A neglected corner of Roman history

When Ovid was seeking ‘cures for love’, the most efficient remedy, he wrote, was for a young man to watch his girl on the toilet. The American author of The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy begins with this worrying poetic advice. The evacuation of the human body has had little previous attention from historians of Rome, she says, but ‘Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow on the toilet’ should not become the citation attached by fellow scholars to her name. We might all be put off.

Her fear is well-founded. The reason that there are dozens of books about the Romans’ baths and almost none about their latrines reveals much about us and nothing about them. High-minded archaeologists used to prefer their heroes as brave bathers discussing philosophy. Any awkward seats with holes could be prison chairs or hydraulic hoists. One early 19th-century excavator posited a form of ‘medicinal steam baths’ where the ‘strength of the steam created a need to be seated’.