However detailed they could be in other respects, many accounts of daily life centuries and centuries in the past move over using the toilet in silence. Even when they didn’t, they’dn’t contain the form of toilets we’d recognize right now, however moderately chamber pots, outhouses, and other sorts of specialized rooms with chutes emptying straight out into rivers and onto again gardens. And that was simply the residences. What would public facilities have been like? We’ve got one reply in the Advised in Stone video above, which describes “public latrines in historical Rome,” the facilities constructed in virtually each Roman city “the place citizens may relieve themselves en masse.”
These usually had no less than a dozen seats, Advised in Stone creator Garrett Ryan explains, although some had been grander in scale than others: the Roman in the pastra of Athens, for examinationple, boasted a 68-seater. A facility in Timgad, the “African Pompeii” previously featured right here on Open Culture, had “fancy armrests within the form of leaping dolphins.”
Judged by their ruins, these public “restrooms” could appear unexpectedly impressive of their engineering and elegant of their design. However we might really feel somewhat much less inclined towards time-travel fantasies when Ryan will get into such particulars as “the sponge on a stick that served as toilet paper” that continues to be “one of many extra notorious features of daily life in historical Rome.”
These weren’t technically latrines, as Lina Zeldovich notes at Smithsonian.com. “The phrase ‘latrine,’ or latrina in Latin, was used to explain a private toilet in somebody’s dwelling, usually constructed over a cesspit. Public toilets had been known as foricae,” and their construction have a tendencyed to depend on deep-pocketed organizations or individuals. “Higher-class Romans, who someinstances paid for the foricae to be erected, generally wouldn’t set foot in these locations. They constructed them for the poor and the enslaved — however not as a result of they took pity on the lower classes. They constructed these public toilets so that they wouldn’t should stroll knee-deep in excrement on the streets.”
The problem of large-scale human waste disposal is as outdated as city civilization, and Rome exhaustingly solved it as soon as and for all. The Absolute History quick above exhibits how the castles of medieval England handled it, utilizing lavatories with holes over the moat (and piles of “moss, grass, or hay” in lieu of yet-to-be-invented toilet paper). At Medievalists.internet, Lucie Laumonier writes that the city equivalent of Roman foricae had been “usually constructed over bridges and on quays to facilitate the evacuation of human waste that went directly into running water.” Innovative as this was, it will need to have posed difficulties for boaters moveing beneath, to say nothing of the customers unfortunate sufficient to sit down on a woodenen seat simply rotten sufficient to present out — the prospect of which, for all of the deficiencies of Modern Western civilization’s public restrooms, no less than now not worries us fairly a lot right now.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceebook.
