The Romans managed to conquer most of the Mediterranean, build roads across Europe, invent concrete, organise an empire stretching from Britain to Syria—and yet apparently saw nothing odd about discussing politics while twenty people sat together on a public lavatory.
History has a wonderful way of keeping us humble.
We have a curious habit of imagining the Romans as people very much like ourselves, only dressed in togas instead of jeans. They worried about taxes, argued about politics, complained about their neighbours and occasionally drank more wine than was good for them. Surely they could not have been all that different.
Well—yes and no.
The quickest way to misunderstand the Romans is to assume that they thought like us. Again and again they surprise us, not because they were irrational, but because they organised their world according to rules that can feel completely foreign.
You All Use the Toilet Alone?
Suppose you were transported to Rome in the first century BC. After a long dinner you ask your host where the lavatory is. He points around the corner. So far, so good.
Then you walk in and stop.
A row of men is sitting shoulder to shoulder on a stone bench, chatting quite happily while getting on with their business. One is discussing an election. Another is complaining about the price of grain. A third has heard something scandalous about a magistrate and is clearly unwilling to keep it to himself. Someone notices the empty place beside him and waves you over.
No cubicle. No locked door. No polite agreement to pretend that nobody else exists.
Roman public latrines varied, and we should not imagine that every Roman city possessed the grand arrangements familiar from later imperial sites. Yet communal seating and a far weaker expectation of bodily privacy were real features of Roman urban life. Water could run beneath the seats to carry waste away, while a shallow channel in front supplied water for cleaning.
The famous sponge on a stick is often introduced as though every visitor received the same communal bathroom implement. The evidence is less obliging than that. Romans certainly used sponges and water for cleaning, but the precise arrangements differed and are not always recoverable. Ancient sanitation becomes less amusing when we pretend to know more than we do.
Still, one point survives intact: a Roman would probably have found our tiny locked cubicles rather lonely.
Where Is Everybody?
Now show the same visitor your bathroom. A shower, a basin, clean towels, perhaps even underfloor heating if you wish to impress him.
He looks around and asks the obvious question: where is everybody?
For many Romans, especially in towns with public facilities, bathing was not a private five-minute operation performed before work. The baths were somewhere between a leisure centre, a business club, a café and the local rumour mill—with hot water added.
You could exercise, meet friends, arrange business, hear political news, complain about the government, discuss a court case, receive a massage and learn exactly who had been seen with whom the previous evening. The washing was important, but it was not the whole point.
Nor did Romans clean themselves exactly as we do. Oil could be rubbed over the skin and scraped away with a curved metal strigil, taking sweat and dirt with it. Soap existed in the ancient world, but the familiar daily ritual of standing alone beneath running water would not have been the obvious Roman method.
Roman writers also remind us that the baths were not always the serene marble palaces shown in modern reconstructions. They could be noisy, crowded, smoky, badly behaved and full of people whose idea of relaxation involved shouting. Seneca, living above a bathhouse, gives us an entire catalogue of grunts, splashes, sellers, masseurs and enthusiastic athletes. His complaint sounds surprisingly modern. Only the plumbing is different.
A Dangerous Question About Sex
Then we come to one of the easiest subjects to explain badly.
People sometimes say that homosexuality was normal in Rome. Others answer that Romans condemned it. Both statements are too blunt to tell us very much.
A Roman would not usually begin with our modern question: was this man homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual? Sexual orientation was not the principal category through which Roman society judged male behaviour. Status, freedom, citizenship, age, reputation and the role taken in the sexual act mattered enormously.
A free adult male citizen was expected to preserve his bodily independence and masculine standing. Sexual access to slaves or prostitutes, male or female, could be treated as compatible with that status, although moralists might still condemn excess, lack of self-control or the humiliation of another free person. To be publicly represented as the receptive partner was very different. Political enemies used such accusations because submission in sex could be made to imply submission in character.
This was not modern tolerance. It was not modern intolerance either. It was a hierarchy.
A modern discussion often begins with the sex of the partners and the identity of the person. A Roman discussion was more likely to begin by asking who was free, who was enslaved, who possessed honour and who was permitted to use whose body. That is a much less comfortable world than the cheerful phrase “the Romans accepted homosexuality” suggests.
It is also why the subject requires care. Our sources are full of insults, jokes, poems, rumours and political attacks. Cicero was not conducting a sociological survey when he accused an opponent of sexual disgrace. Martial wanted a sharp ending. Suetonius preserved stories because they were memorable, not because every one of them had been tested in a court of historical verification.
Shave This, But Perhaps Not That
Even body hair came with rules.
Roman men could remove hair from parts of the body without causing a social earthquake. Barbers, tweezers and depilation were familiar. Excessive hairiness might be mocked; excessive smoothness could be mocked as well. Roman masculinity, like most forms of masculinity, was governed by an invisible line that everyone was expected to recognise and nobody could define without starting an argument.
Chest, armpits or other areas might be attended to. Legs were more dangerous territory. A man who made himself too elaborately smooth could be accused of vanity or effeminacy. The exact fashion changed over time, and satirists naturally exaggerated, but the broader lesson is wonderful: grooming did not carry the same meanings then that it carries now.
A Roman gentleman might accept a carefully managed body, admire a clean-shaven face and then look at an advertisement for men's leg waxing as evidence that civilisation had finally collapsed.
Cleanliness Was Not One Simple Thing
Roman hygiene is often forced into one of two stories. In the first, the Romans were hygienic geniuses who invented sanitation. In the second, they were filthy people splashing about in contaminated water. Reality, predictably, refuses to cooperate.
They built aqueducts, drains, sewers, fountains, latrines and bath complexes on an extraordinary scale. They valued washing, grooming, fresh water and the removal of urban waste. At the same time, they knew nothing of bacteria, germ theory or modern infection control. Bath water was not necessarily changed as often as we would like. Crowded facilities spread disease as well as gossip. Street refuse, animals, workshops, smoke and human waste ensured that a Roman city did not smell like a museum reconstruction.
Women used cosmetics, perfumes, oils, combs, hairpins, mirrors and depilatory preparations. Men did many of the same things, although society judged the result according to different standards. Tooth powders could contain abrasive materials that would alarm a modern dentist. Urine, valued for its ammonia, had practical uses in laundering and cleaning. Roman ingenuity occasionally asks rather a lot of our admiration.
Clean and unclean were not absent categories. They were simply understood without microbiology—and within a society far more accustomed than ours to shared spaces, strong smells and the public presence of the body.
The Strange Moderns
It is easy to laugh at the Romans until we turn the experiment around.
Imagine explaining to them that many of us live for years beside people whose names we do not know. We eat alone, bathe alone and close a locked door to use the toilet alone. We speak daily to people hundreds of miles away but may avoid conversation with the person sitting next to us. We spend money on gym memberships to perform physical work that our machines have saved us from doing elsewhere.
Then explain online dating, social media, reality television and the fact that millions of people voluntarily publish photographs of their breakfast.
The Roman may begin to look less embarrassed.
That is the pleasure of these small curiosities. The communal lavatory is not merely a funny Roman fact. It tells us something about privacy. The bath tells us about community. Grooming tells us about masculinity. Sexual behaviour tells us about hierarchy and power. Hygiene tells us how a society can be technically sophisticated and scientifically limited at the same time.
The Romans shared many of our emotions. They loved, envied, boasted, worried, gossiped and made fools of themselves. But familiar emotions do not produce identical societies.
They were not modern people wearing togas.
And that is precisely what makes them worth meeting.