The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome) by Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow

Author:Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow [Koloski-Ostrow, Ann Olga]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

This passage, perhaps based on a similarly disgusting man from Theophrastus’s Characters, is rich in twisted images of proper table etiquette. The type of personality who would attempt to enliven dinner conversation with an account of his digestive workings is abhorrent and laughable, perfect personal characteristics for the landscape of satirical writing.53

The ungutted hog, the blood puddings, the vomiting bees, Niceros’s story including a graveyard defecation, Scintilla nearly throwing up after eating bear meat, Habinnas’s comments about women “pissing away” money, Daedalus’s pig creations, and Trimalchio’s warning to “crappers” on his tomb, keep the metaphor ever before our senses. The dinner ends with Encolpius and his friends rushing out amid the utter confusion of a false fire alarm.54 And like the bursting of an unstoppable bowel movement inspired by hours of stuffing one’s face, no guest can ever leave Trimalchio’s house by the same way he came in.55 The whole house of Trimalchio takes on the hierarchical head-to-bottom metaphor of the city of Rome and its sewers.

By the early second century A.D.,56 Juvenal finally utilizes satire to its full potential to make it seethe and bubble like the most choked-up of sewers.57 In fact, Juvenal informs us58 that one important collection point for the Cloaca Maxima was the Subura, Rome’s impoverished zone of lowlifes, seedy restaurants, and prostitutes. We now start to see where the sewer and its contents fit conceptually into Juvenal’s view of Rome. Juvenal viciously intensifies the fairly straightforward Plautine reference59 to the neighborhood of the Subura. He clearly implies that sewer drains under the Subura were servicing those parts of the city where the filth was most plentiful and most vile, where urine was generated by the constant flow of cheap wine, and where foul excreta were created from the poor quality of the food to be found in the neighborhood.

In the context of this study, it is not so important to determine which of these authors is accurate or which details are to be believed.60 What is important is the cumulative effect we can glean from our sample, which turns out to demonstrate the literary use of lively, textured imagery regarding toilet habits, latrines, and sewers in the lives of the Romans, sometimes with political overtones. We have let the Romans speak for themselves about sanitation and some of its technologies, such as sewers and latrines. We must be aware that individual authors, like many nineteenth-century writers on the same subject, often speak in double tongues. Given the nature of the literary evidence we have, we must accept and even expect the constant presence of exaggeration and hyperbole in the interest of humorous effect or cutting sarcasm. Nevertheless, the citations we have been discussing from Roman literature show recognition of the sordid nature of excretory matters and, certainly in satire, make a close connection between sewers, their contents, and insults.

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