The street washing thing was bullshit. They were going to use "nightsoil" anyways because they needed the fertilizer, especially after switching from small dispersed yeoman farmers to large slave plantations. Also, it likely cut down on lots of disease in the city itself spread by flies or contaminated drinking water.
The bathing part I'm more ambivalent about. Lots of barbarians and Romans alike thought baths made people weaker, which is why the Romans made it a deliberate policy to spread it in all the lands they conquered. Northerners did have a bath culture at least in later times (think of Vikings and saunas) but they were small and dispersed, not giant public pools.
The street washing thing was bullshit. They were going to use "nightsoil" anyways because they needed the fertilizer, especially after switching from small dispersed yeoman farmers to large slave plantations. Also, it likely cut down on lots of disease in the city itself spread by flies or contaminated drinking water.
The bathing part I'm more ambivalent about. Lots of barbarians and Romans alike thought baths made people weaker, which is why the Romans made it a deliberate policy to spread it in all the lands they conquered. Northerners did have a bath culture at least in later times (think of Vikings and saunas) but they were small and dispersed, not giant public pools.
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