The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems by Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow (review)

In a famous passage of his Geography (5.3.8), Strabo praises the Romans for three major achievements: paving roads, laying out aqueducts, and building sewers to wash away the filth of the city into the Tiber. While Roman roads and aqueducts have received considerable attention over the years, scholarly focus on Roman toilets and sanitation systems is a relatively new development, due in large part to the tireless efforts of Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow. This book is therefore the work of someone who knows her topic, has gone over the ground at the sites she describes, and is in command of recent scholarship, as her extensive bibliography and footnotes make clear.

In a lengthy preface (pp. xv–xxiv) Koloski-Ostrow surveys recent scholarship on the topic, much of it her own work. Chapter 1 reviews the best-preserved remains of Roman latrines in Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia, and Rome and presents a latrine typology for the first centuries bce and of the ce. Roman facilities varied widely in size, the number of users accommodated, and locations, but were largely standard in certain features, like the spacing and height of seating and proximity to a water supply for flushing. Chapter 2 puts our evidence for Roman sanitation into a broader context by exploring sanitary practices in other periods and cultures, from the biblical and Muslim world to modern Europe, including current trends in eco-fundamentalism.

In chapter 3 Koloski-Ostrow turns to Roman sanitary infrastructure, examining in particular Rome’s main sewer, the famous Cloaca Maxima. Because we lack a literary source on Roman sanitation comparable to Frontinus’s treatise on the aqueducts, our understanding of the Cloaca is limited. Koloski-Ostrow argues that Rome’s sewer system served mainly as a storm drain, ridding its streets of excess groundwater; despite the praise it received from Strabo and Roman writers like Pliny the Elder, the Cloaca did not effectively dispose of human waste or contribute significantly to urban health and hygiene.

Chapter 4 discusses use of toilets and rituals of hygiene. Roman latrine design indicates that people sat down to defecate and urinate and did not seem to share modern concerns about privacy, although many elite or wealthy Romans seem to have preferred using individual chamber pots rather than public facilities. They also used sponge sticks to clean themselves, so a nearby source of water was essential. Roman attitudes about human waste were also different from ours; like animal excrement, it was used as fertilizer, and human urine was also collected for commercial use.

A final chapter reviews references to toilets, feces, urine, and sewers in written sources, both Latin literature and graffiti, as well as paintings depicting human evacuation. Koloski-Ostrow’s survey of literary sources focuses largely on Roman satire, particularly Petronius’s Satyricon, but surprisingly omits some well-known coprolitic references in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis and Catullus 20. She also discusses latrine wall paintings and the famous decoration of the Baths of the Seven Sages in Ostia; latrine paintings often include representations of the goddess Fortuna, who presumably was invoked for assistance in the activity of elimination.

This detailed study is not an exhaustive treatment of its topic, but several conclusions come immediately to mind: by modern standards, Roman waste management and sanitation were primitive at best, and Roman cities must have been extremely smelly and disgusting, indeed unhealthy, places. It is therefore a mistake to consider these sewers and sanitation as model systems.

Koloski-Ostrow knows her material, but readers without firsthand knowledge of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Rome, and Ostia might want to read her second and fourth chapters first, before turning to her discussion of the archaeological evidence. The book is richly illustrated with 100 maps and figures, many of them the author’s own photographs. The illustrations, however, appear only at the end of her text, so readers will find themselves...