While the founder Kim was physically traipsing around the public restrooms of ancient Rome in sunny Italy, some of us are traipsing the internet, occasionally emerging from our holes, groundhog-like, to shovel snow.
Beneath the cities of Ancient Rome lay a dark, labyrinthian drain system called the Cloaca Maxima, which swept up stormwater and wastewater and pushed it into the Tiber River. Overseeing this was the Venus Cloacina, goddess of the sewer, who later merged with Venus.
Rome’s Guardian
The Ancient Roman Empire had many innovative achievements. Many are pretty famous, like roads, aqueducts, and military tactics. Among the Empire’s lesser-known innovations are sporting souvenir cups and—more relevant to FLUSH—sewers.
In the Roman Forum—the site of victory processions, grand political speeches, and twisty criminal trials—is an innocuous circle of stones. This is all that remains of what was once a shrine to Venus Cloacina, goddess of the sewers. She watched over Rome’s Cloaca Maxima, “the greatest sewer.”
Writer Amelia Soth tells us not to think of a sewer how a modern reader might, as a subterranean maze of pipes. Instead, think of a great, swirling underground river that functioned as a massive storm drain for the city, sweeping the waste-laden rainwater from the streets of Rome into the Tiber River—Rome’s drinking water source.
The Greatest Sewer
The Cloaca Maxima was a site of contradictions and contrast for the Ancient Romans. It was a “huge work” known for its “structural solidity and durability”, a gift of earlier kings, powerful and impregnable. But it was also dark, mysterious, and dangerous, “clogged with refuse and murdered bodies.” The ancient writer Aelian recounts a story of a massive octopus that lurked in the deep, emerging into the home of an Iberian merchant to break pottery and steal precious pickled fish.
The Cloaca Maxima is one of the oldest monuments in the Roman Forum. It started as a natural stream; then, during the reign of Tarquinius Priscus around the 6th century BC, it was lined with stone to facilitate its ability to carry stormwater out of the Forum and to drain the marshlands. It wasn’t until about 300 years later that it was enclosed with a semicircular vault, and waste from latrines and public baths was directed through the system.
Other Roman cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum also had cloaca. The mixture and sources of wastewater varied from city to city, depending on factors such as flooding and the proximity to the river. Some cloaca focused more on stormwater disposal; others were designed to carry water from public baths and toilets.
Ancient sources stated that the cloaca of Roman cities needed to be manually cleaned. Archaeologists found a massive deposit of hardened sludge in Herculaneum that measured 1.35 meters high. In the 1st century, during the rule of Augustus Caesar, the Cloaca Maxima was not only expanded, but given deep clean. Pliny the Younger, ancient Roman author and administrator, describes prisoners being conscripted to do sewer cleaning.
In the Home
Classics Professor Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow argues that we must be careful not to ascribe to Romans a concern for hygiene and disease; their primary concern in constructing the cloaca was water drainage. In most private homes, Roman toilets were cesspits, unconnected from the sewer. Sometimes, the cesspits were found horrifyingly close to the kitchens, potentially to ensure ready access to the helpful fertilizer, as discussed in a previous FLUSH blog post. The wealthy were unwilling to risk the sewers backing up and flooding their decadent homes: “Floods were fairly common, and when they struck, the dirty water rushed up from the sewers into the streets.” On the other hand, the public toilets, like the ones Kim explored in Ostia, were almost always connected to the main sewer lines.
The Pipes are Still Flowing
The Cloaca Maxima has been in continuous use since ancient times. During the Byzantine era, the great structure was neglected. In 2012, scientists sent a small, remote-controlled, four-wheeled robot called the ARCHEOBOT into the system to photograph, scan, and map out the now-fragile structures. (The ARCHEOBOT website has a cool video where you can watch a 3D tour of the structure.) Subsequently, repairs and maintenance began.
If you swing by the Roman Forum today, you can stop at the remains of the shrine to Cloacina and still see part of the Cloaca Maxima itself. If you stand near a door at the Basilica Julia, you can hear a trickle of water and catch a whiff of the still-used systems.
And I thought American infrastructure was aging. (To be fair, it definitely is. But that’s for another post.)