I frequently visit a women’s restroom in a prestigious downtown building. It’s an inside room with poor ventilation. Many times I’ve complained to myself about the smells that linger for hours.
The Ancient Romans put up with worse. If the house had a “toilet,” it was more of an outhouse attached to the kitchen than today’s modern bathroom. Some scholars speculate that in large houses, the hole in the closet-sized space in the back of the house was only for slaves. The wealthy used a chamber pot. Even so, it would take time—and leave a smell—before some slave whisked it away.
Pooping outdoors in the city was commonplace by the amount of graffiti devoted to warning people not to do it. In Pompeii, on the walls lining a small street near the amphitheater, are large letters screaming. “Sh#tter, beware of misfortune.”
A lengthier curse is found in Rome. “Anyone who urinates or defecates here, may he incur the wrath of the twelve gods and also both Diana and Jupiter the Best and Greatest.”
They must have had quite the problem to involve a curse like that. So did people defecate where there was no warning?
The people of Pompeii created about 1,000 pounds of excrement a day, according to one scholar. It must have reeked, and there was nothing they could do about it.
I guess I can live with a few minutes of unpleasant smells.
Thanks to Sarah Levin-Richardson’s excellent chapter “Bodily Waste and Boundaries in Pompeian Graffiti” in the book Ancient Obscenities: Their Nature and Use in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds.