The Roman jorica was public in the full sense of the term, like soldiers' latrines in war time. People met there, conversed, and exchanged invitations to dinner without embarrassment. And at the same time, it was equipped with superfluities which we forego and decorated with a lavishness we are not wont to spend on such a spot. All round the semicircle or rectangle which it formed, water flowed continuously in little channels, in front of which a score or so of seats were fixed. The seats were of marble, and the opening was framed by sculptured brackets in the form of dolphins, which served both as a support and as a line of demarcation. Above the seats it was not unusual to see niches containing statues of gods or heroes, as on the Palatine, or an altar to Fortune, the goddess of health and happiness, as in Ostia; and not infrequently the room was cheered by the gay sound of a playing fountain as at Timgad. . . . [Yet in]Rome . . . even the latrines of the imperial palace, as majestic and ornate as a sanctuary beneath its dome, contained three seats side by side . . . .
The public latrines were not the resort of misers or of the very poor. These folk had no mind to enrich the conductores joricarum to the tune of even one as. They preferred to have recourse to the jars, skilfully chipped down for the purpose, which the fuller at the corner ranged in front of his workshop. He purchased permission for this from Vespasian, in consideration of a tax to which no odour clung, so as to secure gratis the urine necessary for his trade. Alternatively they clattered down the stairs to empty their chamber pots (las ana) and their commodes (sellae pertusae) into the vat or dolium placed under the well of the staircase. Or if perhaps this expedient had been forbidden by the landlord of their insula, they betook themselves to some neighbouring dungheap. For in Rome of the Caesars . . . more than one alley stank with the pestilential odour of a cess trench (lacus) such as those which Cato the Elder during his censorship paved over when he cleaned the cloacae and led them under the Aventine. Such malodorous trenches were extant in the days of Cicero and Caesar; Lucretius mentions them in his poem, De rerum natura. . . .
There were other poor devils who found their stairs too steep and the road to these dung pits too long, and to save themselves further trouble would empty the contents of their chamber pots from their heights into the streets. So much the worse for the passer-by who happened to intercept the unwelcome gift! Fouled and sometimes even injured, as in Juvenal's satire, he had no redress save to lodge a complaint against the unknown assailant; . . . Roman jurists did not disdain to take cognisance of this offence, to refer the case to the judges, to track down the offender, and assess the damages payable to the victim. . . .
When in consequence of the fall of one of these projectiles from a house, the body of a free man shall have suffered injury, the judge shall award to the victim in addition to medical fees and other expenses incurred in his treatment and necessary to his recovery, the total of the wages of which he has been or shall in future be deprived by the inability to work which has ensued.
From from Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino. The image of an ancient Roman latrine in Ephesus is from Wikimedia.
