Stephen Guerriero:
Hello, Brandeis alumni and friends. My name is Stephen Guerriero. I'm a sixth grade social studies teacher in Needham, Massachusetts, but I'm also a graduate of the Ancient Greek and Roman studies program at Brandeis from 2015. It's really my great pleasure to introduce my friend, my mentor, my advisor, my professor, Professor Ann Kolaski-Ostrow, or, as anyone who's been around the Brandeis humanities world knows her as AOKO.
Stephen Guerriero:
AOKO, today, is going to talk to you about Climate Change and Sanitation: Yesterday's Tomorrow Straight from the Roman City. Ann is a legend in the Brandeis community, although she would never say it. But I, as her former student am very happy to.
Stephen Guerriero:
So we are delighted to welcome you, alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, and friends from around the world. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you for your support of Brandeis and for the humanities generally.
Stephen Guerriero:
I would love to tell you a little bit about Professor AOKO and her work before we start. Firstly, AOKO has done field work in Herculaneum and Pompeian Italy, in Jordan, and Carthage in Tunisia and survey work or archeological research in Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, and Turkey. Professor AOKO works on many aspects of Roman daily life, including prostitution, slavery, urbanism, particularly urban infrastructure, plumbing and hydraulics, water supply, and wastewater disposal, baths and bathing practices, and toilets and sanitation, which she is very affectionately known in the Roman archeological world as the Queen of Latrines. More of that in her talk.
Stephen Guerriero:
She's also the author of several publications. Some recent works include The Archeology and Sanitation in Roman Italy of Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems from 2015 and a paperback in 2018, roman Toilets and Their Archeological and Cultural History, co-edited with Gemma Jansen and Eric Mormon, and Water Use and Hydraulics in the Roman City.
Stephen Guerriero:
Her forthcoming works, Making Sense of Pompeii and Herculaneum daily life and the sensorium of the Roman city will be coming from Cambridge University Press. 68 Toilets and Urinals in the Ancient City of Rome, Sanitary Urbanistic and Social Agency, coauthored and edited also with Gemma Jansen and Richard NewDecker, which will be forthcoming, as well as a volume one of a six volume Bloomsbury press series, the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Technology, Pre-history Through Antiquity, of which she is coauthor and co-edited with Robin Taylor.
Stephen Guerriero:
She has won many teaching awards for starters, five of the six offered by Brandeis University during her 36 year teaching career at Brandeis. She was the winner of the national award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, both from the archeological Institute of America and from the society of classical studies. Currently, she has been named the Charles Elliot Norton lecturer in archeology by the archeological Institute of America for the 2022 and 2023 season.
Stephen Guerriero:
She will take up this role right after she retires from Brandeis at the end of June 2022. Like I said, her friends call her the Queen of Latrines and she recently was honored with a Lego figurine, from Lego classicists, as one of the most distinguished female classical archeologists in the United States. I also will take this opportunity to let you know that I have a personal relationship with Professor AOKO, going back over a decade, when I first started with a professional development course that I can easily say changed my life. I traveled to Greece with Professor AOKO and she recruited me into the Ancient Greek and Roman studies program at Brandeis, for which I'm forever grateful. It led me to things like digging on my first of several archeological digs, of completing a master's program in Greek and Roman studies, furthering my studies and professional development in Latin, Roman history, Greek history, literature, and culture and side note, she sent me on a path which actually had me meet my spouse. It was only because of her that that had happened.
Stephen Guerriero:
So I don't want to take up too much time, but I am so very honored, happy, and really excited to welcome Professor AOKO. I'm really looking forward to hearing this talk. If you have questions while you're listening, feel free to use the Q and A function. I'll moderate a question and answer period at the end of professor AOKO's talk. So hold on to those questions, feel free to type them in the question and answer box, and I'll monitor that for when we finish the talk. So without further ado, professor AOKO.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Thank you, Stephen. Well, I feel every bit as affectionate towards Stephen, as he seems to feel towards me. We've done a lot of traveling together and looked at a lot of archeology together. First of all, I want to thank all of you for coming today on this kind of warm June day and thank you all so much for the support you do give Brandeis. These are not easy times for the humanities and I hope to show you in this talk, how valuable studying the humanities can be for understanding the past, which helps us understand the present, but also helps us understand ourselves. So I'm going to start by just reminding you what the abstract for this talk said, because it asks a bunch of questions that I'd like you to keep in the back of your minds. And if you don't feel the talk has answered them, maybe you'll ask me again or Stephen again, at the end of my talk.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So I wrote in that abstract, what can Roman toilets and sewers teach us about daily life in ancient Rome, including general sanitation and of a Roman value system. What does the archeology of these structures reveal about Roman hygiene customs related to purity or cleanliness, causes and types of disease, life expectancy, recycling of waste, or even climate change. In a talk, this talk, that investigates and illustrates some key examples of public and private Roman toilets and sewers from Rome, from Pompeii, from Herculaneum and from Ostia and those by the way are probably the best preserved Roman cities we have in Italy. We were going to take a trip down into the black holes of ancient space and try to find some answers. So now if I can share my screen, we did this before, and we hope it will work this time. We will get started.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So Brandeis' motto, as I'm sure you all know, is truth to its inner most parts. So we're going to practice that motto in today's talk, in honor of all of you, alumni, alumnae, and friends, and I, again, thank you very much for joining me and I promise you some surprises and I hope you will see how in education in the humanities, in my case, and in Stephen's case, classical art, literature, archeology, and history can provide serious help in understanding the problems that we face today, such as health and sanitation, recycling, waste disposal and as I said, even climate change. As I worked up this talk, I must tell you that I found I had so much to tell you about sanitary issues. I shall not get as deeply into climate change and antiquity as I thought I might, but certainly we can touch on it in the question period, for more questions you might have about it.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I am very happy to be here today and I must give my thanks to Alison Sacon and to the alumni college staff for making all of this possible. I love to talk about my work, especially to Braindeisans, former and present. And hand in hand, so you know, textual evidence combined with archeology can really open up whole new doors of understanding for ancient daily life and perhaps also understandings of ourselves and our own prejudices about difficult issues that we face today. So let's see if we go. So together now ,we're going to focus on what we can learn about Roman daily life from sewer and toilet research. Everyone always seems to want to talk about toilets and sewers. They bring out the middle school personas. Stephen can relate to that from his middle school teaching, they bring out the middle school personas in all of us, like a headline I saw a few years ago in a local newspaper that said, quote, "Police Precinct Toilets Stolen. Not much to Go On."
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I joke here, but toilets and sewers are not funny topics at all. The World Health Organization says that right now, every year, more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making them the leading cause of death around the world. Most of these victims are young children and the vast majority of whom die of illnesses caused by organisms that thrive in water sources that were contaminated by raw sewage. A report published recently in the medical journal, The Lancet, concluded that poor water sanitation and lack of safe drinking water take a greater toll on humanity than war terrorism or weapons of mass destruction combined. According to an assessment commissioned by the United nations, 4,000 children die each day as a result of diseases caused by ingestion of filthy water. The report says four out of 10 people in the world, particularly those in Africa and Asia, do not have clean water to drink and do not have proper sanitary facilities.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
The resource analyst, Eric Peterson, of the center for strategic international studies in Washington, DC, describes the water crisis this way and I quote, "at any given time close to half the population of the developing world is suffering from waterborne diseases associated with inadequate provision of water and sanitation services. There are about 4 billion cases of diarrhea disease per year resulting in about one to 2 million deaths, some 90% of which tragically our children under the age of five." And I close quote. Cholera, typhoid fever, hepatitis A, are all caused by bacteria, often harbored in diarrhoeal deposits. Other illnesses such as dysentery are caused by parasites that live in water contaminated by feces of sick individuals. Lakes and streams, which people use for drinking water bathing and defecating are sources of disease, as is water left by natural disasters. Every year, tsunamis leave victims in ankle deep water, amid destroyed, poorly laid sewage pipes.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So these statistics show the importance of the subjects of health and sanitation across time and cultures. Oops, wrong way. Sorry. So to return to our topic for today, I've been very involved in toilet research for about the last 15 years and I have some interesting findings to share with you about toilets in ancient Roman daily life. You see here, some of my friends, international scholars who work on toilets and they're actually all sitting on a toilet there, a public Roman latrine in the town of Ostia. After I organized a Roman toilet workshop in 2007 in Rome with these scholars, I published my first major toilet book, which Stephen mentioned to you, Gemma Jansen and Eric Mormon were my co writers and editors and that book was called Roman Toilets, Their Archeology and Cultural History. That book acknowledged that more than any other facet of Mediterranean archeology, toilets have always fascinated legions of nonspecialists, while specialists themselves have tended to avoid the topic as taboo or just too dirty and risky.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I am, I must tell you all, after all known as quote Kolaski Ostrow on the toilet in scholarly circles. As a scholar, however, I'm quite gratified to know that my reputation as Queen of Latrines is growing and getting stronger every year. And the good news is that Brandeis seems to appreciate the notoriety of these titles and topics too. And as Stephen also mentioned to you, my next book, 2005, a single author book called the Archeology of Roman Sanitation, Water Sewers and Toilets, published by the University of North Carolina Press, became a paper back in 2018 and it digs deeper still into Roman sanitary matters. And as Stephen also mentioned, I have quite a bit of new work coming out in 2022, specifically on the toilets of Rome, on new excavations and poorly studied old excavations of toilets and sewers. So let's figure out what really went on in Roman toilets. Our two main topics in this talk, along with many others we'll address in the question period are number one, Roman urban sanitation, that is did the Romans have such a concept at all and topic two, toilet and sewer facts.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
What specifics can we say about Roman toilets and sewers and what kind of evidence exists? Where is that evidence and what does it tell us? So, first of all, I want to give you an overview of Roman sanitation and let's take... To do that, let's take a virtual walk in the well-preserved Roman city of Pompeii, on the bay of Naples and this is how it would've looked at the end of the first century, CE, a few years before 79 CE, which was when it was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. You can imagine piercing noises and rotting food, and precariously loaded wagons and uncivil crowds and uncomfortable heat and sweat and mud and dust.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
These would have been common daytime annoyances on the streets of any Roman city in the first century, probably worst of all in the enormous city of Rome and while we have a hard time picturing such chaos from a tourist site of Pompei, note this pristine view you see in front of you of the Via dell’Abbondanza, the main east-west street in Pompei. We do have evidence from the Roman writer, Juvenal, who lived and wrote towards the end of the first century CE.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
And he tells us in his satire three, that even greater dangers lurked in the streets of a Roman city after dark, besides the common dangers of drunks and muggers, a Roman night-walker might also have to avoid broken jars hurled down from upstairs, open windows of tenement buildings or worse, the unsavory contents of chamber pots, a big splash of urine and excrement on that nice white Toga, not the perfect end to an evening out. The fact that Juvenal gives us... The fact is that Juvenal gives us a pretty unpleasant image of the sanitary and security conditions, at least of ancient Rome itself.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So here you see me in about 2007 mucking about in the greatest sewer of all, the Cloaca Maxima, under the city of Rome and here I'm trying to figure out just how accurate Juvenal's literary description really is. Now note how humanities research, into text and into scientific archeology are interconnecting here. Was Juvenal serious or merely trying to be funny when he made those hideous descriptions of nighttime Rome? Getting to the truth about sanitary practices is not so easy, but archeological evidence combined with sanitary practices or sorry, combined with literature, can be quite informative and eyeopening. And I just have to point out to this particular audience that I advertise Brandeis, even when I'm in the sewers of Rome, you see my t-shirt there.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So the study of toilets and human excretory habits has had several barriers to overcome. One of them is the simple taboo that the subject is just unmentionable or unfit for study by anyone who doesn't want to be laughed at. The author of one recent study on latrines who wanted to demonstrate the communal nature of Roman public toilets, like the one you see in front of you, felt he had to blindfold his actor colleagues when he published this photo in his book, this is from the Cyclops baths of Dougga, Tunisia, a big Roman bath building in Dougga and he covered them with those black masks because he didn't want any of them to be embarrassed either right then, or 10 or 20 years from now. When taboos are put aside, however, it becomes apparent that Roman sanitary practice involves many barely known habits and traditions.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
We can learn not only what toilets look like and how they functioned, but much about Roman attitudes towards excrement and hygiene and the level of privacy various facilities had. And about the Romans own taboos. We must constantly be aware, however of our own biased views on these matters. That is our modern bias views. No one is free from his or her own cultural values regarding sanitation, and especially when it comes to toilet habits. So here you see the fairly large forum latrine at Pompeii, and it was unfinished at the time of the eruption in '79. So what you're looking at, here's the floor of the latrine, and these stone structs coming out of the wall, were the strucks that held wooden planks that had holes in them for the crappers and then down below is the sewer trench and you see in the back here, the big opening to the main sewer leading the excretory remains out of the toilet itself.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
The first archeologists in the 18th and 19th centuries, who came across such Roman toilets, seemed to have an immediate ambivalence towards them. On the one hand, because they look so similar to the toilets of their own day. They didn't even think they were worth mentioning and to those scholars, they certainly were not considered among the expressions of high cultural achievements, ascribed to the Romans.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Oops, let's see here. Why am I having this trouble now? Sorry, maybe I'm pressing too hard. There we go. So here, you're looking at a plan of a building in the Roman town of Puteoli, which is also on the bay of Naples. It's a bit north of Naples itself, the other side, away from Pompei. And in this slide, you can see drawing of two latrines, one on the left and one on the right. Now a macellum is a marketplace. So it's a place you bought fruit and vegetables and fish and meat. The fish and meat were probably sold in this circular raised area here. On the other hand, as early as the 18th century, a few scholars did recognize the existence of Roman toilets and slowly, they gave them a place in the scholarly literature. It starts in the 18th century that we get the publication of a massive encyclopedia of Roman daily life by Darrenberg and Saleo and they actually, for the first time start talking about sanitary facilities.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Sanitary facilities. Let's see if I can do this better this time. But several excavators at the time remained blinded by Victorian taboos. And they call these large toilets in the marketplace, the two on that plan, medical steam baths, while other toilets were labeled as prison installations, or even hydraulic lifts. That is no one was easily willing to call a spade, a spade or a toilet, a toilet. As if it was just too embarrassing to say that. So, in the early 20th century attitudes gradually were changing and not surprisingly, it was a doctor, a Danish physician named Holger Mygind. He was among the first to point out the importance of ancient toilet research. And you see in this slide, a image of a single seat toilet. You see there's a little hole right in the center of this plank, reconstructed in a house at Pompeii called the house of Octavius Quartio.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Now, Mygin's articles, he was a amateur archeologist. They were devoted completely to water supply and sanitation in Pompeii. So, for the first time in Pompeii, he made analysis of the total ensemble of toilets, drains and pipes. And you see here, some of the pipes, the lead pipes, that were under the sidewalk outside of a Pompeian house. And he also did the first explorations of Pompeii's sewers. He believed that hygienic standards of a people tell something about the level of their civilization.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
During the large-scale excavations of the fascist era in Italy, dozens of toilets came to light and some of them quite elegant. This is beautiful marble seats here in the Osteria Forum latrine. And this was excavated by the Italian archeologists Guido Calza for the 1942 World's Fair that never happened because of the start of World War II. It served as a fascist demonstration. Mussolini was happy to quote the discoveries of Roman toilets in the late 1930s for how a Roman town functioned and it was supposed to prove to the Italians of the 1930s that they had descended from an impressively civilized and sanitary ancient people. Many years later, Alex Scobey, who was an ancient historian and classicists from New Zealand, wrote a seminal article in 1986 called "Slums, Sanitation and Mortality in the Roman World", in which he listed the sad realities that trapped hundreds of thousands of impoverished Romans in urban squalor.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Now, since archeologists had rarely concerned themselves, either with latrines or with sewers, and here we find ourselves once again inside the giant Cloaca Maxima of Rome's greatest sewer. And on the left here is my friend, Andrew Wilson, who's a professor at Oxford. We do a lot of sewer explorations together. Despite impressive remains of these structures in many places, overviews of Roman daily life remained deficient on sanitary matters. Scobey concluded, not surprisingly from the little evidence that he had available to him in the 1980s, that the inhabitants of ancient Rome lived in an extremely unsanitary environment and that they often experienced a short and violent life.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Now, the German archeologist, and Stephen mentioned him at the beginning as well, Richard Neudecker, he wrote the first book length manuscript in 1994 devoted to Roman latrines. And he called his book in German, "The Pracht Latrine" and pracht latrine means luxury latrines. These are very beautifully decorated and appointed latrines of the late first and second century CE. And you see one here in the slide, the so-called triangular latrine in Ostia again, Neudecker expanded the scope of the sanitary discussion to include the fact that physical care of the body, including bodily evacuations, was a process taught to Roman males in particular from a very early age and it was done so to prepare them for proper stations in life. In other words, how a Roman male groomed himself, including how many times a day he evacuated in the toilet, was directly related to his status in society. That was a kind of a big and different approach to sanitation.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So, now let's switch to the second topic I want to cover with you, which is toilet and sewer facts. First of all, Roman toilets must be studied within their infrastructure. That is their connections are not to sewer systems like the Cloaca Maxima. Their relationship to the aqueduct lines and to water supply that service them, because you need water to clean them. We must seek answers to a whole new range of questions: who built them? Were public latrines meant as social gathering places, or not? And who used them, did men and women use them separately or together? Did slaves go into them as well, and Roman elites, Roman plebs? Were they hygienic improvements on earlier provisions for basic bodily needs, or were they actually breeding grounds for disease and foul smell that did little to improve dismal urban conditions? Perhaps we can get to some of these questions afterwards, but the main fact I'd like you to remember here is that the study of toilets leads to Rome by some very unusual roads.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So, little towns like Herculaneum and Pompeii on the Bay of Naples, we find single seat cesspit toilets. This is a brand new discovery within the last 20 years. We find these single seat cesspit toilets in almost every private house, the one you see in front of you, the House of the Gran Portale, which means the house of the great door, in Herculaneum. And this toilet, by the way, is located right in the kitchen. And it's right next to the counter we're food was prepared. And what's interesting is that today 2021, we can now count over 200 known house cesspit toilets in Pompeii. So, this is a toilet that did not have a connection to the sewer. It was a tank and you crapped in it until it was filled up and then you had your house slaves dig it out probably once a year, once every six or seven months, and either sell that excrement or put it in your garden or whatever you did with it. And then it got filled up again.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So, cesspit toilets, without sewer connections in private houses, seem to be the way things were happening at the same time these public large latrines that were connected to the sewer were being built. Now, Scobey did not know about most of these house toilets and their... Scobey's the 1986 New Zealander who wrote about mortality in ancient Rome. He didn't know about most of these toilets and their existence, if he had known about them, would definitely have affected his grim conclusions about the filthy nature of Roman daily life. Why weren't these toilets connected to sewer lines? That'd be the first question that comes into your head. Well, Roman sewers had no traps, so who could know what might climb up into a house from a sewer line?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Now, we have some literary evidence that gives us a little bit of an idea about this. There is a second century CE writer called Aelian. He lived in the Roman empire, but he was a Greek and he wrote and spoke in Greek. And he tells a great story in his work about a hungry octopus who climbed up from the sea into the sewer line and got into a house toilet that did have a connection to the sewer. This was a house toilet owned by a Spanish merchant, very likely in that town of Puteoli, I mentioned earlier, just north of Naples. And that octopus ate all of the merchant's pickled fish in his pantry. Now, the story doesn't end very well for the octopus as you can imagine. Household slaves pummeled him to death, but I'm sure the owner of this house was definitely regretting after he lost all his pickled fish, that he was about to sell, that he had a toilet that was connected to the local sewer. And of course, to us, this seems completely counter intuitive. We don't live in houses that have cesspits anymore.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So, in country villas of elite Romans like this beautiful villa at Oplontis, which is near modern Torre Annunziata on the Bay of Naples. It's a little bit south of Naples. Which you see here, what we find in villas like this are often multi-seat latrines in working quarters of the house. So, again, you have to... This is the foot rest for the latrine and at about this level where that line is, would have been a wooden plank that had the toilet seats on it and then below here is the sewer. And this is also a cesspit. This doesn't go anywhere. There's no connection to a city sewer here, but it's a big cesspit. So, these kind of multi-seat worker toilet arrangements were often built right alongside private one-seater affairs for the elite at such villas. This multi-seater toilet at Ostia was probably for slaves and visitors and was flushed by water from the wash basins.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
See, there's a little hole in this right-hand corner. This is the wash basin for sheets and blankets and so on. And when they emptied the dirty water, it flushed through this channel and then there's a hole over here that goes under the foot platform and washes into the sewer. So, the contents of cesspit latrines in such houses were likely deposited directly into the Peristyle colonnaded gardens, which you have to imagine would have led to some pretty smelly garden parties. Well, wealthy Romans who lived in these villas probably preferred to use chamber pots to all of these types of public privy. Public toilets in various places could accommodate from one to 100 people in the same facility and toilet technology is also equally diverse.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So, this is probably my favorite slide of all the slides I'm going to show you. It doesn't look like much to you I'm sure in this picture, but when I explain it to you, I think you'll see why it's my favorite. It's a view of a shop or some kind of a food shop perhaps, or maybe it was a ceramic shop in the town of Herculaneum. And if you teach yourself to observe, when you look at such archeological artifacts, and not just look and walk away, it looks boring, what's here, there's nothing to see, no beautiful wall painting. But if you teach yourself to observe what you're looking at, you will really find the Roman world comes alive for you. So, I want you to notice... Oh, I didn't mean to do that, sorry.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I want you to notice in this little partition here, this is a Roman partition, and it has a strut that's holding the partition up, is a little window in that partition, behind here is a toilet right in the middle of the shop. And that little window would have given the owner of the shop a bit of privacy, he could be in there doing his business, but he could also look out that little window and watch for shoplifters.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
The connections to sewer lines could vary from city to city. And while the shapes of toilet rooms also varied, a lot of things were quite standardized, the distances between seats, the height of seats. And if you look at this slide from Dougga, Tunisia again, in the Baths of the Cyclops, the presence of the so-called sponge channel, and what I mean by that is this trench that always we can find in public latrines that runs right under the feet rest of a public toilet. We can talk about sponge sticks later, but I'll tell you what I believe about them. I believe that that trench under my friend Jonathan's feet there, was for washing off the sponge at the end of a short stick that was kept in most public latrines, either as a cleaning device for the toilet or perhaps the equivalent of Roman toilet paper.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
This feature was probably an improvement in better equipped toilets in the first and second century CE. Now the most famous passage about the sponge stick is in Seneca. Seneca wrote and lived between 4 BCE and 65 CE. And that passage in Seneca is really the locus classicus, the key citation for this Roman cleaning device. But I must tell you Seneca is a philosopher, he's not a architect or cares much about the sanitary practices of the Romans. And what he really was admiring when he was writing about the sponge stick was the independent spirit of a German gladiator who decided to kill himself in the latrine rather than face the horrible death he was about to face in the arena, in the amphitheater. The latrine was the only place the gladiator was allowed to retreat without the presence of the guard. It was there for the only place where he could accomplish his suicide without immediately being detected. So, once he got inside the latrine near the Roman amphitheater, Seneca tells us the gladiator shoved the sponge stick down his own throat and killed himself.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Now, the Latin texts specifically indicates that the instrument of the gladiators demise was quote, "the stick of wood tipped with a sponge devoted to the vilest uses". I interpret "vilest uses" to mean the cleaning of excrement, both from people using the latrine, but also from the toilet seats. Now, another first century writer Martial, also makes a reference to the sponge of the damned rod of wood. And to my mind that second reference supports the interpretation of this reading by Seneca. No sponge tied to a stick of course has to date come to us from the archeological record. I can't send you to a museum anywhere to show you what that looked like, even from latrines in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Wood and sea sponges are just too fragile to have survived 2,500 years. But my British friend, Adam Goldwater, who excavates along Hadrian's wall in the United Kingdom, he's told me that bits of sponge have recently been excavated from latrines of Roman soldiers along Hadrian's wall. And we'll return to those excavations in a moment.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So, certainly the use of public toilets contributed to cleaning up filth from the streets of Roman cities, but it must have taken decades to change old customs and convince people to use public toilets instead of side alleys or gutters. Now, you see here an inscription from a tavern in Pompeii, and the inscription is on the wall here. And it says Cacator, C-A-C-A-T-O-R, Cave Malum, which means... Sorry, I didn't mean to change that yet. Basically, crapper, Cacator, be aware of doing a bad thing. And presumably the bad thing is crapping in public. So, you see a naked man squatting on the side of the street, looks like he's about to have a bowel movement. And these two snakes come around him either to protect him or to warn him. And guess who shows up on this right there? That is the goddess Fortuna. That is good luck herself with her Cornucopia and her ship's rudder. She's watching over him.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Now, as it happens just within a month ago, the former director of the excavations at Pompeii, Pierre Giovanni Osanna, has published a brand new guidebook to Pompeii it's called "Pompeii. Il Tempo Ritrovato. La Nuove Scoperte", it's a little guide book describing all kinds of brand new discoveries at Pompeii. It's a wonderful book, but unfortunately so far it's only in Italian and Osanna tells us of a brand new Cacator Cave inscription in his little book. And this was news to me, as I say, just about a month ago. Now, this new inscription not only warns about the threat of punishments from the gods if you do something bad like this, crapping in public, but it actually lists a real fine and money that you could bring upon yourself. And it's not a small amount, 20 sesterces you could be fined if you're caught crapping somewhere on the street.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So, I wanted to... See here, I gave myself some directions. I wanted not ruin this. So, I wanted to just take a minute while we're looking at this lovely wall painting to give you a little bit more information about Fortuna and religion and toilets, all mixed together.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Let me tell you about the connection between Roman toilets and religious beliefs. In the autumn of 1898, the famous Italian archeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, discovered this painting when he was excavating a small taverna in one of the back streets of Pompeii. The painting was in a corridor that led to a single seat toilet. It shows the goddess, two snakes and a naked man. Underneath the painting, he found a small terracotta altar. He thought the painting was important enough to cut it off the wall and bring it to the Naples Museum and that's where you can see it today. So, what do we see? We see a woman in a red Khaitan dress with a red shawl. And in her left hand, as I mentioned, she has the horn of plenty, the Cornucopia and in her right, she leans on a rudder and there is a globe, you see it down here, globe at her feet. And on her head, she has a corn measure and she is definitely identified as for Fortuna Isis or Fortuna by herself.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
And she's quite a common figure in various Pompeian paintings. She looks at the naked, suntanned man squatting on the small platform. The man is smaller than the goddess and most researchers agree that he is defecating or about to defecate. Two colored snakes rushed towards him and above the scene is the flower garland has been painted. And the words, as I told you, Cacator Cave Malum, crapper beware of doing a bad thing or be aware of the evil. Now, Fiorelli was completely puzzled by this image. What was a goddess doing even near a toilet and how to interpret the naked man, the snakes and the threatening words? Later on, many have taken up the challenge and written about this puzzling image. While most of the Cacator painting is a philological rarity, that is not the approach that I suggest.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
That is not the approach that I suggest. If put in context, this painting of Fortuna and the Kakao tour really reveals something of the role of the gods and of superstitious beliefs related to sanitary practices of the Romans. I don't insist that I found the right answer, but nevertheless, you may find something to think about.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
At Pompeii, five such painted warnings have been found as well as three variations. And one of these has the addition with the words translated into English. "If you neglect this," that is, if you don't listen to me and not crap on the street here, "Jupiter will be angry with you." So it's a serious warning that we don't want people defecating randomly on our streets.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So a Roman public toilet can display sophisticated manipulation of water, expensive building materials, artistic embellishments, and considerable planning strategies for some light, some privacy, and even for some air circulation. And at the same time, in over 400 years, very little changed in toilet overall design, and most particulars remained absolutely standard.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
The remains themselves tell us a great deal, including excavation and analysis of the actual excrement. And that's what we're doing more of now, finding this compacted excrement and studying it really carefully for what's in it. The seeds, the bones, whatever.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Now, archeologists today use the concept of formation processes to aluminate behaviors related to construction, use and abandonment of privies. If toilets are excavated properly, they can provide valuable data about diet, socioeconomic status of users, divisions between households where they are found, construction methods and even maintenance behaviors. One example I've already mentioned to you and I promised we'd come back to it. My friend, British archeologists, Adam Goldwater, when he studied the excrement of the toilets along Hadrian's Wall in Great Britain, he found dung beetles in the cornfield excrement from latrines that were used by the common soldiers along Hadrian's Wall. And then he found oyster shells and fish and meat bones in the debris of toilets by ranking officers.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So you could say, and excuse my language here, that shit not only happens, but apparently, sometimes it can also talk, and talk quite a story. I hope I've shown you that to enter field of Roman sanitation, we must be ready to give up our 21st century attitudes and not read the evidence through the lens of our own prejudices. That is, what is dirty to us may have been clean and healthy to the Romans. Where we practice religion is not necessarily where the Romans did, as Fortuna is showing you here. She can follow you right into the toilet. We must be ready to accept the unexpected at every turn in our studies.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
And I would conclude by pointing out that world toilet day is just around the corner. That's going to be November 19th, 2021. And that is a day to promote sustainable sanitation and fight against climate change the world over. So we owe it to ourselves to see how people in the past handled these matters from the perspectives of their own beliefs and their own cultural situations.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Modern analysts say that eliminating disease and death due to unclean water and insufficient sanitary facilities, and here you must read toilets, would reap billions of dollars in health and productivity gains. These same analysts estimate that for every dollar spent on this enterprise, there would be an economic return of about $3 to $34, depending on the country involved.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So the Romans were famous for building multi-seat public latrines and vast public buildings from at least the second century BCE. Roman officials called Aediles were elected specifically to keep the streets repaired and clean, and ancient literary notices on sanitation, however, are pretty sparse, but we can glean information from the ones we have. The information we learn must be read alongside the extent remains to supplement the archeological record. Just like the archeological record can supplement points in the literature.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Now, many of these details suggest standardization, and we know that Roman standardization was applied to many other building types like amphitheaters, and forums, and temples, and theaters. But there were often slight provincial variations, and those need to be looked at too.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So let's see here. I think I have one more. So excavation techniques, our archeologists today, I've mentioned, use the concept of formation processes to eliminate behaviors related to construction use and abandonment of privies. If toilets are excavated properly, they can provide valuable data about diet, socioeconomic status, and as I said, even the divisions between households where they were found.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So here in front of you, you look at a mosaic on a floor of a bath, a building in Algeria. Timgad, Algeria. And it shows a Negro man peeing on the floor of the bath. So while you look at this naughty bath slave peeing on the floor of a bath in Timgad, and non elites always need to be reminded about proper behaviors. Non elites can't seem to learn these things. Well, that's really another indication of how toilets really do matter in society.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
And before I end, I want to take one more slight detour to share with you something I came across late in my preparation for this talk, and I just can't resist sharing it. In 1729, the English poet, SAS, Jonathan Swift wrote an amusing poem after he constructed two privies, two outside toilets connected to his house, in which he raised to the status of ancient temples with their own nurturing goddess and their own noble offerings. And I'd like my talk to end with the first half of that poem. And here it goes.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Two temples of magnifique size attract the curious travelers eyes that might be envied by the Greeks raised up by you in 20 weeks. Here, gentle goddess Cloacina, which is the goddess of excrement basically. She receives all offerings at her shrine in separate cells, the hes and shes here pay their vows with bended knees.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
That's the end of Swift's first half of that poem. So I hope I've elevated the discussion of Roman toilets and sanitation from the depths of a lot of misunderstanding. And I would just make this final statement that toilets actually have curbed many problems related to climate change too, in our world. And I'm guessing in the Roman world as well. So the relevance of toilets and sewers is absolutely undeniable. I thank you so much for your attention and I welcome your questions, with Steven's help.
Stephen Guerriero:
Thank you so much, Professor AOKO. That was great. As a middle school teacher, I can tell you, my students love the topic, and especially the story of Elian and the octopus climbing up from the sewer and eating pickled fish. That's a student favorite.
Stephen Guerriero:
I have a few questions, but people are welcome to put questions into the Q and A box. I'm going to try to get to everybody, but I will take a little prerogative to ask a couple of questions of my own, if that's okay.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Stephen, before you do, should I stop sharing my screen? Would that be helpful?
Stephen Guerriero:
Sure. That would be great.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Although, maybe I shouldn't, because later we might want to come back to some further images, so I'll just leave it there then.
Stephen Guerriero:
Okay, great. So my first question is, we know a lot about Roman obsession with water, aqueducts, baths and the sanitation. And I'm coming to you right now from Southern Utah from an archeological program here. And as you know, the American West is dealing with one of the worst droughts that we have on record. And I'm thinking about Romans and how we are so dependent on fresh water for our sanitation, but it seems like the Romans had a much better adaptation for multiple uses of something that we want to flush away and forget. And I'm thinking of things we might learn from the Romans. Can you talk a little bit about maybe how Romans repurposed some of this? I'm thinking too of like, urine for clothing dye or cleaning, and yeah, if you just want to talk a little bit about that.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Well, I showed you that one image of the bath, the washbasin whose dirty waters flushed the sponge stick channel and ultimately flushed the sewer. I think the Romans, they are very sensitive to multiple uses of something. That is, you don't just use it and throw it away. There might be an intermediate place you could use it as well. And then it has to be thrown away.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I think they are extremely sensitive to a lot of waste from their food production, their gardening. I mean, we would find it hard to think of ... I grew up in a farm in the Berkshire's where we did have outhouses. We had a three seater outhouse. We did not have a flush toilet in the house. And I'm certain my father did not empty that cesspit into our garden. We didn't use human excrement to fertilize the garden. He got cow manure from local farmers to do our garden, because we now understand the potential germ carriage of human excrement. It is just really not very safe to be spreading it in your garden and then pulling up lettuce that might have some on it, and not washing it properly, and so on.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
But the Romans know nothing about germs and they empty out a cesspit toilet, and the easiest way to do that is bring it out to your peristyle garden and just dump it on all the roses, or the bougainvillea, or the herb garden. So I have a feeling, Stephen, Romans dealt with stomach problems, pains and diarrhea, without understanding why they were dealing with it much more frequently than we do today. But I also have a great admiration for them for collecting rainwater for using wash water to continue to water their plants or flush the toilet.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
And as you say, especially urine, the ammonia in urine was discovered to be quite an excellent cleaning agent. And so it's purchased, saved sometimes, and purchased by fullers, these clothes cleaners who clean, especially wool and get ... I don't know how your clothes would smell after they were washed in urine, but it would have made them pretty white again. So I do think there's probably tons more work that scholars in the future can do about this very question of re-usable waste.
Stephen Guerriero:
Oh, sorry.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I've just touched on it. It's not really the focus of what I've been doing.
Stephen Guerriero:
And do you see any sort of potential for examining Roman adaptation to things like climate change? I mean, if you're examining the excrement, we think about what foods people are eating, even at a macro level. Crops and things like that, and how the Romans, across an empire with many different climate zones, how they might teach us to adapt to something like that.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Yeah. That's a great question, too. I realized how I almost had to do a major research project to fill my own knowledge in more about climate change. But I can tell you, a lot of archeologists have worked on the Etruscans, and they were great miners of minerals and metals. Around Etruscan hilltop towns in Tuscany north of Rome, we find these slag heaps.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So I'm guessing Etruscans first, and then ultimately Romans, started realizing that mining practices, road building, even building aqueducts, it has a serious effect on the landscape, and that effect over time, it had to start to do something to climate. Hot roads and even the excavation of roads that would have sent silt and dirt into river bodies that might've polluted water supply, that was natural river water supply, not even aqueduct water supply. It's a slow process that I think Romans are very astute about watching their natural environment. And they do write about this, but we can see it in the way they built their cities, their sensitivity to where to place the Acropolis, or the particular temples, or where to bring the water into the town, how many gates to have protecting your city. They're very sensitive to landscape and landscape architecture.
Stephen Guerriero:
And I can only imagine how much water a Roman city would consume under the course of a month, a year.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I know. And of course, that consumption got greater and greater as demands for more and larger bathing establishments, or more public latrines are built. Or you don't want to a cesspit toilet for a hundred people. Think how that would smell. And of course, there's also in areas of the town where you're selling food, you don't want to have horrible shit and urine smells. You want to be smelling the vegetables and the meat and the fish and excited about that.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So placing two latrines in a marketplace is a way to stop people from just peeing on the street. I mean, I see this as an ongoing problem in Rome today. There's still too many people that feel free that to just do their business on the street. It's really kind of embedded in Italian culture to not worry so much about those things. I think we would get much more upset. And even citizens would see a citizen peeing on the street and might complain to that person.
Stephen Guerriero:
Definitely. And I can tell you as an Italian American who's visited many times, in the summer, that is much more of a pronounced issue. Do you mind if I take some questions? We have some questions rolling in, so I'll start with one from Naomi. She's wondering about a division by sex or gender in the Roman world, and were there separate toilets for men and women, but also any evidence of the disposal of menstrual products for women?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Yeah, well, there really weren't products for menstrual issues, I suppose people use folded up rags and those. They just haven't survived. They just don't survive the record. And in the medical writers, there are some hints about what women did, and certainly rags to protect themselves would have been one thing.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
The whole issue of men and women in toilets is really not completely solved yet. I mean, my guess is women did not walk into men. Men and women didn't go into the same toilet. You saw at the McCallum image I showed you, there are two toilets there. There's one on each side. Was one for women and one for men? Possibly. Although, there probably weren't that many women out on the streets anyway. I mean, most public toilets were probably for men, and women just aren't going to be, if they're out on the streets, they're with their slave protector and they're not going to walk into a public latrine. They'd walk home first. It's too dangerous. Rape and robbery and all kinds of other things could happen to you if you step into these.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I don't think latrines are safe places. And I certainly don't believe they were constructed for social gatherings. I think they were constructed to help clean up the streets and take that hideous filth that Aediles would have been happy to have them to save that awful job of cleaning human excrement from side alleys and so on. But I don't think the idea is to ... Oh, I forgot what my train of thought was. Two places for women and men, because women and men don't have equal outside time. Women stay home and men go out and do business. And so they're aimed more at men. There is-
Stephen Guerriero:
And I think ... Oh, sorry.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I was just going to tell you, there is one place at Pompeii where there's actually an inscribed sign that says Mouli Erebus, which is the data for women. And it's not an entrance to a latrine, but it's an entrance to the female section of the baths. Now, we know in Roman bathing establishment, there's often a toilet on the women's side and a toilet on the men's side. So even that tells you, they aren't using the toilets together. Probably slaves would be more likely to wander in. A slave girl shopping for her family might, if she were desperate, gone into a random public latrine, but she would have been taking her life in her hands.
Stephen Guerriero:
Also, I think I've heard you mention about Roman differences in what we consider privacy and that the concept of privacy was a very different thing. Even up to the type of clothing that they were wearing and how that affects the physical act of going to the bathroom.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I mean, if you're not wearing pants, if you're wearing a tunic or some kind of chiton or a toga, you can sit down on a toilet and be pretty private. I mean, you're not exposing your physical self. You're covered with your clothing as you sit there and do your business. So that's probably why there are no dividers between toilets. They're just hole, hole, hole, hole. Because you don't need a divider. You can't see anybody's naked parts because they're covered by their clothes. That's just something we don't tend to think about.
Stephen Guerriero:
Sure. And let me go to another question. This is from Steven Pickman. He says, "Hi, Ann. Definitely took me back to your classes and lectures 20 plus years ago. Looking at Roman sanitary habits and by extension public health expression, could you see that the Cacator murals as a promotion of change to the larger public health and sanitation awareness, almost like a public health campaign, more than a public nuisance?"
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Hi, Steven. It's great to have you here. I think it's kind of dangerous to make such a bold statement, really. I mean, it might be the case that the appearance in first century Pompeii of more and more of these Cacator inscriptions. I think there are about six of them in all of Pompeii. So it's not hundreds. It's not on every alley. It's not on every toilet. But you see them pretty intensely. That's quite a lot. It might be that the particular Aediles, that is, these health care professionals who are supposed to keep streets clean and fixed and safe, the ones that were in control when those signs went up, were particularly sensitive to the matter. And then 10 years later, you don't hear anything about it or the signs never get repainted or refixed.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Ever get repainted or refixed. You have to think of a lot of this is tied to the magistrates who are in power at the time the signs are appearing and it may be that they maybe they were particularly moved by something they read in a medical writer, or maybe they came from Asia Minor where people were dying of horrible diarrheal disease and they realized in their hometowns back in the east, people were being very uncareful about their excretory habits. So when they got back to their Pompeii place, they said, "Well, we're going to try to fix this. Let's try to scare people, tell them Jupiter's going to come after them. Tell them Fortune is going to punish them. Warn them not to do the bad thing. Do the good thing. Pick up after yourself or go home. Use your toilet at home. If you want to have... The excrement can be used in your own garden, but don't leave it all over the street."
Stephen Guerriero:
Hmm. Okay. We have some great questions here. This one is from Ilana. She's wondering, did latrines and Roman sewer systems in Rome and other Italian cities differ in structure and sophistication from other parts of the Roman world? You touched on this a little bit, but like military forts along the lines of provincial baths versus the baths of Caracalla, something like that. And could this help contribute to an understanding of regional health in the Roman world?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I mean, I suppose it could, but I would say that would be a stretch to make that connection, but certainly there's work to be done all over the Roman world on how standardized these toilets are. There are people who studied the North African cities and there are people that studied Pompeii and people who studied Herculaneum, and there are people that studied Ostia and people who studied the situation in France or in Great Britain. But now, we need all of those measurements and anything that looks standard to be compared to the other places and see... I mentioned in my talk, there really are provincial differences in some of these measurements, whether it's the space between the seats or the height of the seats.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I suppose, in a part of the Roman empire where the north were tall, blonde Norwegians and Fins live that maybe the toilet seats are higher because people are bigger and they don't... So you're not going to get perfect standardization, but there does seem to be a kind of general look to a Roman toilet that would make you able to identify it pretty much anywhere you go. Romans like that. They like to be able to go into a town a thousand miles from Rome and still feel they're in a Roman town. So there's got to be something about it that is similar.
Stephen Guerriero:
Thanks. I have a question from Richard wondering about sitting versus squatting. Why is it we see more sitting toilets versus in other places where they might squat or is this a division that the Romans would have made?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Who... Is this from Richard?
Stephen Guerriero:
Yes.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Richard, I'm not sure where you see squatting toilets.
Stephen Guerriero:
He mentions in Eastern countries. I think maybe even referring to modern times where...
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Well, certainly in modern times you go in... I mean, Turkish toilets, you go in and there's no place to sit. You just bend yourself over a hole and do what you're going to do. I mean, I think that's fairly uncommon in Roman constructions. I can tell you, one thing comes to my mind and that's from Herculaneum. I know there's one... Where am I thinking? It's either a laundromat or a shop where you could go in and there was a squatting area that was right over a sewer. They didn't bother to put the expense of a seat because they just wanted the slaves to have a quick place where they could pee and get back to work.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
But generally speaking, even in large public latrines across the empire, there are not often squatting places as opposed to a seated place. It seems Romans like to sit down, at least when they're doing number two. I guess the open urinal does exist in a few places in some amphitheaters, some marketplaces, but generally speaking, if you're looking for a place for excretory activities, you want to be able to sit down.
Stephen Guerriero:
That's funny that you mentioned the open urinals. It makes me think back to going to the Red Sox games with my dad and the men's room had that gigantic trough that they used to throw ice in. Here's another question from Madeline. She's wondering, did Romans clean their hands after using the toilet? How does the Roman sanitary practice kind of compare to Near Eastern practices?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Well, that's a great question. And mostly, I think I can say this with some confidence, I'm thinking of the forum latrine at Ostia as maybe the best example for you to look at. There is often a fountain right in the center or on the sidewall of a public latrine like that. So maybe it was just for drinking water, but I think Romans are sensitive to smelly... If they had excrement on their hands, they weren't going to just walk out of the toilet and go back to normal business. They would want to get rid of it, either wiping it on the grass or using a fountain in the toilet to clean themselves and many toilets, whether they're in bath buildings or whether they're in public facilities like a marketplace or a gladiator training school or fort toilets along Hadrian's Wall, there is a water supply, a fresh water supply, very close or in the latrine. So we assume from that, that... It's always good to have a drinking supply, but that you would also be able to wash your hands.
Stephen Guerriero:
And did you have any sort of comparative studies of Near Eastern maybe parallels with Roman toilets?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I mean, Near Eastern toilets in the Roman Empire are going to look very much like the ones in the West. Romans are founding cities out there. They're going to use their technologies and their standardization measurements to build the toilets there too. If you went to Telhesban, which is a Roman site at a certain point, you'd see that things look very Roman, not unusual. I think there's more difference today in the way the people of the Middle East handle their excretory habits and toilet use from Europe than there would have been in Roman antiquity. It would have been quite similar.
Stephen Guerriero:
And maybe also related to the abundance or lack of water, fresh water.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Right.
Stephen Guerriero:
A question from Naomi. Were there... Oh, we have answered about different men and women. And then from Karen, did Romans think of urban life as dirtier and less pleasant than rural life or not?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Oh, I'm sure, for sure. I mean, I think Romans have an appreciation for both. And of course, if you're a wealthy Roman, you want your city apartment and then you want to be able to escape to your quiet country estate where you have the bulk of your slaves and you have fresh fruit and vegetables and you're raising cows or pigs or horses or whatever. But I think Romans, I think I could find, I won't try to do it right now, but I'm sure I could find literary evidence to support that statement that country life is cleaner, fresher, maybe even more healthy for you. But of course, the Romans are an urban people and they are excited to be in cities the way we are. I grew up in the country, but all my childhood, I couldn't wait to go live in New York. Once I finally did grow up and live in New York, I couldn't wait to get out of it. So you kind of have to experience the environment to know how it's going to affect you.
Stephen Guerriero:
Mm. And juvenile had lots of opinions on that. This question is for, sorry, if I'm pronouncing this incorrectly, Gila. In one of the slides, a painting of a public toilet is a man sitting there in the center of the slide, appears to be reading a book. Interesting to see if that custom goes way back.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
You mean this? Well, that's my friend, Jonathan. He's reading the guide book. I kind of doubt that there would have been enough light in a room. You're looking at this toilet ruined. I mean, the walls are all gone. They would have been very high walls with a tiny window up at the top. I showed you in my image of the Pompeii toilet. Let's see. It's not too far back here, I think. Well, maybe I didn't go far enough. I remember showing you the forum baths at Pompeii. Sorry, I'm just not finding it. Maybe it was the second slide. Here we are. You see how tall, how high up on the room the window is. That's not going to give you much light if you want to sit here and read something. And I mean, reading is very limited, who's reading, and the people using a toilet like this are probably not the readers. The people who read are the elites and their home and their nice villas or fancy houses.
Stephen Guerriero:
She mentions, I think if you could go one slide further to the line drawing illustration, I think.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
You mean this way?
Stephen Guerriero:
Other direction.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Yeah. This is where the two toilets are in the-
Stephen Guerriero:
Maybe one more after this, there's a line drawing of a reconstruction of a latrine, I think. This one right here of... You also mentioned
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
He is reading too, but I don't really think... Yeah. He looks like he's reading too, but I don't really think... These are 19th century people showing you that, how that toilet was, but this room would have been very dark and stinky and you really wouldn't want to sit there and read a novel.
Stephen Guerriero:
Is it also true that coming in with an open flame could have been dangerous with so much methane gas?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
For sure. I think fires could break out in these and that would be pretty terrifying. Another thing I didn't really get a chance to mention to you folks that I should have is you must remember the Romans are very worried about demons. They think demons are in a lot of different places and we do have some Christian texts from the fourth and fifth century CE. We have one from St. Thekla where a guy named Duxianous is sitting on a toilet and he saw, he says, a demon raise its head from one of the holes of the toilet and he's terrified. And then flames came after him. So who knows, maybe he was sitting there taking a number two break and suddenly a fire broke out in the trench across from him. And it would have been terrifying. It was terrifying enough for him to write about it and to tell us how quickly he wanted to get out of the toilet. It tells us a number of things, that Romans do believe in demons and that there are dangers in these public facilities.
Stephen Guerriero:
And I have a couple of statements from a name you recognize, Jane Woldbolm, and she's saying, Great talk. Teaching at Brandeis has certainly changed since she graduated in '62, but she's wondering, do we know whether there are any kinds of lids for the in-house toilets or do they use lime or any sort of chemical to kind of break things down?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Great question. Absolutely. We have evidence of lime being for those who could afford it or for those who had access to it, in-house cesspit toilet. And for all I know, I haven't really studied this in public toilets, in the compaction of excrement on the bottoms of them, we might be able detect close scientific analysis some lime there too, but yes, lime is often used to quelch the stench and to just stop, kill any bugs that might be thriving in the excrement because that's another thing. Imagine sitting on one of these open holes and having all kinds of horrible bugs fly up onto your bottom. It wouldn't be pleasant.
Stephen Guerriero:
She also adds that Jodi Magnus has studied some toilets at Qumran in Israel.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Absolutely. Jodi and I are good buddies. She shared a lot of her research with me.
Stephen Guerriero:
I have a question from Savannah. She says you brought up a wonderful point about ancient Roman reuse and ancient Roman awareness of reuse. From your own experience, do different latrines situations like public, private, or none reflect larger systemic contexts like periods of conflict, unrest? Can the latrines and how they're made and used tell us about what was going on at the time?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Well, I'm not so sure that could be the case. I thought the question was going to go into, do I have any information about a public latrine down in the Roman forum? Would there be an announcement going out to the local farmers around Rome, "We're cleaning the toilets this week, bring your wagons and you can get some of the excrement." That might've happened. I don't think we have any records of that because we don't have any Edile records, unfortunately. That would tell us so many things, but reused materials sold outside the city, but we do know that farmers came into Rome to collect garbage of various kinds for either for their animals to eat or for fertilizer for agricultural purposes.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Yeah. I don't think you could study a toilet though and learn. I mean maybe if... I'm not a lab scientist, but maybe studying the compact excrement would teach you about diseases that were rampant at that moment of that particular layer of excrement. Maybe you could detect the plague or maybe you could detect certain kinds of germs that would tell you there was a play going on or something bad happening. And then the next layer up in the same compacted excrement wouldn't have that evidence that would suggest that people are healthier now. So it's possible. And I'm sure that's a whole nother area that for someone with the right interest could do amazing work.
Stephen Guerriero:
I imagine also the kind of breakdown and stopping maintenance of these kinds of places would be like any other public function if things were going rough or invasions, civil unrest, things like that. I'm going to take maybe one or two more questions and then we'll wrap up. First, not a question, but Ilana says, "Another favorite story of students is the poor gladiator with a sponge on a stick." That's a very vivid image. And I have one more question here in the chat from Michelle. Can you comment on the role of the public baths as part of the Roman approach to public health and/or social status? Do we know anything about the importance of emptying the bowels as part of Roman approach to health, diet, generally things like that. Can that kind of show us some stratification of social classes?
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
Well, this is really, I would say, probably one of the major contributions of Richard Neudecker, the German archeologist. I'm working with him right now on my 68 Toilets of Rome Book. He's an amazing scholar. I'm afraid he might be suffering from cancer right now. I'm very worried about him. But anyway, he came to the conclusion that by closely reading medical writers, especially Kelsis, and who's the other major medical writer? The name is just escaping me right now. He has a series of books on all kinds of Roman health issues. I'll have to check that. But anyway, reading the Latin medical writers who do talk about the absolute necessity to keep your inner body clean, that is cleaning yourself, emptying regularly. And this is direct... These medical writings were written for Roman elite men. They try to keep Roman elites healthy and well, so they can continue to rule.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So emperors and their officials and magistrates, they're all reading these books. So it comes from the medical writers, this notion, and Richard Neudecker picked up on that and he connected the flourishing growth of toilets with the time period of these medical writers. He noticed the medical writers are saying these things about the importance of bodily evacuations. At the same time, the toilets are appearing all over the Roman empire. It's the same with the baths. They are appearing at the same time too, and often there's always one or two toilets in a bath.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
So the Roman see the whole washing, emptying, cleaning as a part of a physical process that's necessary to keep you healthy. I think it was especially required of elite males. They don't care what happens to the slave guys. They're not going to make prescriptions for them, but obviously slaves in a household would hear these things and would think, "Oh, I guess I should make sure I go to the bathroom once a day," or you kind of learn from your owners how to live your life and you find yourself feeling better, you're going to keep doing that.
Stephen Guerriero:
Great. All right. I think that's a great note for us to pause here. I just want to say many thanks to Professor AOKO. It was so great to see you and hear from you this fascinating discussion. I want to give a special thanks to all of you for joining us today. We're delighted to see so many of our Brandeis alumni and friends and supporters coming together to explore topics with our Brandeis faculty and alumni experts. We want to invite you to join us next week for our final alumni college program on Wednesday, June 30th, at 12:00 PM for In the Margins, Delhi Women in India with Professor Harleen Singh and Professor Rajesh Sampath, and we greatly appreciate your participation and continued support of Brandeis University and I have to say, as a social studies teacher, supporting the humanities is now so important, more than ever. And so thank you, thank you, thank you to our alumni and supporters for this.
Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow:
I can't thank you all enough. And I hope you'll open your hearts and wallets to keep Brandeis strong in the future.
Stephen Guerriero:
Agreed. All right. Thank you everybody for coming and I wish you a wonderful afternoon.