Latrinae - Roman Toilets in the Northwestern Provinces of the Roman Empire. Oxford 2018 (original) (raw)
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Private toilets in Roman Italy: an overview
In this essay I analyse the archaeological evidence of private toilets in Italy and I make a comparison with the public ones. In the category of private toilets I included rooms founded in private houses, in some workshop and finally in some big villas. I used the label “domestic” and “private” for latrines that were used by a selected number of people, mainly who lived and worked there.
The spread of public toilet facilities in Roman towns should not be ascribed simply to processes of Hellenisation, nor taken as a natural consequence of the rise of Roman urban infrastructure addressing the needs of growing communities. In the Early Roman Empire, the combination of intertwined factors opened up a new chapter in the history of urban landscapes. Key developments in civic infrastructure and related specialised administration were initiated at the very beginning of the Principate, in the Age of Augustus. His new idea of cura urbis, which incorporated investments in sewage disposal and an interrelated drainage system, must have played a pivotal role in this. As one of the indispensable component parts of such infrastructure, latrines were a natural extension and continuation of such urban planning. And yet, one gets the impression that the public toilets themselves, as one of fundamental aspects of urban infrastructure, had been largely ignored by this new ideological frame of the Principate.
Journal of Roman Studies, 2019
The rediscovery of the Baths' decorative sculpture and ornamentation through time is discussed in ch. 2. G. draws attention to the movement and recycling of materials: the sculptures of the Farnese collection in the Archaeological Museum of Naples, the capitals reused in Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome and in the Duomo of Pisa, and the colossal column from the frigidarium which now stands in Piazza Santa Trinita in Florence, to cite just a few examples. This chapter includes a short catalogue of all the decorative materials recovered from the Baths, of either known or uncertain setting within the ancient building (62-75). A longer, descriptive catalogue of the freestanding sculpture can be found in a separate appendix at the end of the book (271-388). The main body of discussion is developed throughout chs 3-5. Bearing in mind that only part of these materials can be associated with specic sectors of the bath complex, G. nevertheless manages to undertake a very scrupulous analysis. Her study is praiseworthy as it looks at the whole of the building's decorative programme, including sculpture, architectural ornament, mosaics and furnishings. Major statuary groups, such as the Hercules Farnese, the Latin Hercules and the Farnese Bull, are not just examined as individual masterpieces of sculpture, but are also set in their respective display contexts together with the rest of the decoration. Images of military power recurred across the entire building, from shield-shaped motifs on the mosaics to thunderbolts and eagles on the column capitals. The author recognises such images as a distinctive feature of Caracalla's political agenda, likening their ideological effect, perhaps quite ambitiously, to those of Augustus' Res Gestae and Trajan's Column (112-26). Another interesting observation concerns the repetition of images in the various rooms of the Baths (165-72). In the frigidarium, bathers walking from the antechamber into this hall would have seen two statues of Hercules on either side; after raising their heads, they would have spotted a small-size version of the same image on the gured capitals on top of the columns. The existence of groups of other deities (Venus, Bacchus, Mars, Virtue/Roma and Fortuna) on the preserved capitals may suggest the presence of analogous, large-size statues that are now lost. The strong connection between water architecture and military power is better understood when one considers the Baths of Caracalla within the urban context where they were placed (210-41). In the Severan period, the area of Porta Capena became a fulcrum of imperial building activities with the construction of the Septizodium, the Baths of Septimius Severus (probably to be located along the Via Appia at the foot of the Caelian) and the Baths of Caracalla. These buildings formed a homogeneous group in terms of architectural language and would have been clearly identied by people who entered the city from this direction, including ordinary travellers, members of the urban elites and soldiers, as well as the emperor and his household during the celebration of triumphs over the enemies of Rome. In conclusion, both books under review address (with different emphases) important aspects of art, architecture, decoration and display in the Roman world. K.'s study of temple pediments in Rome is a fundamental collection of the extant material evidence, which is now made available in a single monograph to the benet of all scholars. With regard to the Baths of Caracalla, while this building and its ornamentation had been examined in previous studies, G. has the great merit of approaching this topic by looking at the monument, its wide range of decorative materials, urban setting and history as a whole. These two studies are therefore welcome initiatives which mark a clear progress of research in the eld of Roman art and architecture.