possibly explain that semen could make new humans? It's crazy if you really stop and think about it. So this is an extremely potent activity because of the potential that it has to create life. They're worried about what's coming out of your body, right. You know, what is making this seed that then can make humans, what is drawing that out of your body do. So some people, it turns out, have too much of whatever this is and actually are healthier if they have sex more frequently, because otherwise they have this kind of backlog of material that has to be evacuated. Whereas some people are weaker or don't have as much of that. And too much sex is going to lead to all sorts of problems. So I think thinking about it as like extreme energy output, basically it's more than exercise. It's its own specific, very powerful thing. And so you need to regulate things that are coming out of your body and these powerful things in a way that doesn't SAP your strength or kind of back you up and have you too full of things that need to be out. So that's why you get the sort of balance on a day to day basis and then it sort of falls in the same category as exercise in terms of what time of year you want to do it. So when it's really hot in the summer and, and you don't want to be doing a ton of exercise because you're already losing a lot of stuff, sex probably is going to be the extreme version of that. And you'd like, you should avoid it if you can.

Okay. So like really they're kind of just lumping it in with exercise. This expends a lot of energy, takes a bit of time, you don't want to be doing it and it's really hot. Broadly. That explains their approach to it.

Yeah, and it's taking your seed, right. You're actually ejecting something that is vital to you and able to create a whole other human. Like that's powerful, that's more than sweat.

And on exercise they mention a lot of walking. Walking seems to be a very well thought of exercise. What else do they suggest and how do these ancient Greek and Roman writers think about exercise more broadly in relation to health? Is it just this purely good thing or does it have some downsides too?

Yeah, this is another really culturally specific topic, I think, where you have a general ideas, but then the details are going to have cultural variation. So there's some things that are appropriate for people to do and there are things that are not appropriate for people to do. But they view exercise, they sort of categorize it as there's exertion and there's exercise. And so there's all sorts of ways of doing exertion. You could be a ditch digger, that's, you know, that's exercise that's taking a lot of energy. But that's probably not what an elite Roman is going. That's not how they're going to choose to do their exertion in the form of kind of curated exercise. So there's a whole parallel industry, if you want to think about it, parallel to medicine, of gymnastic training, where you get personal trainers, basically people who tell you what your exercise regime should be in order to get whatever physique it is that you want. And the doctors have a kind of love hate relationship with these people because they're kind of working in the same space a little bit. So you know, your doctor definitely wants you to exercise, but they want to kind of control exactly what you're doing. I think contrary to the modern way of thinking about exercise. And very surprisingly, you read some of these authors and they are so down on athletes, it's just unnatural. You know, they've moved themselves way too far to the extreme. People shouldn't have muscles like that. They're putting too much time into exercise and there might be a reason why they're doing it and that's fine. But your normal person should absolutely not be doing a sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger weightlifting regime. That's unhealthy. You don't want to be at that level. Which I think is why we get things like walking. It's for basic cardio health and some strength training. There's a great text by Galen, very short text, called On Exercise with a Small Ball, which is how you can use a ball to get some good all body exercise without going full extreme weightlifting.

So like with the food and like with the sex, it's about moderation. Is that broadly how the physicians and the doctors are thinking of exercise?

Yeah. If you take one thing away from any of these texts, it's everything in moderation. Don't do anything extreme, don't do anything sudden. If you're going to make a change, make it gradual. And you don't want to go all in on some crazy version of something or all in on its opposite. You want to find that middle ground, but specifically it needs to be the middle ground that's right for you.

That sounds like broadly good advice. And to end on a constructive note, if there was another piece of advice or a specific rule or just a general attitude that you think people adopting today would broadly be a positive thing and lend itself to positive outcomes, what do you think that would be?

I think the big takeaway is a really big picture idea, which is this is a society that just didn't have as good healthcare as we do. Right. There were all sorts of illnesses they simply could not cure. And so they were very conscientious about health as an active thing you actively work to maintain because they knew if you lose it, it's not guaranteed you're going to be able to fix it. And so I think this intentionality about. But thinking about, how am I exercising, how am I eating, what am I eating? How are my daily choices keeping me healthy and happy? I think that's a huge takeaway that is equally true now as it was 2,000 years ago.

[James Osborne]

That was Claire Bubb, Assistant professor of Classical Literature and Science at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Claire is the author of how how to Eat An Ancient Guide for Healthy Living. And she was speaking to James Osborne. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.

[Claire Bubb]

Running a business is hard work building your website shouldn't be with wix, you can express your ideas, give direction, then leave the heavy lifting to AI, from site creation to branded content and images. Have fun with the details, customize what you want the way you want and manage your whole business from a centralized dashboard with expert AI tools. Build, scale and enjoy the incredible results. You can do it all yourself on wix.