As Monty Python fans know, the Romans have done nothing for us apart from giving us sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health.
Roman experts may also suggest they have given us public relations, street food, town planning, currency, our calendar, underfloor heating and bureaucracy.
English Heritage is now adding another: body hair removal. “From painful waxes to irritating shaves, we can trace the modern obsession with hair removal back to the Romans,” it said as it put on display objects at a revamped museum opening to the public on Thursday.
More than 400 objects will be at Wroxeter Roman City in Shropshire, including items that shine light on bathing and beauty practices in Roman Britain.
They include tweezers used to remove the unwanted body hair of men and women.
Cameron Moffett, English Heritage’s curator for the site, said a strikingly large number of tweezers had been found there. “We do have an amazing number,” she said. “English Heritage has 50 Roman sites, 10 of which have produced tweezers. We have a total number of 94, 60% of those came from Wroxeter. So yes, we’ve cornered the market in tweezers.”
The sheer volume of tweezers shows how popular it was as an accessory in Roman Britain. “The advantage of the tweezer was that it was safe, simple and cheap, but unfortunately not pain free,” Moffett said.
The tweezers were used by people selling a service in Wroxeter’s bathing complex to pluck people’s body hairs.
For men, Moffett said, there was an expectation that body hair was removed before physical exercise such as wrestling. Roman Britons were also following the fashions in Rome for a clean-shaven appearance, which distinguished them from “barbarians”.
For women it was often the perception of beauty. “There are many, many written sources including Pliny and Ovid,” said Moffett. “They are all writing about how you will need to keep on top of the body hair and you know, gosh, no man is going to be interested in you if you’ve got armpit hair.”
The plucking was often carried out by slaves and was not without noise or pain.
The Roman author and politician Seneca wrote a letter to a friend complaining about the noise from the public baths, noting “the skinny armpit hair-plucker whose cries are shrill, so as to draw people’s attention, and never stop, except when he is doing his job and making someone else shriek for him”.
The tweezers will be exhibited along with other beauty objects including nail cleaners and an ear scoop. The latter may have been used in the ear, but also to measure ingredients for face masks and beauty creams.
Also on display will be a replica strigil, a curved, blunted blade that would have been used to scrape off oil – and dead skin and dirt – in which a Roman had just been lathered.
Bathing was an elaborate process, said Moffett. “There would have been lots of bottles of perfume and bath oil, there was quite a lot of kit you had to take with you.
“There were so many aspects to it. You could spend hours there, catch up with friends and people would be coming round offering you nibbles and a glass of wine to buy … it sounds nice.”
The revamped museum opens at Wroxeter, which was once the fourth largest town in Roman Britain, almost the same size as Pompeii in Italy. It was founded as a legionary fortress in the mid-first century, established as a town in the AD90s and inhabited until the fifth century.
It is exceptionally well-preserved and archaeologists have unearthed a wealth of treasures that English Heritage hopes will now be much better displayed.
