Rudimentary dental care
Living well before the invention of modern toothbrushes, toothpaste, mouthwash or dental floss, the Greeks had to use their imagination when it came to keeping their teeth clean and healthy. As you can imagine, some methods were effective, others not so much. Similarly, while some ways of keeping your teeth clean in Ancient Athens may well appeal to us today, others are undoubtedly disgusting and best left in the past.
As is quite widely known, washing one’s mouth out with urine was quite common practice in the ancient world. In fact, health-conscious individuals might do this on a daily basis. It was believed that the ammonia found in urine not only disinfected the mouth but also helped keep teeth pearly white. However, to their credit, the Greeks weren’t quite so mad about urine as the Romans were. The people of Rome would import human urine from Portugal and the market became so big that the emperor Nero famously levied a tax on all such imports.
Natural – and horrible – mouthwashes aside, surviving records from the time show the other ingenious ways the people of Ancient Greece tried to keep their teeth and gums clean. By far the most popular way was to use twigs as toothpicks, with this commonplace after every meal. A man or woman might also occasionally floss using horsehair before rinsing and gargling human urine for good measure. Unsurprisingly, such primitive methods were not always so effective. However, the Greeks took great pride in being able to endure pain and discomfort, so a trip to the dentist to have a tooth extracted was seen as a very last resort.
While we may well smile at some of the methods used by the Ancient Greeks and the Romans too, they often had better oral hygiene than people in the modern world. They ate very little sugar and there was no such thing as processed food back then, so cavities were rare. However, unprocessed food required a lot of chewing, meaning teeth got worn down over the years to the point that an old man is likely to have had just a few stumps remaining where his molars should have been.