'Cacator cave malum': what collective latrines teach about ancient Rome

“I love this place,” exclaims Mary Beard in the third part of one of her BBC historical documentaries,

.

The monument she is about to show can explain many things about ancient Rome, although it is relatively unexpected: it is a public latrine.

Defecation, for the Romans, was not always a private matter.

They shared talk, comments, jokes and even a sponge attached to a stick that they used to clean themselves - the same one after another, something that today would be considered quite unhygienic.

“Splendid is your dinner, I confess it”, explains Marcial, the sharpest and most cynical of Latin writers in his famous

, in this case XLVIII (48), “very splendid;

but it will be nothing tomorrow, even more, today, at this very moment, nothing that the unfortunate sponge of a disgusting stick does not know”.

“If you want to understand the culture, look at its baths,” says Mary Beard, sitting in a nearly intact latrine in Ostia Antica, one of Italy's best-preserved ruins, reached from Rome on a commuter train as beautiful as it is. desperately slow.

"In the center of Rome, according to an old guide that is preserved, there were 144 latrines, although we do not know how many seats each one had," continues the prestigious Cambridge historian, recently retired, Princess of Asturias Award winner and author of books such as

or

.

More information

Mary Beard: “The ancient Romans don't have much to teach us”

Latrines in Ostia Antica.getty

Next, he expresses a series of doubts about the use of public latrines: were they mixed?

What were the small pipes located at the foot of the craps used for?

Was the second hole only used to insert the stick with the sponge?

"No matter.

This is how we should imagine the old city: everyone shitting at the same time.

Toga up, pants down, chatting while proceeding”, he sentences.

The scene in Mary Beard's documentary is not strange among specialists of the ancient world: it is far from the only one that has been interested in the enormous information that can be extracted from the defecative customs of the Romans and, in general, from their relationship with the bathrooms.

The historian Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, one of the great experts on the cities destroyed by Vesuvius in the year 79, carried out an exhaustive investigation of the remains of faeces that were preserved in Herculaneum.

He discovered some objects that were lost in the almost fossilized shit and, in addition, he obtained a lot of information about the diet: chicken, lamb, fish, figs, fennel, olives, sea urchins and molluscs.

“This is a completely standard diet for ordinary townspeople,” Wallace-Hadrill explained in a National Geographic documentary.

“It is a very good diet;

any doctor would recommend it.”

But no researcher is better than Barry Hobson, who spent 14 years excavating in Pompeii and who is the author of the two reference books on the subject (unfortunately difficult to find today and neither of them translated into Spanish):

(Duckworth, 2009) and

(BAR Publishing, 2009).

The latter requires a passion for Roman latrines within the reach of very few specialists.

The first, on the other hand, is a very informative and fun book, which answers many of the questions that Mary Beard raised.

General view of some latrines in Ostia Antica.getty

The title of the essay, published in 2009, differentiates between individual toilets (

) and collective toilets (

).

Analyzing both spaces, Hobson provides a great deal of information about the Roman world, about its sense of privacy, for example.

Collective baths reflect a considerable distance from the Western world today, where this matter is almost always private, although, on the other hand, many individual baths have also been found in Roman ruins.

Hobson recounts, for example, that Seneca tells of a gladiator who committed suicide with a sponge when he went to the bathroom unaccompanied, which would mean that he claimed privacy.

"During a gladiatorial fight with the wild beasts, one of the Germans who was to participate in the morning show retired to the outhouse to evacuate - nowhere else was he allowed to go without an escort -", wrote the Stoic philosopher and adviser to Nero .

"There, the stick that, attached to a sponge, is used to clean the impurity of the body, stuffed it all into the throat and drowned."

However, both archeology and Marcial's graffiti or epigrams reflect a clear fraternization in the

.

“Vacerra is in the bathrooms at all hours, sitting all day.

Vacerra does not want to shit, he wants to be invited to dinner, ”the Latin poet wrote.

The chapter dedicated to graffiti is especially amusing, with a mysterious and disturbing one that is repeated in several places in Pompeii: “

”, “Cagador, be careful”, which warned of the hidden evil that whoever used the latrines could meet.

Some other graffiti indicates who had relieved himself there - for example, Appolinaris, physician to Emperor Titus at Herculaneum - and in quite a few places in Pompeii there are inscriptions warning against defecating there, leading to the conclusion that the Romans did not they always used the appropriate spaces for these tasks.

As a doctor, Hobson also studied the concept of hygiene in ancient Rome and, above all, if its inhabitants were aware of the danger that the accumulation of feces represented, beyond the smell.

“Did the Romans know about the health problems that human excrement could pose?” he writes, without finding a clear answer, although he considers that “the transmission of diseases was misunderstood”.

He emphasizes, however, that 19th century London was not much more hygienic than Pompeii in the 1st century. It is true that the Romans had a deep relationship with water, through aqueducts or baths, but their hygienic concept it was very different.

In the hot springs, for example, the water was stagnant and going with a foot injury was a very bad idea.

One of the works that best analyzes the Roman world from the point of view of baths and water, but also of latrines, is a manga,

(Editorial Standard), by Mari Yamazaki, which has also just been released as an

series on Netflix.

It tells the story of a Roman spa engineer who travels back in time to present-day Japan, where he learns all kinds of tricks to improve his constructions.

With great humor and careful historical research, Yamazaki shows what unites two cultures for which hot springs are an essential element.

But also what separates them:

are light years away from the cleanliness obsession of Japanese toilets, which offer all kinds of buttons to improve the experience and hygiene.

In fact, one of the first chapters of the series shows the abyss that separates the Roman

, with their disgusting sponges, from the technological Japanese toilets.

Two worlds separated and united at the same time by the water and the bathrooms.

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