Yeah, so your toilet..."We used to think there were no toilets in {Roman} peoples' private homes, that if they used facilities in the high empire, they used public facilities that were associated with bath buildings, or near the amphitheater. But now, we understand that everybody did have a private house toilet. Only those were cesspit toilets… But Romans knew how to make flush toilets. They could have had house flush toilets, but they chose not to. Except for public ones — multi-seater toilets where up to 60 to 100 people sat around a room on open holes — those were flush toilets."
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"What is interesting is that Romans didn't have sewer traps, and they didn't have the systems that we have connecting our modern toilets to sewers, and they were really afraid to put their house toilets connected to the sewer system.
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"So instead they, once a year, roughly, maybe, excavated their own house toilets into the garden and raised their vegetables on the human excrement from the house. Or, they sold the contents of their house toilets — it was a commodity that you could sell to a guy going by with a wagon calling out, 'Looking for your excrement,' who would then collect from your cesspit the excrement to bring it to more commercial agriculture in the nearby city."
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"Of course, the Romans didn’t understand germs. They are also a people of extreme superstitions, and fear of sitting on a toilet with a sewer connection was something very real to them… Because they believed in demons that lived in dark, dirty places, and because, occasionally — as you were sitting on those public toilets over a real sewer — buildup of methodic gasses would cause a fire to burst through the seats of the toilet… Or, rats would crawl out of them and bite you.
... don't take it for granted.
