Roman Toilets: Disgusting To Us, Normal To Them

Ancient Rome had aqueducts, public baths, running water and a sewer big enough to steer a boat through. Almost nobody had a toilet at home. That is not a gap in the engineering. It is what the engineering was actually for. If you rented a room on the fourth floor of a Roman apartment block, you had no toilet, no drain and no connection to any of it — and that was most of the city. Even people wealthy enough to pay for a connection often turned one down, for a reason that made complete sense at the time. So what did a million people actually do? A public bench with no doors between the seats, a sponge nobody can agree about, and a clay pot carried down four flights of stairs. This is the ordinary version of Roman sanitation, and why the most famous plumbing in the ancient world barely reached the people living above it. A note on the evidence: the shared-sponge story is far thinner than its popularity suggests, and Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow's work on Roman sanitation sets out how much of the familiar version rests on very little. The parasite findings come from Piers Mitchell's 2016 study in Parasitology. Martial and Juvenal are poets being rude, not reporters. Where something is a guess, this video says so. Origins Untold tells strange, surprising stories about how humans lived before the modern world. #AncientRome #RomanEmpire #Historyations human history