Roman Barbershop Danger and Daily Gossip

Marcus Valerius

If you take a turn off the Argiletum just as the sun clears the rooftops of the Subura, you will hear it before you see it. Not the laughter, mind you, but the sound of iron scraping on wet, unsoaped skin. It is a dry, whispering rasp that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up. I am sitting right now on a three legged stool in my local tonstrina, the barbershop. My chin is tilted back, my throat is completely exposed, and my tonsor, a little Greek man who insists everyone call him Thalamus, is leaning over me with an iron blade that has seen better days. There is no rich lather here. No scented oils, no warm towels, no soothing foam. Just a splash of plain, frigid fountain water slapped across my cheeks, and then the steel.

Marcus Valerius

You see, here in Rome, in this hundred and tenth year of our Lord Trajan, a smooth face is not merely a matter of personal hygiene. It, it, it is a civic duty. Look at the coins in your purse. Look at the imperial busts standing in the Forum. The Emperor Trajan goes clean shaven, his hair cut neat and flat across his forehead, and so every citizen who wants to be taken seriously must do the exact same thing. If you walk through the streets with a scruffy jaw, people assume you are either a grieving father, a penniless philosopher, or a barbarian who just wandered in from the northern woods. So here I sit, paying two copper asses every couple of days for the privilege of suffering.

Marcus Valerius

Before he even touches my jaw with the razor, the novacula, he has to deal with my hair. And if you think the razor is terrifying, you have never seen a pair of Roman shears up close. We call them the forfex, but do not picture the neat, hinged scissors you might have at home. These are a single piece of pounded iron bent into a horseshoe at the back, acting like a spring. There is no central pivot pin, and there are certainly no little loops for your fingers. The barber simply squeezes the two raw iron blades together with his bare hand, relying entirely on his own grip strength to make a cut. If his fingers slip or if a passing donkey cart jolts the wooden doorway outside, he cuts your hair unevenly, leaving those terrible, jagged ridges we call steps. Walk out into the sunlight with a head full of steps and your neighbors will mock you for a month.

Marcus Valerius

So when he finishes clipping and picks up the novacula, the entire small room goes dead silent. The iron blade is dull. Iron rusts if you look at it sideways in this city, and Thalamus sharpens it on a Spanish hone lubricated with nothing more than his own spit. You stretch your cheeks tight, puffing out your mouth like a blowfish, holding your breath while he glides that cold metal up toward your jawbone. You do not move. You do not blink. You pray to the gods that the cart wheel out on the basalt street does not hit a loose stone right at the moment he reaches your jugular.

Marcus Valerius

Of course, no matter how steady the barber hand might be, blood is part of the tax we pay to appear civilized. A nick on the chin, a slice along the lip, it happens almost every single time. And how do we patch up these bloody little sacrifices? Well, if you are lucky, your tonsor has a pot of sticky tree resin mixed with vinegar sitting on his shelf. It stings like a fresh bee sting, but it seals the skin instantly. And if he runs out of resin? He simply reaches up with his fingers to the dark, forgotten corners of his ceiling, grabs a clump of fresh, grey spiderwebs, and plasters them right over your bleeding cheek. It sounds filthy, I know, but I swear by Hercules, it stops the bleeding faster than anything else in the empire.

Marcus Valerius

Once the blade is wiped clean on an old rag, you move over to the waiting bench to let your cheeks stop stinging, and that is where the real business of the tonstrina begins. I found myself sitting right next to old Lucius, a builder who works down by the river. While the man in the chair was wincing and gripping the edges of his stool, Lucius and I were trading news about the gigantic new forum Trajan is digging out between the Capitoline and Quirinal hills. They are moving millions of cubic feet of earth down there, hauling in marble columns from Egypt that take twenty teams of oxen to pull. You hear about it first right here on this wooden bench, long before any official town crier shouts it out in the public square.

Marcus Valerius

The barbershop is Rome's morning nervous system. It is where you find out who is buying up insulae tenements in the Subura, whose daughter is marrying which merchant, and which magistrate took a bribe yesterday afternoon. The barbers themselves are the greatest gossips in the world, taking in secrets from every man who sits in their chair from dawn until the eighth hour. It is a place of sheer physical agony, yes, but nobody ever leaves early. You linger on that bench, listening to the clatter of the street and the low hum of voices, watching the morning light cut through the dust clouds near the doorway.

Marcus Valerius

And then, finally, you stand up, hand over your two small copper coins, and step out of the doorway onto the hard basalt paving stones. The morning wind hits your scraped, naked chin, cold and sharp as a mountain stream. You run your hand over your jaw. It is smooth, slightly stinging, and completely clean. You take a deep breath of the city air, smelling fresh bread from the bakery down the lane and heavy smoke from the cookshops, and you hold your head just a little bit higher. In Rome, greatness is not given to you for free. Sometimes, it is bought two copper asses at a time, right at the edge of an iron blade.