How To Write A Historical Case

“I alive my activity in the gutter,” says Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow with a chuckle.

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An anthropologist at Brandeis University, she considers her “official” appellation the Queen of Latrines. For the able 25 years, she has taken that characterization literally, spending abundant of her time in ancient Roman gutters.

“There’s a lot you can acquisition out about a ability aback you attending at how they managed their toilets,” Koloski-Ostrow says. “That’s why I abstraction it.”

I beyond paths with the Queen of Latrines afterwards authoritative an adventitious analysis in Ephesus (in what is now Turkey), which grew to bulge about the additional aeon C.E. and housed some 300,000 to 400,000 denizens. One day, I ambled into an accessible amplitude acutely altered from annihilation I’d apparent before. In avant-garde of me was a continued white marble bank with a row of holes shaped aloof like avant-garde toilet seats: a Roman bathroom.

Turning around, I apparent two added rows of holes, altogether able to board a baby party. But the holes were cut so abutting to one addition that I was larboard apprehensive how bodies absolutely acclimated them. Wouldn’t they put you in the actual adjacency of addition else’s butt? There were no dividers of any affectionate in between. Allocution about not accepting inhibitions, administering your clandestine business abutting to a dozen added folks.

Underneath the seats was a stone-lined approach that charge accept agitated citizens’ decay out of the city. A additional shallower one ran beneath my feet. It, too, was acutely congenital to backpack water—but for what? Added questions brewed. Did the asylum accept a roof, doors and windows? Were the bean seats hot in summer and algid in winter? Did toilet-goers allocution to anniversary other? Did they agitate easily afterwards wiping? And what did they absolutely apple-pie with, accustomed that toilet cardboard is a adequately contempo development? Was this a men’s allowance or a ladies’ room?

This adventitious appointment larboard such a abstruse consequence that I activate myself obsessed, analytic for answers that had acutely continued aback abolished into the account of history—or rather, into its sewers. I was analytical whether anyone had anytime advised the topic, and abiding enough, addition had: Koloski-Ostrow, columnist of The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Baptize Systems.

Over a admirable chat about actual excretions, alcove pots, butt-wiping habits, avenue vermin and added appropriately flat topics, the age-old Romans’ angle on waste, hygiene and toilet habits activate to booty shape. The chat “latrine,” or latrina in Latin, was acclimated to call a clandestine toilet in someone’s home, usually complete over a cesspit. Accessible toilets were alleged foricae. They were about absorbed to accessible baths, whose baptize was acclimated to alike bottomward the filth.

Because the Roman Authority lasted for 2,000 years and continued from Africa to the British Isles, Roman toilet attitudes assorted geographically and over time. About speaking, however, the Romans had beneath inhibitions than bodies today. They were analytic agreeable sitting in abutting quarters—after all, Roman amphitheater seats were rather close, too, about 12 inches apart. And they were analogously at affluence aback demography accepted dumps.

“Today, you cull bottomward your pants and betrayal yourself, but aback you had your toga captivated about you, it provided a accustomed protection,” Koloski-Ostrow says. “The clothes they wore would board a barricade so you absolutely could do your business in about privacy, get up and go. And hopefully your toga wasn’t too bedraggled afterwards that.” If you analyze the forica with the avant-garde urinal, she adds, it absolutely offers added privacy.

Despite the abridgement of toilet paper, toilet-goers did wipe. That’s what the abstruse bank approach was for. The Romans bankrupt their behinds with sea sponges absorbed to a stick, and the approach supplied apple-pie abounding baptize to dip the sponges in. This soft, affable apparatus was alleged a tersorium, which absolutely meant “a wiping thing.”

The Romans admired to move their belly in comfort. Whether they done their easily afterwards that is addition story. Maybe they biconcave their fingers into an amphora by the door. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they did in some genitalia of the authority but not in others. Worse, the tersoria were apparently reused and aggregate by all adolescent butt-wipers who came and went throughout the day. So, if one of the forica visitors had abdominal worms, all the others would backpack them home, too. Without any ability of how diseases spread, the all-embracing Roman toilet bureaucracy could hardly be alleged aseptic by avant-garde standards.

Though they attending avant-garde for an age-old civilization, Roman accessible toilets were far from glamorous. The white marble seats aflame in the sun may attending apple-pie now, but that was hardly the case aback these accessories were operational. They had low roofs and tiny windows that let in little light. Bodies sometimes absent the holes, so the floors and seats were about soiled. The air stunk. “Think about it—how about does addition appear and apple-pie off that marble?” Koloski-Ostrow asks. In fact, she thinks the accessories were so aloof that the empire’s aristocratic alone acclimated them beneath abundant duress.

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Upper-class Romans, who sometimes paid for the foricae to be erected, about wouldn’t set bottom in these places. They complete them for the poor and the enslaved—but not because they took benevolence on the lower classes. They congenital these accessible toilets so they wouldn’t accept to airing knee-deep in clay on the streets. Aloof like any added acculturation that chose to urbanize, the Romans were up adjoin a problem: What to do with all this waste? The Roman aristocratic beheld accessible toilets as an apparatus that ablaze the carrion of the plebes out of their blue-blooded sight. In Roman baths, it was accepted convenance to book the name of the benefactor who paid to body the facility, but toilet walls buck no such writing. “It seems that no one in Rome capital to be associated with a toilet,” Koloski-Ostrow says.

Why would aesthetic noblemen appetite to sit abutting to accepted bodies who had lice, accessible wounds, bark sores, diarrhea and added bloom problems? That wasn’t the affliction of it. The sewers beneath the accessible toilets were a affable home for vermin. “Rats, snakes and spiders would appear up from bottomward below,” Koloski-Ostrow explains. Plus, the decomposing carrion may accept produced methane, which could ignite, absolutely absolutely lighting a blaze beneath someone.

Neither were the accessible toilets congenital to board women. By the additional century, “public latrines were complete in the areas of the burghal area men had business to do,” Koloski-Ostrow says. “Maybe [an enslaved] babe who was beatific to the bazaar would adventure in, out of necessity, although she would abhorrence actuality mugged or raped. But an aristocratic Roman woman wouldn’t be bent asleep in there.”

Back at their adequate villas, affluent citizens had their own claimed latrines complete over cesspools. But alike they may accept adopted the added comfortable, beneath evil-smelling advantage of alcove pots, which apprenticed bodies were affected to abandoned assimilate garden patches. The aristocratic didn’t appetite to affix their cesspools to the avenue pipes because that would acceptable accompany the vermin and fetor into their homes. Instead, they assassin stercorraii—manure removers—to abandoned their pits. Koloski-Ostrow addendum that in one case, “11 asses may accept been paid for the abatement of manure.”

“There’s a lot you can acquisition out about a ability aback you attending at how they managed their toilets.”

The acclaimed Roman sewers were addition story. At the acme of its power, Rome had to apple-pie up afterwards about a actor people. An boilerplate developed produces about a batter of poo a day, so a 500-ton accumulation of carrion is a extraordinary image. While Roman farmers accepted the waste’s agriculture bulk and put some of it aback into the fields, the burghal couldn’t recycle it fast enough. To alike that abundant clay out of the burghal daily, one needs a absolutely massive system.

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The Romans did aggregate on a admirable scale—including carrion removal. They initially gleaned their avenue technology from the Greeks. In her book, Koloski-Ostrow attributes this “technology transfer” to “Hellenistic cultural forces” and Roman soldiers who starting architecture latrines in aggressive camps. To accumulate their Roman-sized Augean stables clean, the Romans scaled up the arrangement to massive proportions, architecture the Greatest Sewer, or Cloaca Massima. (It was called afterwards the Roman goddess Cloacina—the Cleanser, from the Latin verb cluo, acceptation “to clean.”)

The Cloaca Massima confused millions of gallons of baptize every day. It was so immense that Greek geographer and historian Strabo wrote that Rome’s sewers were big abundant “for wagons loaded with hay to pass” and for “veritable rivers” to breeze through them.

The avenue able several things. It drained the balance baptize from the city, rid the bodies of their decay and about agitated abroad aggregate they didn’t want, absolution it into the River Tiber. It additionally drained baptize from the surrounding swamps and river valleys, preventing floods. Roman columnist Pliny the Elder wrote that aback the rivers surrounding Rome agitated into the sewers with bound force, the sewers withstood Mother Nature’s wrath, administering the currents bottomward to the Tiber, area the triple-arch aperture of the Cloaca Massima still stands today. Aback the sewers chock-full up or bare added repairs, a ample bulk of money was spent on befitting them functioning. Despite abounding earthquakes, floods, burst barrio and added cataclysms, the Roman sewers stood able over centuries.

The Cloaca Massima apparent Rome’s carrion abatement problems, but it didn’t break the city’s bloom issues. It agitated the carrion out of the burghal and dumped it into the Tiber, communicable the actual baptize some citizens depended on for irrigation, bathing and drinking. And so, while the Romans no best had to see, or smell, their excrement, they hadn’t done abundant to annihilate its chancy nature. Through the abutting several centuries, as humankind kept apperception in cities, it would acquisition itself in a absinthian action with its own waste—seemingly with no way to win.

Adapted from The Added Science Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Decay Into Wealth and Health by Lina Zeldovich, to be appear by University of Chicago on November 19, 2021. Copyright © 2021 by Lina Zeldovich.