In ancient Rome there were public latrines, but no privies attached to houses. There were basins and tubs, which were emptied daily by servants detailed for the purpose. No closet-paper was in use, as may be imagined, none having yet been invented or introduced in Europe, but in each public latrine, there was a bucket filled with salt water, and a stick having a sponge tied to one end, with which the passer-by cleansed his person, and then replaced the stick in the tub.[52] Seneca, in his Epistle No. 70, describes the suicide of a German slave who rammed one of these sticks down his throat.
The warning “Commit no nuisance,” or in French “Il est défendu de faire ici des ordures,” is traceable back to the time of the Romans, who devoted to the wrath of the twelve great gods, “and of Jupiter and Diana as well, all who did any indecency in the neighborhood of the temples or monuments.” “On nous saura gré de rapporter ici une inscription qui se lisait autrefois sur les thermes de Titus; ‘Duodecim Dios et Dianam et Jovem Optimum Maximum habeat iratos quisquis hic minxerit aut cacarit.’” In Genoa, excommunication was threatened against all who infringed upon this same prohibition.
Privies were ordered for each house in Paris in 1513, whence we may infer that some house-builders had previously of their own impulse added such conveniences; as early as 1372, and again in 1395, there were royal ordinances forbidding the throwing of ordures out of the windows in Paris, which gives us the right to conclude that the custom must have been general and offensive; the same dispositions were taken for the city of Bordeaux in 1585.
Obscene poetry was known in latrines in Rome as in our own day, and some of the compositions have come down to us.—(See “Bibliotheca Scatalogica,” pp. 13-17.)
The Romans protected their walls “against such as commit nuisances ... by consecrating the walls so exposed with the picture of a deity or some other hallowed emblem, and by denouncing the wrath of heaven against those who should be impious enough to pollute what it was their duty to reverence. The figure of a snake, it appears, was sometimes employed for this purpose.... The snake, it is well known, was reckoned among the gods of the heathens.”—(“Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs,” Rev. John James Blunt, London, 1823, p. 43.)