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How Romans wiped their butts after going to the bathroom. - Ciencia Histórica

Romans, as all people do, went to the bathroom and wiped their butts. Both activities were very original back then, worth reading about them...

www.cienciahistorica.com

Wiping their butts.
More striking, if possible, was the method used by the visitors to the baths to wipe their butts. In absence of toilette paper, the butts cleaning device was a wooden stick with a sponge attached at one of the ends (often, literally a sea sponge), or some type of cloth or animal wool. If you look carefully at the illustrations, you can see the gutters just in front of the seats, where sea water ran continuously so they could rinse their sponges after each use. To make matters worse, the sponges were also public and only the wealthier carried their own.

A second option for the Romans to wipe their butts, when public bathrooms sat in the poorer neighborhoods, was simply to use the hand (not very differently to how is currently done in some countries), which was rapidly washed in a fountain installed for that purpose. I think you don’t need any more details. In those days it was a common practice, except in China, where paper had been used for the private parts since the second century b.C. I imagine that some of you are already sending a prayer to the inventor of modern toilette paper, I sometimes do.


I first found this out watching Spartacus. Disturbed me big time, no wonder they had plagues.

 

[ruvikx]

Makes you wonder...what kind of fetishes they had in ME times? I'm going to assume eating a$$ wasn't as popular back then

In the U.S., 110 Million S.T.D. Infections (Published 2017)

Chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are all on the rise, federal researchers found.

www.nytimes.com

That's an estimated 110 million Americans in the 21st century with an STD. Add the obesity levels on top & you'd probably be safer eating some Christian shepherdess ass in 12th century Holy Roman Empire than modern day USA.

Just saying.

 

[#Phonepunk#]

what kind of fetishes they had in ME times? I'm going to assume eating a$$ wasn't as popular back then

iirc fetishes were really popularized during the Roman Empire, before medieval times. there were infamous hedonist emperors like Caligula and Heliogabalus; homosexuality, orgies, slavery, torture, all kinds of fetishes, all that stuff that people do, they did it then too, of course, probably far worse than you could imagine towards their captured enemies. there was widespread torture of Christians and other minority groups, and alongside torture, you know there will be BSDM freaks. they had bath houses. this stuff isn't new, human sexuality is pretty instinctive.

thing is, in middle ages most people were very poor, and public infrastructure was non existent. if you were wealthy tho no doubt you could afford remnants. surely you could get leather or metalwork bondage stuff from a blacksmith. wealthy people did not work so they spent a lot of time consuming booze and fucking, like in GOT. all that stuff was done back then too. there isn't that much new, outside of VR or mechanized robots. people ran harums. there were popular red light districts with hilarious street names that linger on today, like Gropecunt Lane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane).

even then, they probably made fuck machines in medieval times. you just know somewhere someone did that. think about how desperate everything was, how violent and short life could be, the threat of the plague. it would be interesting i guess to read a book on medieval sex but i haven't really seeked on out.