When Boys Wore Dresses, and Other Fascinating Traditions and Conventions From History

Ancient Roman Funeral Traditions

Long before those traits became associated with the Brits, Ancient Roman were into stiff upper lips, and frowned upon excessive displays of emotion. Funerals were exempted, however. The more people attended a funeral, and the showier the funerary procession was, the more respected the deceased was. However, an excessive display of grief by the deceased’s relatives – especially when it came to upper class Roman families – was just not done, and seen as undignified. To square that circle, professional mourners were hired.

The kin of the dearly departed paid women who specialized in that stuff to weep, wail, grieve loudly, and engage in other emotional displays that well-born Romans were not supposed to demonstrate in public. To sell their sadness and impress the crowds, professional mourners ripped their clothes, tore out their hair, threw dust and dirt on themselves, and scratched their faces until they drew blood. Such excessive displays eventually got out of hand. So the hiring of professional mourners was made illegal, because their antics “invoked strong emotions and were incompatible with the idea of the quiet life of the citizen“.

World War II’s Most Viral Tradition

Occasionally, nowadays, graffiti of a long-nosed bald guy peeping over a wall can be spotted, usually accompanied by the caption “Kilroy Was Here“. It is homage to an American viral meme that spread around the world in the Second World War, and popped up wherever American servicemen could be found. GIs competed to try and tag the most obscure, out of the way, and unlikely locations with the picture and text that Kilroy had been there. Kilroy had apparently been everywhere. The meme was spotted in barracks, bathrooms, cafeterias, Navy ship holds, the ruins of wrecked buildings, tents, carved on tree trunks, and on anything that could get chalked or painted.

“Kilroy Was Here” went so viral that it sometimes appeared even before American GIs arrived. US soldiers who stormed enemy beaches claimed to have seen notices that Kilroy had been there ahead of them. The meme mystified Japanese intelligence. Rumor had it that even the Fuhrer wanted to know the significance of Kilroy, and whether it had some secret espionage connotations. After Germany was defeated, Stalin saw “Kilroy was here” tagged in the VIP bathroom at the Potsdam Conference, and asked who he was. A good question: who was Kilroy, and what kicked off World War II’s most viral meme tradition?

Just Who Was Kilroy?

It is not clear just where the viral “Kilroy Was Here” tradition got started. Soon after WWII ended, the American Transit Association ran a contest to track down its origins. Scores stepped forward, to claim that they had been the originators. Ever since, there has been plenty of research on Kilroy. The likeliest theory traces the meme to James J. Kilroy, a Fore River Shipyard in Braintree, Massachusetts, inspector. That Kilroy supervised the work of riveters who were paid by the number of rivets installed. After they noted that number down, inspectors put chalk marks on the work done. However, some unscrupulous riveters erased the mark, in order to get paid twice for the same work. To avoid that, Kilroy wrote “Kilroy was here” in harder-to-erase crayon.

Kilroy’s crayon marks would normally have been painted over. Wartime was hectic, however, and in WWII, that didn’t always happen. Thousands of GIs came across “Kilroy was here” on ships built at Fore River Shipyard. None of them knew who Kilroy was, but they wondered, and that minor mystery birthed a viral meme tradition. The hardest to reach ship locations were the likeliest to go unpainted. The presence of the crayoned phrase in those spots enhanced Kilroy’s reputation for getting into impossible-to-reach places. When they got off their ships, many servicemen continued the gag about the mysterious Kilroy. They ran with it, and tagged every available surface to let the world know that Kilroy had been there. Somebody at some point added an easy-to-imitate drawing of a big-nosed cartoon character to the gag. The phrase and drawing combination took Kilroy from a widespread meme to major viral history.

The Ottoman Tradition of Wedding Splurging

Hatice Sultan (1660 – 1743), daughter of Sultan Mehmed IV, and sister of sultans Mustafa II and Ahmed III, had an epic wedding. In 1675, fourteen-year-old Hatice was married to Musahip Mustafa Pasha, the Ottoman Navy’s Admiral of the Fleet. Her royal family and the groom pulled out all the stops to ensure that Hatice’s marriage celebrations of were unequaled. The wedding took place in Edirne, and lasted for twenty days. The city was decorated with artificial trees that featured silver leaves. The biggest one was about sixteen-feet-wide, and was pulled by 200 slaves. Instead of navigate the city’s warren of twisting streets, all buildings in the big silver-leafed tree’s path, including houses, were demolished.

There were daily fireworks, ceremonies, banquets, parades, wrestling matches, and other athletic contests. Actors, musicians, and artists were brought in from all across the Ottoman Empire and beyond, to perform. Hatice’s dowry contained thousands of gifts, and was carried by eighty six mules covered in expensive fabrics. It included diamonds, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, and other jewelry and precious stones. There was also plenty of delicate porcelain, gold candlesticks, pearl-covered stools, and expensive shoes, slippers, and boots. Also prominently featured were the priciest Persian rugs, carpets, beds and table cloths. It was the era’s most lavish marriage celebration, bar none.

The Psychotically Violent Traditions of Ancient Rome

We often assume that people thousands of years ago were just technologically deprived versions of us. In reality, they were quite different. They were not just like you, minus smartphone and electricity. They were born and raised in a different world, with different mental and moral landscapes. Their basic assumptions about life – and right and wrong – differed greatly from what we take for granted. Which explains how otherwise normal people back in the day could spend entire days in places like Rome’s Colosseum, watching other humans get killed in various gruesome ways for fun. Before it ceased operations as a gladiatorial arena and public execution site, up to a million people died in the Colosseum, aside from the millions of animals slaughtered for the crowd’s pleasure. Ancient Romans thought snuff on a massive scale was great.

Their sense of humor was also cruel by modern standards. Take the aftermath of the fire that burned Rome in Emperor Nero’s reign. Many Christians had been seen celebrating – they seem to have thought the fire was a sign of the anticipated end of days and the return of Jesus. Understandably, such giddiness amidst widespread misery infuriated other Romans. They suspected that the Christians had started the fire or at least spread it, and demanded that they be punished. So Christians were arrested, and Nero ordered a spectacle to make an example of them. The highlight – literally – was when Christians were covered in pitch, and set on fire so they became human torches. Spectators thought that was an apt and funny punishment, especially fit for arsonists who had torched Rome, and now became torches themselves.

The Traditional Accounts of Christians Being Fed to Lions at the Colosseum

For centuries, it was widely believed that early Christians had been slaughtered in droves in Rome’s Colosseum. The imagery of Christian martyrs being fed to lions became – and remains – an art and cultural trope. Indeed, so widely accepted was it, that it almost seems as if early Christians were the main fare of the Colosseum’s big cats. However, there is no historical evidence that Christians were ever fed to the lions in Rome’s deadly arena. To be sure, as seen above, Roman authorities were not squeamish about visiting horrific punishments upon some Christians. There also were waves of official persecution of Christians. However, there are no contemporary accounts that Christians were fed to the lions.

We have the Acts of the Martyrs to thank for the spread of such tales. They were accounts of the sufferings of early Christians, compiled after Christianity became the Roman Empire’s official religion. Such accounts are historically dubious, but they had a silver lining for which history owes them many thanks: they saved the Colosseum. After the Western Roman Empire fell, the city of Rome went into a steep decline. The Colosseum was one of the many ancient Roman monumental buildings pilfered of marble and stone to reuse in local construction, until it became the shell seen today. In the eighteenth century, however, various popes cited the supposed martyrdoms in the Colosseum to declare it a site sanctified by blood, in order to preserve what was left of it.

The Tradition of Grave Robbing for Medical Research and Study

Medical research and education in the 1700s relied heavily upon corpse dissection. However, there was a snag: few would donate their loved ones’ corpses. So doctors stole cadavers from fresh graves, or paid grave robbers to do so. In the 1780s, New York’s Columbia University doctors got their corpses from a plot known as the African Burial Ground, where slaves and freedmen were buried. The doctors simply headed there at night, dug up the freshest graves, and stole the corpses. The relatives petitioned the authorities to do something about the grave robbing, but nobody listened. Then one day in April, 1788, some boys peeped through the window of New York Hospital, as a doctor dissected a corpse. To amuse the kids, he waved her severed arm at them. Unfortunately, the woman being dissected happened to be the recently-deceased mother of one of the kids.

He ran home and told his father, who gathered a mob to attack the hospital. When they broke in, the mob encountered corpses strewn all over, one of them boiling in a pot to ease dissection. As the doctor on duty hid, the angry crowd gathered the cadavers and burned them outside. Thousands of New Yorkers attacked doctors’ homes, and even the city’s jail, where the authorities had moved the doctors for their own protection. The mob bayed for blood, and shouted “Bring out the doctors!” The militia was gathered to resist them. In the fighting that ensued, about twenty were killed. John Jay, future president of the Continental Congress and first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, served in the militia at the time. He was struck with a rock that cracked his skull. In the aftermath, laws were finally passed to prohibit and punish grave robbing.

When Obesity Was Celebrated

Today, the weight loss industry’s profits grow steadily in lockstep with the steady growth of our waistlines. Go back a few generations, though, and the existence of such an industry would have mystified our ancestors. Most of them wished they were so lucky as to have to worry about being too fat. Between running for their lives from predators or back-breaking toil as peasants and serfs, they were neither sedentary enough, nor had that much extra (or even enough) to eat to get obese. When food and leisure were scarce, to be chunky indicated good fortune – and throughout history, the fortunate have loved to showcase their good fortune. That explains the rise of fat men’s clubs in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, when well-to-do fat men got together to celebrate and showcase their obesity.

Membership was contingent on weight – usually, a 200 pounds minimum. At fat men club get-togethers there were weigh-ins that often got competitive. Especially at clubs that assigned roles based on weight, where the most obese was appointed president, the second fattest became treasurer, and so on. Today, we downplay our weight, but back in the day, fat club members went to great lengths to add weight at weigh-ins by stuffing their pockets with coins, among other shenanigans. It was not until the 1920s, when the link between obesity and poor health became better known, that fat men’s clubs declined. One of the biggest, the New England Fat Men’s Club, last met in 1924. By then, membership had dropped from 10,000 to just 38, and when none passed the weigh-in, the club disbanded.

When Hefty Was Nifty

As seen above, fat was admired throughout much of history. To be fat meant that you were doing well and had all you can eat (and more). To be skinny was not seen as attractive. Instead, it was a sign that somebody was not doing well, did not have enough to eat, suffered from poor health, or all of the preceding. Chunky was sexy, as illustrated by the art of Rubens and the standards of beauty of his hefty models. Some went beyond Rubenesque, though. Take King Rumanika, a nineteenth ruler of Buganda in central Africa, who had a thing for extremely fat women.

Rumanika had a harem of big ladies. So big, they could not stand. Rather than walk, they waddled about like elephant seals. They were fed – or more accurately, force fed – a porridge heavy on goat’s milk to keep them pleasantly plump. As in literally force fed: His Majesty had servants stand over his big mamas at mealtimes with whips to make sure they finished all the food they were given, and flog them if they did not until they did. To this day, fat women are seen as sexy in many parts of the world, while “model thin” skinny girls are pitied or viewed with revulsion.

The Fart Huffing Tradition

The Great Plague of London, which began in 1665, was England’s last major bubonic plague outbreak. It was not as bad as the Black Death a few centuries before, but it was still pretty bad. In a year and half, over 100,000 perished, with nasty symptoms that included vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pains, and copious rectal bleeding. Medical knowledge back then was poor, and people desperately sought ways to combat or cure the plague. Amidst their desperation, some doctors turned to a radical remedy: fart sniffing.

The basic premise was that the plague was caused by a miasma, or toxic vapors in the air. Some doctors figured that if people diluted the nasty air with something equally nasty, it might reduce the chances of catching the plague. So they told people to have something that smelled bad at hand. To wit, that they store their farts in jars and seal them in. That way if the plague showed up in their neighborhood, they could open the jars, and breathe in the fart fumes to ward off the plague’s bad vapors. It goes without saying that sniffing farts did not save anybody from the plague.

Shoe Traditions Around the World and Across History

The cultural significance of shoes varies, depending on the historic era and location. In the ancient Middle East, shoes were seen as symbols of authority. The placement of one’s foot on a defeated enemy’s head or neck demonstrated dominance. To kiss the shoe or foot of a ruler was a ritualized display of submission to his authority. That belief in the shoe or foot as symbolic of authority eventually made it to Europe. In medieval France, for example, kings required vassals to kiss their feet as a demonstration of allegiance.

One such, King Charles III of France, grew tired of Viking raids, and figured that it takes a thief to catch a thief. So he granted Normandy to Rollo the Viking, in exchange for the latter’s agreement to become Charles’ vassal, become a Christian, and fight off other Vikings. To seal the deal, attendant bishops urged Rollo to kiss the king’s foot as a display of fealty. Rollo adamantly refused to kiss another man’s foot. Instead, he ordered one of his warriors to kiss the royal foot on his behalf. Rather than kneel down to do so, however, the Viking remained standing, lifted the king’s foot to his mouth, which caused Charles to topple over.

The Parts of the World Where Shoes Are Traditionally Seen as Especially Unclean

Another example of cultural differences when it comes to the significance of shoes can be seen in historic Ghana. There, most people went about barefoot, but ritual dictated that the king always had to wear sandals. There was a taboo against monarch ever touching the earth, because if he did, he would lose his status. In much of Asia, shoes have long been considered particularly unclean. In many Asian countries, people do not enter homes with their shoes, but leave them at the doorstep. In Islamic culture, footwear is left at mosque entrances because of the association of shoes with uncleanliness. Accordingly, they are removed in the presence of God to show respect and submission.

Shoe soles are particularly repugnant in the Middle East. There, it is offensive to show others one’s shoe sole, and to throw footwear at or hit somebody with it is a grave insult. Sultana Shajar al Durr, a woman who ruled Egypt starting in 1250, had her reign cut short in 1257 when her maids beat her to death with their slippers. The sultana’s enemies were not only pleased at her demise, but took extra satisfaction from the manner of her death, inflicted by offensive shoes. The Middle Eastern belief that shoes are ritually unclean is still around. In an infamous 2008 incident, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President George W. Bush in a Baghdad press conference, to express his disgust with him. Elsewhere in the world, however, as seen below, throwing shoes at people is seen as a good thing.

The Parts of the World Where Shoes are Traditionally Seen as Good Luck

In contrast to the Middle Eastern cultural perspective that throwing a shoe at somebody is a deadly insult, there is a belief in other parts of the world that throwing a shoe at somebody brings good fortune. In medieval Europe, it was believed that shoes were good luck. Text that dates back centuries refers to shoes being thrown at newly married couples to wish them good fortune in their new life together. The belief that throwing shoes at somebody brought good luck lasted into the modern era.

In 1854, for example, Queen Victoria threw her shoes at British soldiers as they headed out for the Crimean War, to wish them well. She also wrote in her diary that shoes were thrown into the doorway of Balmoral Castle when it was completed in 1855, for good luck. It was part of another long-held belief, that shoes brought good fortune to homes. For centuries, well-worn shoes were placed inside the walls or in the rafters of homes that underwent renovations, in the belief that it warded off evil spirits and witchcraft.

The Tradition of Royal Swans

Swans are reputed to be quite tasty, although relatively few today have ever tasted them. As the once famous and now infamous chef Mario Batali described his experience with a Christmas swan hunted in Michigan: “It was delicious – deep red, lean, lightly gamey, moist, and succulent“. In England, even fewer people nowadays have tasted swan, since killing them has been illegal since the 1980s. In a twist, all swans in England are the property of the monarch. For centuries, eating swan was a mark of high status. However, by default, all swans belonged to the king or queen, and to legally consume the majestic birds, one had to pay.

Swans in England have long been “royal fowl”, but for centuries, the upper classes purchased from the monarch the right to own, sell, and eat them. Those who paid for the privilege were granted special “swan marks” to carve on the beaks of their birds. All swans not so marked remained the property of the monarch. Over time, elaborate rules and entire books were written to keep track of the markings. Swan’s popularity as a status meat began to wane in the eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, marking swan beaks came to be seen as animal cruelty, and the practice fell out of favor.

Shifts in Medical and Cultural Traditions About Beards

After generations of being out of fashion in the West, beards have become stylish lately, thanks in no small part to hipsters. It is not the first time that beards fell out of fashion, then made a comeback. In archaic and early classical Greece, beards were stylish, but they went out of fashion in the Hellenistic era. Early Roman Republic leaders rocked beards, but within a few generations, Romans adopted the clean-shaven look. That endured for centuries, until Emperor Hadrian made facial hair fashionable once again.

In the Middle Ages, beards fell in and out of fashion. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, medical opinions deemed facial hair to be bodily waste. To shave one’s beard was to rid the body of a potentially harmful substance. In the eighteenth century’s Enlightenment, men went about clean shaven. The ideal enlightened gentleman’s face was smooth, youthful, with a clear countenance that suggested an equally clear and open mind. Then came the nineteenth century when, beards roared back into style in a big way. As seen below, the renewed popularity was helped by a change in medical opinions, that now came to see facial hair as good for men’s health.

The Heavily Bearded Tradition

Beards came back in a big way in the nineteenth century, after centuries of smooth-shaved faces. Much of that had to do with the Victorian ideal of rugged manliness, and beards are clear visual markers of maleness. It was not just changed cultural norms and mores, though. The popularity of thick facial hair was helped by medical opinions about the supposed health benefits of beards. In the mid-nineteenth century, doctors began to encourage men to rock thick beards for their health. Although the medical benefits of beards as imagined by Victorian doctors are nonexistent, there was some logic behind the theories that beards were good for men’s health.

The Industrial Revolution was fueled by coal burned in unprecedented quantities. That led to massive air pollution. Add in the recent discovery of germ theory, which many doctors had heard of but had not yet fully understood, and concerns with tiny bad things in the air were understandable. Doctors reasoned that thick facial hair could filter out bad air and the bad little particulates that floated in it. Some even theorized that beards could prevent sore throats. In reality, as we now know, beards can’t filter air: harmful germs and aerial pollutants are too small for facial hair to block them. Beards actually do the opposite of what nineteenth century medical opinion assumed. Rather than filter out germs and other harmful particles, such particles can actually get stuck to beards, so facial hair actually increases rather than reduces the odds of infections.

The Tradition of Animal Trials

In medieval Europe, animals that misbehaved could be criminally tried in court. For example, in 1457, a sow in Savigny, France, along with her six piglets, attacked and killed a five-year-old. Nowadays, the pig’s owner might face criminal negligence charges. Medieval Europeans had different ideas about law and justice. The authorities in Savigny charged the porcine with murder, and the piglets with being accomplices. A lawyer was appointed to defend the accused, and after testimony was heard, a judge found the sow guilty. In accordance with local custom, he sentenced her to be hanged to death by her hind legs. If it was any relief to the sow, her execution was less painful than that of another pig convicted of homicide in Falaise, Normandy, in 1386. It was sentenced not only to hang, but to also be maimed in the head and forelegs before it was hanged.

Fortunately for the piglets, they did not share their mother’s fate. Although they had been found covered in blood, their participation in the murder was not proven, so they were acquitted. Today, to criminally try an animal seems ridiculous, because we know that animals lack the moral agency necessary to make them culpable for crimes. In Middle Ages Europe, however, people thought differently. All involved, judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and hangmen in case the animal was found guilty, took the proceedings quite seriously. The Savigny sow had been imprisoned pending the trial, and the jailer charged the same daily rate for the pig’s board as that of human prisoners. The court hired a professional hangman to carry out the sentence, and he charged the same fees as those charged for the execution of a human.

Spartan and Greek Eugenics Tradition

Throughout much of history, life was rough – as in orders of magnitude tougher than what we experience today – for the majority of mankind. Things that strike us today as shockingly cruel, such as infanticide of unwanted children, were once seen as routine by many. The ancient Greeks, for example, often abandoned unwanted children in the wilderness. There, they perished from exposure to the elements, thirst or hunger, attacks by wild animals, or, if lucky, were saved by a passerby. The Spartan government in particular ramped up infanticide into eugenics as a matter of state policy.

Plutarch wrote in his biography of the ancient Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus: “Offspring was not reared at the will of the father, but was taken and carried by him to a place called Lesche, where the elders of the tribes officially examined the infant, and if it was well-built and sturdy, they ordered the father to rear it, and assigned it one of the nine thousand lots of land; but if it was ill-born and deformed, they sent it to the so‑called Apothetae, a chasm-like place at the foot of Mount Taÿgetus, in the conviction that the life of that which nature had not well equipped at the very beginning for health and strength, was of no advantage either to itself or the state“.

Infanticide in the Ancient World

Throughout much of history and across many societies, infanticide was an accepted means to dispose of unwanted children. Infant exposure was widely practiced in ancient Greece. It was the preferred method to get rid of unwanted children because, to the ancient Greeks, it was not as immoral as the outright murder of a baby. They reasoned that an exposed infant’s fate was in the hand of the gods, who might directly intervene to rescue the child, or a kind-hearted passerby might do so. The exposure of infants often took place in difficult times that made an extra mouth to feed problematic. However, some took the practice further, and took infant exposure from cruel necessity to eugenics. The philosopher Aristotle, for example, advocated that deformed infants be exposed.

As Aristotle put it: “[L]et there be a law that not deformed child shall live“. Whether to keep or expose an Greece was usually the father’s decision. In Sparta, however, a group of Spartan elders made that choice. The goal was to produce strong warriors to maintain Sparta’s military dominance. To that end, the Spartan state involved itself in the selection of parents for their physical and mental traits. The authorities decided which newborns to keep, and the state was involved in the upbringing of children, who were raised in brutally tough boarding schools, to ensure their development in accordance with Spartan ideals. Thousands of years later, a eugenics movement arose, and had its heyday in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Modern eugenicists looked back at history, and filled with admiration for Spartan manliness and hardihood, figured that the ancient Spartans were on to something.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

America Comes Alive – “Kilroy Was Here”: A Story From WWII

Amusing Planet – When Little Boys Wore Dresses

Atlas Obscura – For Centuries, People Celebrated a Little Boy’s First Pair of Trousers

Atlas Obscura – Why the King Owns All the Swans in England

Dando-Collins, Stephen – The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City (2010)

Delamere Manor – The Five Most Expensive Weddings of All Time

Esquire – Why Not Eat a (Black) Swan on Oscar Night?

Eyewitness to History – The Flagellants Attempt to Repel the Black Death, 1349

Fashion History Museum – Sole Discretion

Forrest, William George Grieve – A History of Sparta, 950-192 BC (1963)

Gardner, Martin – Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957)

Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct., 1932) – Cremation and Burial in the Roman Empire

History Collection – 20 Biblical Traditions Heavily Influenced by Other Ancient Cultures

Hopkins, Keith, and Beard, Mary – The Colosseum (2005)

Insider, May 14^th, 2014 – How Bad Medical Advice Helped Make Beards Trendy

Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Jul., 1915) – The Symbolism of the Shoe With Special Reference to Jewish Sources

JSTOR Daily, September 13^th, 2017 – When Societies Put Animals on Trial

Live Science – How “Kilroy Was Here” Changed the World

Mental Floss – The Fart Jars of 17^th-Century Europe

Moss, Candida – The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (2013)

NPR – The Forgotten History of Fat Men’s Clubs

Patterson, Cynthia. Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. 115 (1985) – ‘Not Worth the Rearing’: The Causes of Infant Exposure in Ancient Greece

ThoughtCo. – The Story Behind the Phrase ‘Kilroy Was Here’

Withey, Dr. Alun – The Medical Case for Beards in the 19^th Century

World History Encyclopedia – The Roman Funeral