Ancient Roman culture would be baffling to modern eyes – and their toilet habits prove it

The right to privacy is a pillar of modern human rights. It’s a concept so deeply ingrained in our society that it can feel universal. We assume that certain spaces like our homes – especially their bedrooms and bathrooms – are inherently private while streets, workplaces and public buildings are for communal life.

But these distinctions haven’t always existed.

And in the culture of the ancient Roman world, the definition of privacy was entirely different.

How, then, did the people across the Roman empire conceive of privacy if not through physical seclusion? Why were communal latrines the norm? And what does this reveal about Roman values?

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Dr Hannah Platts explains how understanding those answers requires stepping into a cultural world where the individual was less important than the collective, and where privacy meant something very different from what it does today.

What “public” and “private” meant to the Romans

“It is really important not to conflate the urban realm of the city and the domestic realm of the house with our modern notions of urban as public and domestic as private,” she says. Today, closing a door marks out a sphere of personal privacy. In Rome, that wasn’t the case.

Instead, Romans distinguished between the private and the public based on the activity itself, rather than the place where the activity was happening.

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Confused? You’re right to be. It’s a tricky distinction, but Platts thinks a lesson in Latin can help illuminate what’s going on.

“The Latin word privatus translates as ‘of or belonging to an individual’, apart from the state or the community.” By contrast, publicus meant “belonging to the people, belonging to the state, belonging to the community.”

So whether something was public or private depended on whether it affected the civic body, not where it happened. A legal consultation in someone’s atrium was public; a bodily function performed in a room full of strangers was private.

“It’s not about a space being public or private. It’s about the act that goes on within a space.”

Roman toilets as a private place

Platts chooses a particularly confronting example to help illustrate the point.

Excavations at towns such as Ostia and Pompeii reveal latrines made from long marble benches with regularly spaced holes, often set above flowing channels of water. “These multi-seater toilets could house 20 or so people at one time,” Platts notes.

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To a modern eye, these rooms: open, communal and without partitions, appear unmistakably public. But Roman logic meant the opposite.

“Going to the toilet on a multi-seater toilet was totally a private act in Rome,” Platts says.

That was because the act itself had no bearing on civic life: it did not affect the state, involve business, or concern other citizens. It was therefore considered private, even if dozens of people were seated shoulder to shoulder.

The Roman house: a public venue in disguise

So, if communal latrines were “private”, what was the home considered as?

Platts points out that domestic space was often used for activities we would consider definitively public. “Community or state-related activities could, and very often did, take place in the house,” she says.

Elite households, especially those of senators, magistrates and wealthy patrons, functioned as political workplaces. Clients would visit their patron’s home to request favours or offer support. Business deals, legal advice, and local administration took place under the same roof as where people slept and cooked.

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The important thing was whether “what was being dealt with was of relevance to the state or the community,” Platts explains, which made those acts public regardless of setting.

Why Roman privacy feels so alien

Roman attitudes can feel alien because they reflect a fundamentally different set of social priorities.

Public life – civic duty, political participation, and community belonging – were at the core of Roman identity. The individual was secondary to the collective, and personal space mattered far less than the function of an action.

That mindset is reflected in Roman architecture too.

Roman cities lacked the kind of specialised, closed-off facilities familiar today. Baths were communal, dining was often semi-public, and sleep could take place in rooms accessible to others. Toilets were another of these shared spaces in a culture where solitude was an infrequent consideration.

In this way, the Roman multi-seater latrine is an important window into a cultural world structured by very different assumptions about the body, the state and social interaction.

It also highlights just how radically notions of privacy have changed, and how distant the Roman worldview can seem.

Hannah Platts was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

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