Every tour of Ephesus reaches a moment of perfect, delighted silence: the latrines. Three marble benches around an open court, each pierced with a neat row of keyhole openings, over a channel of water that never stopped flowing. Dozens of seats. No partitions. None were ever wanted.
The Roman toilet was social infrastructure in the most literal sense. Citizens sat side by side, togas arranged, and talked — business, politics, gossip, dinner plans. A small gutter of clean water ran at their feet for the sponge-sticks; the deep channel beneath carried everything away to the sewers, flushed by the same aqueduct surplus that fed the fountains. The engineering was genuinely superb. The etiquette bears no thinking about.
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Membership of the latrine (part of the bath complex) was a modest subscription — and wealthy Ephesians, the story goes, sent a slave ahead in winter to warm the marble seat. In the centre of the court a small pool and columns supported a roof: shade in summer, cover in rain, and pleasant acoustics for conversation, which was, after all, the point.
Beneath the humour sits real history: sanitation on this scale — clean water in, waste water out, for a city of two hundred thousand — would not be matched in Europe again until the 19th century. The queue of grinning visitors photographing each other on the marble is, in its way, paying the correct tribute.
