Toilets in Ancient Rome: Disgusting Public Ones, Chamber Pots and Taxes | Early European History And Religion

Home | Category: Life, Homes and Clothes

TOILETS IN ANCIENT ROME

Ephesus toilet

The ancient Romans had pipe heat and employed sanitary technology. Stone receptacles were used for toilets. Romans had heated toilets in their public baths. The ancient Romans and Egyptians had indoor lavatories. There are still the remains of the flushing lavatories that the Roman soldiers used at Housesteads on Hadrian's Wall in Britain. Toilets in Pompeii were called Vespasians after the Roman emperor who charged a toilet tax. During Roman times sewers were developed but few people had access to them. The majority of the people urinated and defecated in clay pots.

The Romans had flushing toilets. It is well known Romans used underground flowing water to wash away waste but they also had indoor plumbing and fairly advanced toilets. The homes of some rich people had plumbing that brought in hot and cold water and toilets that flushed away waste. Most people however used chamber pots and bedpans or the local neighborhood latrine. [Source: Andrew Handley, Listverse, February 8, 2013 ]

If Romans we well-off enough to afford in their own domus, they had nothing to do but construct a latrine on the ground level. Water from the aqueducts might reach it and at worst, if it was too far distant from one of the sewers for the refuse to be swept away, the sewage could fall into a trench beneath. These cess trenches, like the one excavated near San Pietro in 1892, were neither very deep nor proof against seepage, and the manure merchants had acquired the right probably under Vespasian to arrange for emptying them. If the privileged had their domus in an insula, they rented the whole of the ground floor and enjoyed the same advantage as in a private house. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

Romans did not invent the toilet. Cambridge archeologist Augusta McMahon told the Daily Beast, the first simple toilets were Mesopotamian pits, about 1 meter in diameter, over which users would squat. The pits were lined with hollow ceramic cylinders that prevented excrement from escaping. Approximately 1000 years later the Minoans invented the flush. The first flushing toilet, excavated at the palace of Knossos in Crete, washed waste from the toilet to the sewer. By the Hellenistic period large-scale public latrines were in use. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, November 20, 2016]

Ancient Roman Group Toilets, Seats and Spoons

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: Multi-seat bathrooms (known as foricae) have been found all over the Roman world: there is one in the Circus Maximus; one at Ostia Antica, the ancient port of Rome; another at Ephesus in Turkey; another in Timgad, Algeria; and another at the Emperor Hadrian’s second-century villa in Tivoli, Italy. These bathrooms usually sat between eight and 20 people, so most people (men and women alike) would have been used to emptying their bladders and bowels in group settings, cheek-to-cheek. It was only the very wealthy, as Gemma Jansen has argued, who had enough money to guarantee any kind of expectation of privacy. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, November 22, 2018]

According to Archaeology magazine: In the ongoing excavations of Vindolanda, one of the northernmost Roman forts, near Hadrian’s Wall, excavators found a wooden toilet seat. Marble and stone seats have been found in other parts of the Roman world, but this is thought to be the only surviving wooden one. The 2,000-year-old bench appears to have been well used and, researchers report, rather comfortable. [Source: Samir S. Patel, Archaeology magazine, January-February 2015]

In January 2024, archaeologists announced that a metal detectorist in Wales had unearthed a silver Roman ligula — a “toilet spoon, with a long handle and a small “circular bowl” — that had several purposes. The Miami Herald reported: “A variety of uses have been suggested for Roman ligulae,” archaeologists said. These include extracting “cosmetics and perfumes from long-necked bottles,” extracting medicines, applying cosmetics and aiding in “medical procedures.” The British Museum described Roman ligulae as a “general-purpose object widely used as a toilet and cosmetic” tool. Archaeologists think this “toilet spoon” in particular could have been used for medical purposes because of “silver’s antimicrobial properties.” Museum officials did not give an exact age for the silver spoon, but, based on historical context, it could be over 1,600 years old. [Source: Aspen Pflughoeft, Miami Herald, January 26, 2024]

Public Toilets in Ancient Rome

Rome had a great sewage system but is has been argued that it was rarely used because the public toilets were so disgusting. Mark Oliver wrote for Listverse: Archaeologists believe they were rarely, if ever, cleaned because they have been found to be filled with parasites. In fact, Romans going to the bathroom would carry special combs designed to shave out lice. [Source: Mark Oliver, Listverse, August 23, 2016]

The poor, if the trifling cost was not deterrent, could pay for entry to one of the public latrines administered by the conductores foricarum. The great number of these establishments, which the Regionaries attest, is an indication of the size of their clientele. In Trajan's Rome, as today in some backward villages, the immense majority of private people had to have.recourse to the public latrine. But the comparison cannot be pushed further. The latrines of ancient Rome are disconcerting on two counts ; we need only recall the examples of Pompeii, of Timgad, of Ostia, and that already alluded to at Rome itself, which was heated in winter by a hypocausis: the jorica at the intersection of the Forum and the Forum lulium. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

The Roman jorica was public in the full sense of the term, like soldiers' latrines in war time. People met there, conversed, and exchanged invitations to dinner without embarrassment. And at the same time, it was equipped with superfluities which we forego and decorated with a lavishness we are not wont to spend on such a spot. All round the semicircle or rectangle which it formed, water flowed continuously in little channels, in front of which a score or so of seats were fixed. The seats were of marble, and the opening was framed by sculptured brackets in the form of dolphins, which served both as a support and as a line of demarcation. Above the seats it was not unusual to see niches containing statues of gods or heroes, as on the Palatine, or an altar to Fortune, the goddess of health and happiness, as in Ostia; and not infrequently the room was cheered by the gay sound of a playing fountain as at Timgad. Let us be honest with ourselves: we are amazed at this mixture of delicacy and coarseness, at the solemnity and grace of the decorations and the familiarity of the actors. It is like nothing but the fifteenth century madrasas in Fez, where the latrines were also designed to accommodate a crowd, and decorated with exquisitely delicate stucco and covered with a lacelike ceiling of cedar wood. Suddenly Rome where even the latrines of the imperial palace, as majestic and ornate as a sanctuary beneath its dome, contained three seats side by side Rome at once mystic and sordid, artistic and carnal, without embarrassment and without shame seems to join hands with the distant Haghrab at the epoch of the Merinids, so far removed from us in time and space.

But the public latrines were not the resort of misers or of the very poor. These folk had no mind to enrich the conductores joricarum to the tune of even one as. They preferred to have recourse to the jars, skilfully chipped down for the purpose, which the fuller at the corner ranged in front of his workshop. He purchased permission for this from Vespasian, in consideration of a tax to which no odour clung, so as to secure gratis the urine necessary for his trade. Alternatively they clattered down the stairs to empty their chamber pots (las ana) and their commodes (sellae pertusae) into the vat or dolium placed under the well of the staircase. Or if perhaps this expedient had been forbidden by the landlord of their insula, they betook themselves to some neighbouring dungheap. For in Rome of the Caesars, as in a badly kept hamlet of today, more than one alley stank with the pestilential odour of a cess trench (lacus) such as those which Cato the Elder during his censorship paved over when he cleaned the cloacae and led them under the Aventine. Such malodorous trenches were extant in the days of Cicero and Caesar; Lucretius mentions them in a poem, two hundred years later, in the time of Trajan, they were still there and one might see unnatural mothers of the Megaera type, anxious to rid themselves of an unwanted child, surreptitiously taking advantage of a barbaric us law and exposing a new-born infant there; while matrons grieving over their barrenness would hasten no less secretly to snatch the baby, hoping to palm it off on a credulous husband as their own, and thus with a supposititious heir to still the ache in his paternal heart.

Water Supplies and Sewers in Ancient Rome

Roman public baths had a pubic sanitation system with water piped in and piped out. Some houses had water piped in but most homeowners had to have their water fetched and carried, one of the main duties of household slaves. Residents generally had to go out to public latrines to use the toilet. According to Listverse: The Romans “had two main supplies of water – high quality water for drinking and lower quality water for bathing. In 600 BC, the King of Rome, Tarquinius Priscus, decided to have a sewer system built under the city. It was created mainly by semi-forced laborers. The system, which outflowed into the Tiber river, was so effective that it remains in use today (though it is now connected to the modern sewerage system). It continues to be the main sewer for the famous amphitheater. It was so successful in fact, that it was imitated throughout the Roman Empire.” [Source: Listverse, October 16, 2009 ]

aqueduct pipe

All the important towns of Italy and many cities throughout the Roman world had abundant supplies of water brought by aqueducts from hills, sometimes at a considerable distance. The aqueducts of the Romans were among their most stupendous and most successful works of engineering. The first great aqueduct (aqua) at Rome was built in 312 B.C. by the famous censor Appius Claudius. Three more were built during the Republic and at least seven under the Empire, so that ancient Rome was at last supplied by eleven or more aqueducts. Modern Rome is well supplied by four, which are the sources and occasionally the channels of as many of the ancient ones. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) |+|]

“Mains were laid down the middle of the streets, and from these the water was piped into the houses. There was often a tank in the upper part of the house from which the water was distributed as needed. It was not usually carried into many of the rooms, but there was always a fountain in the peristylium and its garden, and a jet in the bathhouse and in the closet. The bathhouse had a separate heating apparatus of its own, which kept the room or rooms at the desired temperature and furnished hot water as required. The poor must have carried the water for household use from the public fountains in the streets. |+|

“The necessity for drains and sewers was recognized in very early times, the oldest at Rome dating traditionally from the time of the kings. Some of the ancient drains, among them the famous Cloaca Maxima, were in use until recent years. |+|

Exploding Toilets, Parasites and a Shared Wet Sponge

In Roman times, people generally didn't use soap, they cleaned themselves with olive oil and a scraping tool. A wet sponge placed on a stick was used instead of toilet paper. A typical public toilet, which was shared with dozens of other people, had a single sponge on a stick shared by all comers but usually not cleaned.

Mark Oliver wrote for Listverse: “When you entered a Roman toilet, there was a very real risk you would die. “The first problem was that creatures living in the sewage system would crawl up and bite people while they did their business. Worse than that, though, was the methane buildup—which sometimes got so bad that it would ignite and explode underneath you. [Source: Mark Oliver, Listverse, August 23, 2016]

“Toilets were so dangerous that people resorted to magic to try to stay alive. Magical spells meant to keep demons at bay have been found on the walls of bathrooms. Some, though, came pre-equipped with statues of Fortuna, the goddess of luck, guarding them. People would pray to Fortuna before stepping inside.”

Ancient Roman Chamber Pots

Ancient Greek and Roman chamber pots were taken to disposal areas which, according to Greek scholar Ian Jenkins, "was often no further than an open window." There were poor devils who found their stairs too steep and the road to these dung pits too long, and to save themselves further trouble would empty the contents of their chamber pots from their heights into the streets. So much the worse for the passer-by who happened to intercept the unwelcome gift! Fouled and sometimes even injured, as in Juvenal's satire, he had no redress save to lodge a complaint against the unknown assailant; many passages of the Digest indicate that Roman jurists did not disdain to take cognisance of this offence, to refer the case to the judges, to track down the offender, and assess the damages payable to the victim. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

chamber pot found in Gerace

Ulpian classifies the various clues by which it might be possible to trace the culprit. If [he says] the apartment [cenaculum] is divided among several tenants, redress can be sought only against that one of them who lives in that part of the apartment from the level of which the liquid has been poured. If the tenant, however, while professing to have sub-let [cenacularium exercens], has in fact retained for himself the enjoyment of the greater part of the apartment, he shall be held solely responsible. If, on the other hand, the tenant who professes to have sub-let has in fact retained for his own use only a modest fraction of the space, he and his sub-tenants shall be jointly held responsible. The same will hold good if the vessel or the liquid has been thrown from a balcony.

But Ulpian does not exclude the culpability of an individual if the inquiry is able to fix the blame on one guilty person, and he requests the praetor to set in equity a penalty proportionate to the seriousness of the injury. For instance When in consequence of the fall of one of these projectiles from a house, the body of a free man shall have suffered injury, the judge shall award to the victim in addition to medical fees and other expenses incurred in his treatment and necessary to his recovery, the total of the wages of which he has been or shall in future be deprived by the inability to work which has ensued.

Wise provisions these, which might seem to have inspired our laws relating to accidents, but which we have failed to adopt in their entirety, for Ulpian ends with a notable restriction. In formulating his final paragraph he expresses with unemotional simplicity his noble conception of the dignity of man: "As for scars or disfigurement which may have resulted from such wounds,' no damages can be calculated on this count, for the body of a free man is without price. "

Parasite Eggs Help Identify Ancient Roman Chamber Pot

In February 2022, archaeologists said that a 1,500-year-old, 30-centimeter (12.5 inch) -tall, 32-centimeter (13.5 inch) -wide ceramic vessel first labeled as storage jar may actually be a chamber pot based on the presence of whipworm eggs, which can be found in human feces. Smithsonian.org reported: The key to this identification was a calcified crust scraped off the bottom and sides of the pot. Upon analysis, researchers realized that the substance contained the parasitic whipworm eggs. The findings was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. [Source David Kindy, Smithsonia.org, February 24, 2022]

“Conical pots of this type have been recognized quite widely in the Roman Empire, and in the absence of other evidence, they have often been called storage jars,” says study co-author Roger Wilson, an archaeologist at the University of British Columbia, in a statement. “The discovery of many in or near public latrines had led to a suggestion that they might have been used as chamber pots, but until now proof has been lacking.”

Researchers uncovered the clay vessel in 2019 at a fifth-century C.E. Roman villa near the town of Gerace, Italy outside of a tepidarium, or warm room, in a bathhouse. Found in fragments, the reassembled pot stands about 12.5 inches tall and measures 13.5 inches wide at the rim, according to Brandon Specktor of Live Science. Early Sicilians may have used the ancient porta-potty simply by sitting on it. But the study suggests that they probably placed the vessel under a wicker or wooden chair with a hole in it. Roman records mention chamber pots made out of gold or onyx, but only terracotta and bronze vessels have been found to date, reports the Times. Beyond the Roman world, archaeologists have unearthed ancient chamber pots in Jerusalem, Egypt and Greece.

Pecunia non Olet (Roman Urine Tax)

bathtub from Herculaneum

In the first century A.D., Emperor Vespasian (A.D. 9-79) enacted what came to be known as the urine tax. At the time, urine was considered a useful commodity. It was commonly was used for laundry because the ammonia in the urine served as a clothes. Urine was also used in medicines. Urine was collected from public bathhouses and taxed. [Source: Andrew Handley, Listverse, February 8, 2013 ]

According to Listverse: “Pecunia non olet means “money does not smell”. This phrase was coined as a result of the urine tax levied by the Roman emperors Nero and Vespasian in the 1st century upon the collection of urine. The lower classes of Roman society urinated into pots which were emptied into cesspools. The liquid was then collected from public latrines, where it served as the valuable raw material for a number of chemical processes: it was used in tanning, and also by launderers as a source of ammonia to clean and whiten woollen togas. [Source: Listverse, October 16, 2009 ]

“There are even isolated reports of it being used as a teeth whitener (supposedly originating in what is now Spain). When Vespasian’s son, Titus, complained about the disgusting nature of the tax, his father showed him a gold coin and uttered the famous quote. This phrase is still used today to show that the value of money is not tainted by its origins. Vespasian’s name still attaches to public urinals in France (vespasiennes), Italy (vespasiani), and Romania (vespasiene).”

In “Life of Vespasian” Suetonius wrote: “When Titus found fault with him for contriving a tax upon public toilets, he held a piece of money from the first payment to his son's nose, asking whether its odor was offensive to him. When Titus said "No," he replied, "Yet it comes from urine." On the report of a deputation that a colossal statue of great cost had been voted him at public expense, he demanded to have it set up at once, and holding out his open hand, said that the base was ready. [Source: Suetonius (c.69-after 122 A.D.): “De Vita Caesarum: Vespasian” (“Life of Vespasian”), written c. A.D. 110, translated by J. C. Rolfe, Suetonius, 2 Vols., The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, and New York: The MacMillan Co., 1914), II.281-321]

Sex Jokes Found on Mosaics in a Roman Public Toilet in Turkey

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: Mosaics on the floor of 1,800-year-old public toilets in Antiochia ad Cragum, a city on the southern coast of Turkey, reveal some amusing sexual puns. The second-century Roman mosaics are based on ancient mythology and show Narcissus (from whom we get the term “narcissist”) preoccupied with his own penis. According to the myth, Narcissus, a beautiful young man, fell in love with his own reflection. In the latrine version Narcissus has a notably long nose (something ancient Romans didn’t consider beautiful), and when he gazes down into the water he is actually admiring his large penis rather than his nose. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, November 22, 2018]

In the second scene, Ganymede is having his genitals washed by a bird holding a sponge. According to Homer, Ganymede was the most beautiful mortal in the world. Zeus fell in love with him and kidnapped him to serve as cup-bearer among the immortals. In the mosaic Zeus is shown not as an eagle but a heron. Ganymede (who in ancient art is usually shown holding a stick and hoop) is holding a sponge known as a tersorium. This the same kind of sponge that, ordinarily, would have served, in the words of historian Stephen Nash, as a communal “toilet brush for your butt.” Heron-Zeus grasps a sponge in his beak and dabs at Ganymede’s penis. Michael Hoff, an archaeologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told Live Science this month, “Instantly, anybody who would have seen that image would have seen the [visual] pun… Is it indicative of cleaning the genitals prior to a sex act or after a sex act? That's a question I cannot answer, and it might have been ambiguous then.” In either case the combination of sexual and scatological imagery in a bathroom context is highly suggestive.

The scientists who discovered the mosaics last summer told Live Science that they were stunned by the discovery. Hoff added that, while a certain literacy with ancient mythology is a prerequisite for understanding the mosaics, “bathroom humor is kind of universal as it turns out."

Scatological and sexual graffiti adorned the walls of public bathrooms (and elsewhere) in the ancient world. One from Pompeii reads “Apollinaris, doctor to the emperor Titus, had a good crap (cacavit) here!” Another example of ancient bathroom grafitto reads “don’t shit here.” And these are the tamer examples. The intriguing thing about the mosaics from Antioch ad Cragnum is that the sexualized jovial tone is by thoughtful design. Many ancient bathrooms were beautiful; with frescoes on the walls, sculptures in the corners and, sometimes, marble slabs for ‘toilet seats.’ Bathroom humor was a matter of taste and consideration.

Studying the Contents of the Pompeii Sewer System

Duncan Kennedy BBC, Archaeologists excavating Herculaneum near Pompeii “have been discovering how Romans lived 2,000 years ago, by studying what they left behind in their sewers. A team of experts has been sifting through hundreds of sacks of human excrement. They found a variety of details about their diet and their illnesses. In a tunnel 86 meters long, they unearthed what is believed to be the largest deposit of human excrement ever found in the Roman world. Seven hundred and fifty sacks of it to be exact, containing a wealth of information. [Source: Duncan Kennedy, BBC, July 1, 2011]

“The scientists have been able to study what foods people ate and what jobs they did, by matching the material to the buildings above, like shops and homes. This unprecedented insight into the diet and health of ancient Romans showed that they ate a lot of vegetables. One sample also contained a high white blood cell count, indicating, say researchers, the presence of a bacterial infection. The sewer also offered up items of pottery, a lamp, 60 coins, necklace beads and even a gold ring with a decorative gemstone.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated October 2024