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Many people today worry about how to find time to keep fit and healthy in the midst of their busy lives. Believe it or not, but this was also a problem in ancient times.
So, how did ancient people deal with it?
A universal problem
The physician Galen, who lived from around 129 to 216 AD, dealt with thousands of patients in the city of Rome.
He used to complain some people didn’t devote enough time to keeping fit. In his treatise, Hygiene, Galen wrote one of his patients, a philosopher called Premigenes, was such a workaholic he stayed inside all the time writing books. Because of this bad lifestyle, Premigenes got sick.
Galen said Premigenes needed to work less, and devote more time to getting exercise and some sun.
Some 2,000 years later, most of us will be able to relate to this. The World Health Organization has a number of recommendations for the amount of exercise one should do each week. But it can be difficult to balance work and other commitments with our health and fitness.
The trade-offs of a busy life
People in the Greco-Roman period recognized that being busy has an effect on health.
The writer Lucian of Samosata, from the 2nd century AD, talks in his essay On Salaried Posts in Great Houses about how certain jobs offered workers no time to maintain their health. A bad diet, endless labor and a lack of sleep all contributed to making them unhealthy:
the sleeplessness, the sweating, and the weariness gradually undermine you, giving rise to consumption, pneumonia, indigestion, or that noble complaint, the gout. You stick it out, however, and often you ought to be in bed, but this is not permitted. They think illness a pretext, and a way of shirking your duties. The general consequences are that you are always pale and look as if you were going to die any minute.
The doctors of the time also noticed this problem. Galen said, in his opinion, one of the determinants of whether we are able to be healthy or not is the amount of free time we have.
He recognized some people had no choice but to be “bound up with the circumstances of their activities” – such as those taken into slavery – but noted others seemed to have
chosen a life caught up in the circumstances of their activities, either through ambition or whatever kind of desire, so they are least able to spend time on the care of their bodies.
Galen was also affected by this problem. As a doctor, he had little free time, and his normal routine was often interrupted by patients’ problems. Nonetheless, he explains how, in his 20s, he started adhering to a daily health routine:
after I reached the age of 28, having persuaded myself that there is an art of hygiene, I followed its precepts for the whole of my subsequent life, and was never sick with any disease apart from the occasional ephemeral fever in some degree.
This routine involved eating one full meal each evening, and doing some sort of exercise every day. One of these exercises may have been wrestling, as he also mentions dislocating his shoulder while wrestling at the gym at the age of 35.
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Mosaic at the Villa Romana del Casale near Piazza Armerina in Sicily. Wikimedia Commons
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