Ancient Roman toilets/Alamy
Even 2,000 years ago, people wrote on the walls of toilets just as they do today! Sometimes, they weren’t everyday citizens but well-educated people in high places. Let’s explore how ancient bathroom graffiti can open a surprising window into the past.
In Herculaneum, the city near Pompeii that was also destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, there exists a building called the House of the Gem. Its name originates from the discovery of an elegant brooch with a woman’s head during excavations in the 1930s. Naturally, the house has a toilet, where an intriguing message was carefully etched on the wall for posterity: ‘Apollinaris medicus Titi imp. hic cacavit bene’, meaning ‘Apollinaris, physician of the Emperor Titus, had a wonderful bowel movement here.’
Since Herculaneum was certainly not Emperor Titus’s residence, and the personal physician was usually duty-bound to be near his master, it is possible that Apollinaris was part of an official delegation that visited Herculaneum. In any case, Titus became emperor only a month (or a few months—it’s a confusing conundrum of dating!) before the eruption. Hopefully, Dr Apollinaris was able to get out of the toilet in time.