[kennywinker]

So... my point was that we have a cultural bias towards representing the romans as clean and medieval people as dirty - "As to who was cleaner, it depends heavily on class, region and specific year." So you agree with the core of the idea I was presenting, but you then immediately dismiss it as bad scholorship. Apologies, I didn't think I needed to google the details for this conversation - but let's correct the record: romans didn't have soap during the republican era, but they did during the roman empire. At least by 200CE, perhaps as much as a century earlier. Happy?

> That's the problem with preconceived notions, they lead to bad scholarship

I agree. E.g. missing the forest for the trees. As you just did.