The Toilets and Related Infrastructure of Roman Pompeii

Mount Vesuvius as seen from the Forum in Pompeii.

Pompeii was founded around the 7th to 6th century BC by the Oscans or Osci of central Italy, on an important crossroad between Cumae, Nola, and Stabiae.

There was a devastating earthquake in 63 AD, but the city had been rapidly rebuilt. The population had grown to around 20,000. Then, over the two days of 24-25 August 79 AD, it was buried by a catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The city was buried under 18 meters of ash and pumice and about 10% of the population was killed.

Plaster casts of victims.

The Greek author and scientist Pliny the Elder had been appointed praefect of the Roman Navy. His desire to rescue some friends and closely observe the fascinating volcanic phenomenon led to his death. The account by his nephew Pliny the Younger of the eruption and his uncle's death is famous. See letter VI:XVI To Tacitus, Letter 16 from the Sixth Book of Letters of Pliny the Younger, The Harvard Classics, 1909-14. He described an enormous eruption column, with a pyroclastic flow or cloud of superheated gas, ash, and rock, rushing down the flanks of Vesuvius and covering the surrounding area. Modern analysis suggests an ash cloud temperature of 850°C at the point of eruption cooling to 240 to 350°C by the time it reached the city.

The city was known to history but physically lost. An architect digging a new course for the river Sarno rediscovered the site in 1599, but there was no serious excavation until 1748. Giuseppe Fiorelli, who took charge of excavations in 1860, realized that voids in the ash layers containing human remains were spaces left by decomposed bodies. He came up with the technique of injecting plaster into these voids to recreate the victims. It soon became a popular spot on the Grand Tour of Europe.

Pompeii is a large and very popular site — about 66 hectares and two to three million visitors annually.

For a modern parallel, see the November 1985 eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Tolima, Colombia, and the burial of the town of Armero by a series of lahars (volcanic mudslides).

The Lupanaro, the famous brothel of Pompeii.

Roman Brothel Toilet

The Lupanaro is the famous well-preserved brothel in Pompeii, the name referring to the home of the "she-wolves". It's about two streets northeast of the north end of the Forum, along Vicolo Stortlo.

A Roman brothel toilet.

The exterior of the two-story brothel is seen at left, and yes, that's its toilet at right.

It's a pretty basic one-hole frame design. A chamberpot would be placed below the hole, and then taken out and empted into the sewer immediately outside.

So, it's an indoor toilet, but not indoor plumbing.

A stone bed in the brothel.

Most brothels in Pompeii were single-room operations. The Lupanaro was the largest, with ten rooms. The beds look awfully uncomfortable, as all that survives today is the solid stone bed form and "pillow". There would of course have been mattresses and pillows on top of this!

The book "Cities of Vesuvius: Pompeii and Herculaneum" (Michael Grant, Phoenix Press, 1971) quotes the earlier "Present State of Pompeii", by Malcolm Lowry, 1949: "The brothels were by no means spacious and 'seemed to have been made to accommodate the consummations of some race of voluptuous dwarfs'."

In other words, the beds are rather short.

The frescos are the feature of greatest interest to most historians outside the speciality of toiletology.

It seems to me that the frescos may have served as more than simple decoration, perhaps they were a graphical menu of available choices. "I'll have Number 3, please."

All of the erotic and fertility related imagery shocked the excavators and early influential visitors. Some discoveries seem to have been re-buried and then re-discovered in later years. A large collection at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples was inaccessible without academic credentials or special permission until 2000.

Graffiti on the walls of the Lupanaro indicates that the prostitutes were slaves from all around the Mediterranean.

The frescos themselves show that there's nothing new in the way of stereotypes. They intentionally depict the women with significantly lighter skin, despite their origins, and the men with significantly darker skin. The theory was that lighter skinned women were more beautiful, and darker skinned men were more sexually active.

Pompeii's Sewage and Drainage

Roman hydraulic engineering and city design being what it was, Pompeii was well supplied with constant flows of spring water from the inland mountains.

It seems that most streets were constantly flushed with water overflowing from fountains, and so waste (as in the case of that brothel chamberpot) could be disposed of by dumping it into the continuously flushed gutter.

Large elevated blocks at street corners allowed people to cross the street without stepping into the waste water. And the slots between the blocks were sized and spaced to accommodate chariot and wagon axles of standard dimensions.

Baths at Pompeii

This was a Roman city, so of course there were baths. The two most prominent ones were Terme del Foro and Terme Stabiane. Those are the Italian names, as you'll find on the local maps and signs. "Forum Baths" and "Stabiane Baths", you might say.

Roman baths contained the standard three chambers: caldarium, or hot room; tepidarium, or warm room; and frigidarium, or cold room.

Urine-Based Wool Processing

Wool was a major product of Pompeii, including all stages of processing through the sale of finished goods.

An early wool processing step is fulling, also called tucking or walking. This is the process of cleaning or scouring to remove oils and dirt, followed by milling or thickening. These pictures show a series of tanks used for fulling wool at Pompeii. The smaller tanks are for treading and fulling, the larger ones are for rinsing.

The cleaning or scouring process during Roman times was based on human urine. Urine contains ammonium salts, which are still components of modern soaps. Read your shampoo bottle — a handy bottle of Suave shampoo lists ammonium lauryl sulfate, ammonium laureth sulfate, and ammonium chloride.

A wool fulling operation had to purchase the wool itself from shepherds in the surrounding countryside. But the urine needed for processing might be obtained quite cheaply or even for free....

One of the wool fulling businesses along the main street of Via dell'Abbondanza famously had a sign asking male passersby to please contribute via the jars hung on the wall. See "The Production of Woolen Cloth in the Roman World", Walter O. Moeller, 1976, page 20:

Since water was of great important to the fullers, they had to have their establishments near sources and needed guaranteed water-rights (below, p. 96). And as with water a sure supply of urine was a prime concern. So that it might not go to waste, the fullers set out jars in the street outside their shops as a public convenience, thereby collecting some of their supply free of charge. [162] Yet since animal urine was also used, much of the substance must have been imported from the farms to the cities, and if camel urine was prized, as Pliny (HN XXVIII. 91) reports, then urine must have entered into an extensive trade pattern. Other arrangements, however, had to be made to collect the vast supply of human urine generated in the cities (below, p. 96).

Ammonium: NH₄⁺

Later technology included fulling mills with arrays of water-driven broad wooden mallets to repeatedly stamp the wool immersed in its ammonium-laden bath, a mixture that combined urine with fuller's earth, a clay-like material with high magnesium oxide content. But back in Roman times, this was done by slaves stomping away in urine from ankle to knee deep.

Not what you might think...

                        
Overly enthusiastic toiletological tourists might see these common types of facilities at Pompeii and assume that they are some sort of public toilet.

Not at all!

These businesses are either shops or taverns featuring large clay pots or amphorae built into countertops. These are systems for storing and dispensing olive oil, wine, or other liquids.

Click here for my page about visiting Napoli, or Naples as it is known in English.

Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."

In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.

If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):

• Travel suggestions
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