“Are you angry when someone’s armpits stink or when their breath is bad? What would be the point? Having such a mouth and such armpits, there’s going to be a smell emanating. You say, they must have sense, can’t they tell how they are offending others? Well, you have sense too, congratulations! So, use your natural reason to awaken theirs, show them, call it out. If the person will listen, you will have cured them without useless anger. No drama nor unseemly show required.”
MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 5.28
I'm aware that Marcus was a Stoic, and the reframing of his annoyance above was a way of coming to terms with things he couldn't control and refocusing on what he could — either telling people they stank so they could address it, or shutting up and accepting that sometimes armpits just stink.
I'm friends with a few people who are all about natural living. That means no deodorant, and perhaps questionable bathing habits. They often have a notably unpleasant reek. I've heard the au naturel crowd claim that people have always had BO, and it's only modern people who are perturbed by it and try to reign it in through bathing and deodorants, etc.
But is that true? How common was dislike of BO? Did people just get used to it, or was it always annoying?
In the premodern era, did people bath to address BO? Did they have any other remedies? Is dislike of BO really a mostly modern thing, with outliers like the rich Marcus Aurelius representing a snobbish view?
Just what did Marcus expect his subjects to do once informed of their stinkiness? Just take a bath? Something else?
OK, I'll bite. :) I'm sure you already know that what people consider "too much" body odor is cultural. 21st century Americans are undoubtedly a much-bathed culture and our personal care industry has us convinced that we shouldn't smell at all, or only nicely. We get on a cultural high horse and talk about how clean we are, while using "dirty" not only as a physical description but as a marker for taboos about sexuality, racism, and morals.
For the Romans, particularly among the upper class, physical, immersive bathing was frequent and considered to be medicinal for various health complaints. Romans generally bathed communally (except for the very rich, who could afford to bathe at home), and sometimes mixed men and women, though the sources suggest that mixed bathhouses had unsavory reputations. Both men and women used perfumes and deodorants, oiled their skin to make it soft, cleaned their teeth with ammonia and bicarbonate of soda, and applied cosmetics to their faces. They preferred hairlessness, so men plucked or shaved their beards, and according to the poet Ovid, women plucked or removed most of their body hair. There are many archaeological examples of perfume and cosmetic flasks and such from ancient Rome and from late antiquity. Some of the poetry of Catullus (d. ca. 54 BCE) insults a man with bad breath; see poem 98, http://vroma.org/vromans/hwalker/VRomaCatullus/098x.html
The Greco-Roman god of health was a son of Apollo named Aesculapius, who had a daughter goddess named Hygieia who was the goddess of cleanliness and good health.
It's hard to tell whether the upper-class Romans in the first few centuries CE still had the same fastidiousness remarked upon by Ovid (d. ca. 17 CE) and other writers, but it seems likely that they frequently bathed and deodorized. Anti-Christian writers of the early centuries CE made fun of Christians, whom they accused of believing that dirty bodies were holy ones. That's not really inaccurate, because Christian ascetics did often abstain from bathing as part of their attempts to tame the flesh, but it doesn't tell us what the standards were for being clean. Clearly Marcus Aurelius wasn't crazy about what he was smelling and suggested doing something about that.
(soapbox/) Let me put in a plug for the past here: the popular understanding of the ancient world, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Early Modern periods is that people were dirty and OK with that. That's simply not true. They may not have bathed as often as 21st-century people would think necessary, but that's a far cry from filthiness, even by our current standards. So I think anywhere you look into culture, you'll find that they almost all have practices that encourage people not to stink. (/soapbox)
Here's a little bibliography on Roman hygiene:Baker, Patricia Anne Land, HanNijdam, and Karine van ’t Land, eds. Medicine and Space: Body, Surroundingsand Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Visualising the Middle Ages,v. 4. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2012.Dupont, Florence. "DailyLife in Ancient Rome." Translated from the French by Christopher Woodall.London: Blackwell, 1992.Fagan, Garrett G. “Bathing forHealth with Celsus and Pliny the Elder.” The Classical Quarterly 56, no.1 (2006): 190–207.Ward, Roy Bowen. “Women In RomanBaths.” Harvard Theological Review 85, no. 2 (April 1992): 125–47. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816000028820.