For ancient Romans, pooping was a group activity

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Imagine answering the call of nature in a dark, stinking chamber alongside dozens of strangers, all while making pleasant conversation. When it’s time to wipe, perhaps you reach for a communal sponge on a stick, hoping that the person before you rinsed it well. You’re also hoping that the hole you’re sitting over won’t suddenly release rats, or flames. 

This might sound like some kind of punishment or endurance challenge today, but in Ancient Rome this was just a standard public restroom.

So what exactly was it like to use a Roman toilet? Here are all the smelly details. 

The different kinds of Roman toilet

At home, the poorest Romans relieved themselves in chamber pots. Some apartment buildings were equipped with a shared pit toilet on the ground floor, while wealthier homes might have their own private ones. Unfortunately, these private toilets were often placed near the kitchen, likely because it was also on the lowest level of a Roman home and close to a source of water for washing. 

While some of these latrines connected to pipes that moved waste underground, very few drained into Ancient Rome’s sewer system. Rome had one of the world’s first urban sewer systems, a network that included the Cloaca Maxima. Rivaling modern sewers in size and complexity, this remarkable network of tunnels dates as far back as 500 BC, and parts are still in use today, draining runoff from the Forum in the heart of the city.

But the Cloaca Maxima was primarily designed to drain marshland and alleviate flooding. Only a small portion of it was used to carry wastewater away from the empire’s capital. This meant that latrines had to be periodically emptied. 

Household slaves emptied the private toilets of the wealthy, while paid waste removers cleaned out public pit toilets and chamber pots. These paid removers would shovel waste into horse-drawn carts, which they drove out of the city at times when no other street traffic was permitted for maximum efficiency. The collected waste was then sold as fertilizer. 

The poorest Romans, often isolated on the upper floors of tenement buildings, would also empty chamber pots out of windows, although this was made illegal by the third century.

Classicist and Roman plumbing expert Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow suggests that private toilets might have been cut off from the municipal sewers to prevent animals crawling up the pipes and into homes. And not just rats. Koloski-Ostrow cites one ancient account of an intrepid octopus, which climbed out of a toilet to devour fish stored in the household pantry.

Inside Roman public toilets

As Rome’s population grew, public toilets were installed in high-traffic areas for the free access of all (although in practice, they were used mostly by men). By the third century, the city had 144 such facilities. Known as foricae (singular forica), they are also found in other Roman settlements, such as Ostia and Pompeii.

Foricae were generally connected to city sewers and equipped with running water. Many had a channel for rinsing that ran along the floor, as well as a pool in the center of the room to help diffuse odors (how much, no one can say), and sometimes an additional washbasin. Sewage would be flushed by releasing collected rainwater or runoff from bathhouses. Foricae were typically placed near bathhouses for this reason. 

From there, the sewers carried waste off into the river or ocean, where it ran the risk of contaminating water sources. The second-century physician Galen warned against eating fish from “the outlets of rivers which clean out the sewers, the tavern, and the baths,” suggesting that at least some Romans were aware of the health risks.

What was it like to use a Roman public toilet?

Inside a forica, stone benches lined the walls, with open holes to sit on over the drainage channel below. Foricae varied widely in size. One from the Roman port of Ostia could seat 20, but the elaborate Baths of Caracalla had two adjacent restrooms seating 100 each. The absence of privacy in these open rooms was a nonissue for the Romans, who also slept, ate, and bathed in view of one another.

Lacking modern long-distance communication, Romans relished any opportunity for connecting with each other in person, even in the restroom. Ancient writers like the first-century satirist Martial described foricae as a hub for socialization. 

In one poem, Martial mocks a friend who “spends hours in all the privies, sitting all day long” in hopes of getting invited to a party: “He doesn’t want a shit. He wants a dinner.” In another poem, Martial suggests that a writer seeking fame should copy his works on the toilet walls for all to read. Even in Ancient Rome, there was toilet graffiti.

Foricae could also be quite scary. Hydrogen sulfide and methane gas rising from the cesspits were known to suddenly burst into flames, not unlike the natural phenomenon of burning marsh gas. Superstitious Romans imagined demons lurking in the darkness under the toilet seats. Many toilet walls bore images of Fortuna, the goddess of luck, just in case.

What did Romans use as “toilet paper?”

When it came to wiping, Romans had several options. The humblest was leaves or moss. One could also scrape oneself clean with discs of pottery called pessoi, made by rounding off the edges on broken potshards.

A gentler method was a natural sea sponge on a stick, known as a tersorium, which means “wiper” in Latin, or xylospongium, “sponge stick” in Ancient Greek. These were likely found in public foricae. After using a sponge stick, you would rinse it off in the running water channel if there was one, or else in a provided bucket of water or vinegar, and pass it to the next person.

As horrifying as this might sound, remember that the Romans didn’t know about germs. If something looked clean, they likely assumed it was. The sponge stick was such a normal, everyday object that it could even be used in metaphor. In a letter from the second century, a soldier named Claudius Terentianus complained about someone who “pays no more attention to me than to a sponge stick.”

What about urinals?

Standing urinals in the form of gutters are found at some Roman public buildings, such as the Colosseum. Like foricae, they were connected to running water and could be used by many people at once. 

Just as solid waste was valued as fertilizer, urine was a commodity in Roman industry due to its ammonia content. It was used for tanning leather, making toothpaste (yes, really), and most of all for cleansing and fortifying fabric in a process called fulling.

Instead of letting it all go to waste down the Cloaca Maxima, fullers and others who needed urine for their business placed pots on the streets to be filled by passersby. This resource was so valuable that the first-century Emperor Vespasian even imposed a tax on it. When his son expressed disgust at this, the Emperor is said to have replied “Pecunia non olet:” Money doesn’t stink.

Faced with the challenge of keeping their great city clean, the Romans had some solutions that were ingenious and sophisticated for their time. Still, if you ever plan on visiting Ancient Rome in a time machine, you should probably use the bathroom before you leave.

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