The Puzzling Channels in Ancient Latrines

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In the previous article Ronny Reich and Ya‘akov Billig told us that the strange-looking grooves in the stones amount to nothing more that a flushing channel. But how does this channel work? It is, after all, the most important evidence that the stones had been used in a latrine. I admit my first thought was that somehow people relieved themselves into the flushing channel. But my friend Ronny Reich insists that this could not be: The flushing channel was on the floor—not under, but in front of a person sitting on the toilet. Yet Reich could not give an […]

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Footnotes

For more about Martial, see “Past Perfect: In the Here and Now,” AO 05:05.

Endnotes

In addition to Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, I would like to thank Philip J. King, Gregory Nagy, Kathleen M. Coleman, A. Trevor Hodge and Esther Dvorjetski for their assistance on this article. Any errors, of course, are mine.

A. Trevor Hodge, Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply (London: Duckworth, 1992), p. 271.

Fritz Kretzschmer, La technique romaine (Brussels, 1966), cited in Hodge, Aqueducts, p. 454, n. 77. Citing Roto-Rooter’s History of Plumbing, Dan Berger, the administrator of the MadSci Network (a collection of scientists of various disciplines answering questions, at www.madsci.org), says that toilet paper as we know it was not invented until about 1880. Before that, paper would have been too expensive for this purpose. Likewise cloth, although it could be washed and reused. Leaves were largely unavailable in urban areas. According to Berger, for most of human history “the preferred tool” was the left hand, presumably with water.

Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, “Finding Social Meaning in the Public Latrines of Pompeii,” in Nathalie de Haan and Gemma C.M. Jansen, eds., Cura Aquarum in Campania (Leiden: Stichting Babesch, 1996), p. 81.

Koloski-Ostrow, “Cacator cave malum: the subject and object of Roman public latrines in Italy during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.” in Gemma C.M. Jansen, ed., Cura Aquarum in Sicilia (Leiden: Stichting Babesch, 2000), p. 291.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Epistles, 2.70.20, Loeb Classical Library (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), pp. 67–69.

Koloski-Ostrow, “Latrines of Pompeii,” p. 81 and following.

Marcus Valerius Martial, Epigrams, 2.12.48.7, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), p. 351.

Jerome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), p. 41.