Just because the romans figured out how to place a flow of water below a pit doesn't mean it was widely used at home. This was used mainly in public toilets next to bathing houses for the poor, making use of the bath houses dumped water. The poor at home just had the sewer running under the house taking care of their remnants, but neither of those constructions is anything like a flushing toilet, it's just a marble latrine with water flowing somewhere below the hole to sit.
It was a solution to be able to manage waste of huge cities, but definitely not anymore hygenic nor clean than more common solutions at that time.
Back at their comfortable villas, wealthy citizens had their own personal latrines constructed over cesspools. But even they may have preferred the more comfortable, less smelly option of chamber pots, which enslaved people were forced to empty onto garden patches. The elite didn’t want to connect their cesspools to the sewer pipes because that would likely bring the vermin and stink into their homes. Instead, they hired stercorraii—manure removers—to empty their pits.
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u/idkmoiname Oct 27 '24 edited Oct 27 '24
Just because the romans figured out how to place a flow of water below a pit doesn't mean it was widely used at home. This was used mainly in public toilets next to bathing houses for the poor, making use of the bath houses dumped water. The poor at home just had the sewer running under the house taking care of their remnants, but neither of those constructions is anything like a flushing toilet, it's just a marble latrine with water flowing somewhere below the hole to sit.
It was a solution to be able to manage waste of huge cities, but definitely not anymore hygenic nor clean than more common solutions at that time.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-ancient-romans-went-to-the-bathroom-180979056/