Toilets/Latrines in Ancient Rome
The ancient Romans' engineering prowess and ingenuity are key reasons as to why their civilization spread and society flourished. Their ability to tangibly improve individuals' lives helped the Romans maintain order and gain quick acceptance by conquered people.
While delivering fresh potable water was vital for survival, cultivating crops, and raising livestock, the ancient Romans' ability to handle waste was equally important. Offering a complex and effective toilet and sewage system promoted public health and enhanced the quality of daily life for all Romans.
The Romans built their first public toilets during the 2nd century BC. The form and structure somewhat varied regionally and throughout the provinces, but they were largely consistent across the Roman empire.
Public Toilets
Construction and Appearance
Public toilets, called foricae, were built alongside Roman baths. The facilities consisted of a single room with stone or wooden benches along the exterior walls. A channel of water, usually fed by wastewater from the nearby bath, ran underneath. Each bench had a half-dozen or more spaces with a key-shaped opening for Romans to use the bathroom.
The structures were marble and, like other public facilities, featured mosaics and architectural flourishes. However, only lower and middle-class Romans used public toilets. They were usually dirty and cramped.
The foricae were built with low ceilings and few windows to prevent the stench from escaping. This design left them dim, leading to highly unsanitary conditions, as people had to use the facilities in relative darkness.
Financing
Public toilets were a way for the Roman elite to beautify their urban areas. Designating areas for slaves and poorer people to relieve themselves kept sewage off the streets and out of sight. Cities needed waste management to maintain livable conditions and combat infestations of vermin.
Public toilets were as much an urban beautification project as a public health endeavor. Wealthy Romans financed the construction of foricae for their own sake, despite their refusal to use them. The upper-class' distaste for the toilets kept the donors from having their names displayed on them, as they would normally do for other public facilities and buildings.
Personal Hygiene
The Romans did not use toilet paper to clean themselves. Instead, they wiped themselves using a xylospongium (also known as a tersorium), which was basically a stick with an attached sponge. The foricae featured a second channel of running water at the foot of the benches. The Romans would dampen and rinse the communal sponge to cleanse it before and after use.
Regional customs varied across the empire. Some public toilets offered stones, shells, or pieces of pottery instead of sponges for visitors to cleanse themselves.
Privacy
The public toilets featured at least a dozen commodes. The seats were close together because of the structure's relatively condensed construction. While there were no partitions, togas provided Romans some level of privacy. Lifting one's toga to use the commode provided some separation between each Roman. The public toilets were not separated by gender, but it's unlikely that any Roman women - even the poor - would use them.
Public Health
While the toilets and waste removal system were a leap forward from a cleanliness standpoint, they were far from hygienic. The toilets themselves were often filthy and not well maintained. The Romans also lacked a method for sanitizing them.
Beyond that, everyone that visited the toilets used the shared tersorium. This created an easy pathway for intestinal disease to spread through the city. In addition, despite the toilets' availability, many Romans still defecated in the streets or emptied chamber pots in public places.
Private Toilets
The homes and villas of wealthy Romans had private toilets called latrina. Rather than carrying waste via the sewage system, homeowners built latrina over cesspits that served as a reservoir. Affluent Romans often elected not to connect their homes to the sewage system over concerns about the invasion of rats and snakes through the shared pipes.
The cesspits were emptied and cleaned by stercorraii, workers hired to remove manure. Some elite Romans may have elected to forgo latrina entirely due to the stench. Instead, their wealth enabled them to have slaves who emptied chamber pots and discarded waste offsite.
Romans with private bathrooms dipped the tersorium in a mixture of vinegar and water for cleansing.
Ancient Plumbing and Pipeworks
While the aqueducts' ability to carry fresh water into Roman cities was vital for survival and growth, removing wastewater was equally important. The Romans used a network of interconnected terracotta pipes, as far back as 200 BC, to carry waste water, sewage, and excess rainwater out of their cities.
As Roman civilization grew, they eventually encased their terracotta network with concrete, fortifying the pipes to prevent breaks and flooding due to excessive water pressure. According to Strabo, the Greek historian, Roman sewers were large enough to accommodate an entire wagon.
While the removal systems functioned well, they often emptied too close to the city for proper sanitation. For example, the Cloaca Maxima, the system serving the city of Rome, was discharged directly into the River Tiber. Despite the vast aqueduct system, many Romans still got water from the Tiber for irrigation and drinking. The proximity allowed diseases to fester and spread.
Hazards
While the public toilets helped keep the cities clean by isolating waste, using them carried some risk. The lack of sanitization was an obvious issue. Romans also had to contend with:
- Vermin. The basins and sewage system were dark and damp, drawing in many potentially harmful creatures. Depending on the region of the empire, snakes, rats, spiders, and even the occasional octopus lived in the pipes. There was an ever-present risk of a creature attack from beneath the commodes!
- Explosions. While waste moved through the sewage system, the removal rate was not always efficient. Depending on the facility's traffic and level of use, outflow could be even slower. Human waste produces methane as it breaks down. The buildup of such a flammable gas in a confined and poorly ventilated underground space created prime conditions for explosions. Spontaneous combustion could send flames up through the commodes!
- Parasites. The use of shared sponges for cleansing, the inability to sanitize benches, the overall dirtiness of public toilets, and the close proximity of each Roman made the foricae epicenters for disease. Intestinal parasites that caused dysentery were rampant in Roman public toilets.
Precautions
Conditions in the toilets were so unpredictable that Romans were superstitious about using them. Researchers have found multiple sites with incantations warding off demons scrawled on toilet walls. Other sites feature mosaics dedicated to Fortuna, the goddess of fortune, as a way of ensuring luck while visiting!
