Originally published at: Pooping in ancient Rome | Boing Boing
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Omnis Cacat
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I once grossed out some Christian coworkers when I pointed out what Roman soldiers used vinegar soaked sponges for…
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Yikes, no stalls? I suppose romans didn’t have shy bowels.
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So the men can encourage each other. Camaraderie. - General Bartford Hamilton Steele.
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Just to put this in perspective: it’s actually the other way round: diluted vinegar, posca, was the drink of choice of Roman soldiers. It is very likely that the soldiers were actually trying to give the dying man some of their own water rations, not trying to mock him.
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As the narrator said…togas aided in personal privacy.
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It’s entirely possible that “shy bowels” are the result of learned behavior. You know, a lot of people take this time of year as a cue to start unlearning bad habits.
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Public latrines are still a thing. I used one of the open pit variety as recently as 2007, in Moldova while on a bus trip to the Black Sea near Odessa, Ukraine.
Another example, Uganda:
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This sounds like my worst nightmare - but I guess if you grew up with it like this - it wouldn’t be bad.
And let’s not even think about the smell.
It can not be worse than the out house like pits they have in places like state parks in the heat of the summer.
I think the Roman ones at least had a system to flush it out.
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“When in Rome,” I mutter to myself as I reach for the public latrine sponge…
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Notice in the image that they all held in their hands the “mighty poop stick”, those were the days.
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When I went to high school, a Catholic high school, the bathrooms had the stalls removed to discourage smoking and drugs. Did I mention the part about it being a Catholic school?
For the first year I did not use the bathroom at all during the day except maybe in gym class because the locker room had the only acceptable bathrooms.
Maybe they were trying to imitate ancient Rome.
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So did my public high school, at least in the boys bathrooms. AFAIU, it was pretty common. One of the bathrooms even had a toilet with no partition at all, sitting right at the end of a row of urinals, basically the first thing you see when you walk into the bathroom. The “display stall” as it was called. I don’t think it was ever used, and I have no idea how that came to be.
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So much shit talking in this thread.
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Did it have a german style toilet as well?
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No poop knife, though.
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I can’t be bothered with a thread filled with such potty language…
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Nowadays you need the poop sieve.
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