Roman public latrines had a sponge on a stick, the tersorium, instead of toilet paper.
It was rinsed in a channel of water or vinegar running at the users’ feet, and was probably shared.
More amazing facts
- 79 · 200 A little over a century after Vesuvius buried Pompeii, across the ocean in Teotihuacan the Pyramid of the Sun rose — one of the largest pyramids in the world.
- 79 · 80 The Colosseum opened a year after Pompeii was buried, under the same emperor.
- 80 A vomitorium was not a room where Romans threw up at feasts.
- 80 Gladiators were nicknamed hordearii, 'barley-eaters'. They lived on a nearly vegetarian diet of barley, beans and dried fruit thought to build strength, while legionaries got barley instead of wheat only as a punishment.
- 80 · 1872 No one knows which gesture Roman crowds used to doom a gladiator. 'Thumbs down' comes from Gérôme's 1872 painting Pollice Verso — the Latin just means 'with a turned thumb', direction unknown.
- 105 · 751 China had paper by the early 2nd century, but according to tradition it reached the Islamic world only after the Battle of Talas in 751, via Chinese captives.