Roman Latrines - The BAS Library

Endnotes

1.

M.Th.R.M. Dolmans discusses this possibility in “Hygiene in de Oudheid en in de Middeleeuwen” (“Hygiene in Antiquity and the Middle Ages”), in Latrines: antiete toiletten—modern onderzoek, ed. Susanna Piras (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 6–12.

2.

Findings such as those gleaned from 19th-century American outhouses have revolutionized ideas about early American household sanitary practice. See Kathleen Wheeler, “View From the Outhouse: What We Can Learn from the Excavation of Privies,” Historical Archaeology 34 (1) (2000), pp. 1–2.

3.

Piras, Latrines; see also Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Water, Sewers, and Toilets (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming).

4.

Arnold and Mariette De Vos, Guide archeologiche Laterza: Pompei, Ercolano, Stabia (Roma-Bari: Gius, Laterza & Figli Spa, 1982), pp. 90–96.

5.

Koloski-Ostrow, “Finding Social Meaning in the Public Latrines of Pompeii,” in BABESCH (Leiden: 1996), ed. Nathalie De Haan and Gemma C.M. Jansen; and “Cacator cave malum: The Subject and Object of Roman Public Latrines in Italy During the First Centuries B.C. and A.D,” in Cura Aquarum in Sicilia, ed. Jansen, BABESCH (Leiden: 2000).

6.

Richard Neudecker, Die Pracht der Latrine: Zum Wandel öffentlicher Bedürfnisanstalten in der kaaiserzeitlichen Stadt (Munich: Dr. Friedrich Pfeil, 1994).

7.

For research on private toilets in Roman houses, see Jansen, “Water Systems and Sanitation in the Houses of Herculaneum,” Mitteilungen des Leichtweiss-Instituts für Wasserbau der Technischen Universität Braunschweig 117 (1992), pp. 449–468; “Private Toilets at Pompeii: Appearance and Operation,” in Sequence and Space in Pompeii, eds. Sara E. Bon and Rick Jones, Oxbow Monographs 77 (Oxford: 1997), pp. 121–134; and “Systems for the Disposal of Waste and Excreta in Roman Cities. The Situation at Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia” in SORDIS URBIS: L’eliminazione dei rifiuti nella città romana, ed. Xavier Duprè Raventós (Rome: 1999).

8.

Jansen, “Toilets of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli (Italy) and Roman Privacy,” in American Journal of Archaeology 106 (April, 2002), p. 257. Jansen and her team studied more than 40 toilets at Hadrian’s Villa with two questions in mind: Who used what toilets, and how much privacy did the toilets offer?

9.

See Arnold and Mariette De Vos, Guide archeologiche Laterza, pp. 250–3, for information on the Villa of Oplontis, modern Torre Annunciata. The ample latrine is no. 48 on their plan (p. 251).

10.

Varro, De re rustica 1.13.4 and 1.6.24, and Columella, De Re Rustica 9.5.1, provide directions about how to construct privies for agricultural uses. Also see Arnold and Mariette De Vos, Guide archeologiche Laterza, p. 242, for the Villa rustica alla Pisanella at Boscoreale, the most complete excavation of a working farm on the Bay of Naples in the outskirts of Pompeii.

11.

Petronius, Satyricon 27.47.6. There is also a reference to the lasanum in Horace’s Satires 1.6.109.

12.

See Lucinda Lambert, Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 7.

13.

Seneca, Epistles 70.20: “Ibi lignum id, quod ad emundanda obscena adhaerente spongia positum est, totum in gulam farsit et interclusis faucibus spiritum elisit.”

14.

Martial, Epigrams 12.48.7.

15.

See John R. Clarke, “Look Who’s Laughing: Humor in Tavern Painting as Index of Class and Acculturation,” in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 43/44 (1998/1999), pp. 36–47.