Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Recently, the television series Nova had a special on Roman baths; pre-show teasers promised that the inner workings of the opulent, aqueduct-fed tubs would be revealed.

Dawn presumed that the show's producers would be at least as savvy as Dawn's mom who, upon noticing all the little cubicles in the dressing area of a Roman bath in Britain-- reconstructed for her and other tourists-- exclaimed, "I can only imagine...." Mom knew that across cultures, throughout time, boys will be boys: get 'em together, drunk, and naked and nature will take her course.

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But alas, the Nova team glossed over the most intriguing aspects of the ancient tubs and focused instead on the engineering problems posed in modern attempts to replicate the construction of a Roman-style bath using only Roman technology. While Dawn is as interested as the next viewer in how concrete's drying time can be altered with heat from wood fires, more attention to whether Estruscan glory-hole technology survived to imperial times would have been welcome diversion.

The show wasn't completely given over to "aggregate desiccation engineering," however. Included in the introduction was a tour of the outer areas of a massive downtown Rome public toilet. The room was lined on three sides by a stone bench with holes cut therein (with thoughtful notches added to allow for dick floppage); said holes (and there were two dozen of them) were remarkably close to one another with no partition between them. As the Nova host noted, such an arrangement would offend many modern shithouse goers, for one would not only be touching the thighs of anyone sitting adjacent, but would be aware of all their business, sounds, and smells.

Dawn cannot tell whether it is some neurosis created by early, unremembered toilet-training trauma, or simple fascination at basic cultural information almost-always omitted from history texts and the like, but Dawn is intrigued learning the different toileting and defecation habits of other people. While Nova remained silent on sex, at least they implicitly acknowledged that bath-goers had dicks and assholes.