[A new book by journalist Lina Zeldovich traces the management of
human waste—and underscores poop’s potential as a valuable
resource] [[link removed]]

HOW THE ANCIENT ROMANS WENT TO THE BATHROOM  
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Lina Zeldovich

Smithsonian
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_ A new book by journalist Lina Zeldovich traces the management of
human waste—and underscores poop’s potential as a valuable
resource _

The Roman elite viewed public toilets as an instrument that flushed
the filth of the plebes out of their noble sight., Photo illustration
by Meilan Solly

 

“I live my life in the gutter,” says Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow
[[link removed]] with
a chuckle.

An anthropologist at Brandeis University, she considers her
“official” title the Queen of Latrines. For the past 25 years, she
has taken that label
[[link removed]] literally,
spending much of her time in ancient Roman gutters
[[link removed]].

“There’s a lot you can find out about a culture when you look at
how they managed their toilets,” Koloski-Ostrow says. “That’s
why I study it.”

I crossed paths with the Queen of Latrines after making an accidental
discovery in Ephesus
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Turkey), which grew to prominence around the second century C.E. and
housed some 300,000 to 400,000 denizens. One day, I ambled into an
open space drastically different from anything I’d seen before. In
front of me was a long white marble bench with a row of holes shaped
just like modern toilet seats: a Roman bathroom.

Turning around, I discovered two more rows of holes, altogether able
to accommodate a small party. But the holes were cut so close to one
another that I was left wondering how people actually used them.
Wouldn’t they put you in the immediate proximity of someone else’s
butt? There were no dividers of any kind in between. Talk about not
having inhibitions, conducting your private business next to a dozen
other folks.

Underneath the seats was a stone-lined gutter that must have carried
citizens’ waste out of the city. A second shallower one ran beneath
my feet. It, too, was clearly built to carry water—but for what?
Other questions brewed. Did the enclosure have a roof, doors and
windows? Were the stone seats hot in summer and cold in winter? Did
toilet-goers talk to each other? Did they shake hands after wiping?
And what did they actually wipe with, given that toilet paper is
a fairly recent development
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Was this a men’s room or a ladies’ room?

This chance encounter left such a profound impression that I found
myself obsessed, searching for answers that had seemingly long since
disappeared into the annals of history—or rather, into its sewers. I
was curious whether anyone had ever studied the topic, and sure
enough, someone had: Koloski-Ostrow, author of _The Archaeology of
Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems_
[[link removed]].

Ancient latrines in Ephesus, Turkey. Karen via Flickr under CC
BY-NC-ND 2.0

Over a lovely conversation about bodily excretions, chamber pots,
butt-wiping habits, sewer vermin and other equally unappetizing
topics, the ancient Romans’ views on waste, hygiene and toilet
habits begin to take shape. The word “latrine,” or _latrina_
[[link removed]] in Latin, was used to describe a private
toilet in someone’s home, usually constructed over a cesspit. Public
toilets were called _foricae_. They were often attached to public
baths [[link removed]], whose water was
used to flush down the filth.

Because the Roman Empire lasted for 2,000 years and stretched from
Africa to the British Isles, Roman toilet attitudes varied
geographically and over time. Generally speaking, however, the Romans
had fewer inhibitions than people today. They were reasonably content
sitting in close quarters—after all, Roman theater seats
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rather close, too, about 12 inches apart. And they were similarly at
ease when taking communal dumps.

“Today, you pull down your pants and expose yourself, but when you
had your toga wrapped around you, it provided a natural protection,”
Koloski-Ostrow says. “The clothes they wore would provide a
barricade so you actually could do your business in relative privacy,
get up and go. And hopefully your toga wasn’t too dirty after
that.” If you compare the forica with the modern urinal, she adds,
it actually offers more privacy.

Despite the lack of toilet paper, toilet-goers did wipe. That’s what
the mysterious shallow gutter was for. The Romans cleaned their
behinds with sea sponges attached to a stick, and the gutter supplied
clean flowing water to dip the sponges in. This soft, gentle tool was
called a _tersorium_
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which literally meant “a wiping thing.”

A replica tersorium, or sponge attached to a stick D. Herdemerten via
Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 3.0

The Romans liked to move their bowels in comfort. Whether they washed
their hands after that is another story. Maybe they dipped their
fingers into an amphora by the door. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they
did in some parts of the empire but not in others. Worse, the tersoria
were probably reused and shared by all fellow butt-wipers who came and
went throughout the day. So, if one of the forica visitors had
intestinal worms, all the others would carry them home, too. Without
any knowledge of how diseases spread, the overall Roman toilet setup
could hardly be called hygienic by modern standards.

Though they look advanced for an ancient civilization, Roman public
toilets were far from glamorous. The white marble seats gleaming in
the sun may look clean now, but that was hardly the case when these
facilities were operational. They had low roofs and tiny windows that
let in little light. People sometimes missed the holes, so the floors
and seats were often soiled. The air stunk. “Think about it—how
often does someone come and wipe off that marble?” Koloski-Ostrow
asks. In fact, she thinks the facilities were so unwelcoming that the
empire’s elite only used them under great duress.

Upper-class Romans, who sometimes paid for the foricae to be erected,
generally wouldn’t set foot in these places. They constructed them
for the poor and the enslaved—but not because they took pity on the
lower classes. They built these public toilets so they wouldn’t have
to walk knee-deep in excrement on the streets. Just like any other
civilization
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chose to urbanize, the Romans were up against a problem: What to do
with all this waste? The Roman elite viewed public toilets as an
instrument that flushed the filth of the plebes out of their noble
sight. In Roman baths, it was common practice to inscribe the name of
the benefactor who paid to build the facility, but toilet walls bear
no such writing. “It seems that no one in Rome wanted to be
associated with a toilet,” Koloski-Ostrow says.

Ancient Roman latrines at Ostia Antica, an archaeological site
southwest of Rome Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Why would refined noblemen want to sit next to common people who had
lice, open wounds, skin sores, diarrhea and other health problems?
That wasn’t the worst of it. The sewers underneath the public
toilets were a welcoming home for vermin. “Rats, snakes and spiders
would come up from down below,” Koloski-Ostrow explains. Plus, the
decomposing sewage may have produced methane, which could ignite,
quite literally lighting a fire under someone.

Neither were the public toilets built to accommodate women. By the
second century, “public latrines were constructed in the areas of
the city where men had business to do,” Koloski-Ostrow says.
“Maybe [an enslaved] girl who was sent to the market would venture
in, out of necessity, although she would fear being mugged or raped.
But an elite Roman woman wouldn’t be caught dead in there.”

Back at their comfortable villas, wealthy citizens had their own
personal latrines constructed over cesspools. But even they may have
preferred the more comfortable, less smelly option of chamber pots,
which enslaved people were forced to empty onto garden patches. The
elite didn’t want to connect their cesspools to the sewer pipes
because that would likely bring the vermin and stink into their homes.
Instead, they hired _stercorraii_—manure removers—to empty their
pits. Koloski-Ostrow notes that in one case, “11 asses may have been
paid for the removal of manure.”

“There’s a lot you can find out about a culture when you look at
how they managed their toilets.”

The famous Roman sewers were another story. At the height of its
power, Rome had to clean up after about a million people. An average
adult produces about a pound of poo
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day, so a 500-ton pile of feces is a mind-boggling image. While Roman
farmers understood the waste’s fertilizing value and put some of it
back into the fields, the city couldn’t recycle it fast enough. To
flush that much excrement out of the city daily, one needs a truly
massive system.

The Romans did everything on a grand scale—including filth removal.
They initially gleaned their sewer technology from the Greeks. In
her book [[link removed]], Koloski-Ostrow attributes this
“technology transfer” to “Hellenistic cultural forces” and
Roman soldiers who starting building latrines in military camps. To
keep their Roman-sized Augean stables
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Romans scaled up the system to massive proportions, building the
Greatest Sewer, or _Cloaca Massima_
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the Roman goddess Cloacina
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Cleanser, from the Latin verb _cluo_, meaning “to clean.”)

The Cloaca Massima moved millions of gallons of water every day. It
was so immense that Greek geographer and historian Strabo wrote
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Rome’s sewers were big enough “for wagons loaded with hay to
pass” and for “veritable rivers” to flow through them.

An 1814 painting of the Cloaca Maxima by artist Christoffer Wilhelm
Eckersberg Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The sewer accomplished several things. It drained the excess water
from the city, rid the people of their waste and generally carried
away everything they didn’t want, discharging it into the River
Tiber. It also drained water from the surrounding swamps and river
valleys, preventing floods. Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote that
when the rivers surrounding Rome spilled into the sewers with
unrelenting force, the sewers withstood Mother Nature’s wrath,
directing the currents down to the Tiber, where the triple-arch outlet
of the Cloaca Massima still stands today. When the sewers clogged up
or needed other repairs, a considerable amount of money was spent on
keeping them functioning. Despite many earthquakes, floods, collapsed
buildings and other cataclysms, the Roman sewers stood strong over
centuries.

The Cloaca Massima solved Rome’s sewage removal problems, but it
didn’t solve the city’s health issues. It carried the filth out of
the city and dumped it into the Tiber, polluting the very water some
citizens depended on for irrigation, bathing and drinking. And so,
while the Romans no longer had to see, or smell, their excrement, they
hadn’t done much to eliminate its hazardous nature. Through the next
several centuries, as humankind kept concentrating in cities, it would
find itself in a bitter battle with its own waste—seemingly with no
way to win.

_Adapted from _The Other Science Dark Matter: The Science and
Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health 
[[link removed]]_by Lina Zeldovich, to be
published by University of Chicago on November 19, 2021. Copyright ©
2021 by Lina Zeldovich._

_LINA ZELDOVICH has written for the New York Times, Scientific
American, Reader’s Digest, and other publications and has won four
awards for covering the science of poop. Her book, The Other Dark
Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth, will be
released in November 2021 by Chicago University Press._

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