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How Filthy Were the Ancient Romans?

Aquae Sulis Roman Baths in Bath, UK
Alexander Meddings Author Image
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Location iconRome, Italy

Rome by Night Walking Tour

Experience Rome's iconic landmarks under the enchanting glow of moonlight on this 2.5-hour guided evening stroll. Visit the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, and Colosseum, all without the daytime crowds, while uncovering the city's rich history and hidden tales.
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The Romans left behind some of the most impressive engineering feats in history: aqueducts, bathhouses, and vast sewer systems that still shape the city today. Explore Rome with us, and you’ll see the evidence everywhere—monuments that suggest a civilisation far ahead of its time. But when it comes to hygiene, that comforting narrative starts to unravel.

Many of Rome’s most famous “sanitary” innovations didn’t always make the city cleaner. In some cases, they made it far worse.

This article looks at some of the dirtier aspects of life in ancient Rome: toilets, sewers, and the sensory reality of everyday life. Brace yourself. Rome was a city of extraordinary achievement—but also one of overwhelming smells, constant noise, and an unsettling closeness to filth. Some of what follows may genuinely shock you.

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Toilets

Ancient Rome had no shortage of toilets—public latrines, private household facilities, cesspits, and even sewer-connected systems. But quantity did not equal quality, or indeed cleanliness. Only elite homes were linked directly to the Cloaca Maxima; most Romans relied on cesspits or crude pipes. In crowded apartment blocks, upper-floor toilets often emptied through terracotta downpipes that cracked with age, spilling waste down walls or into the rooms below. In Pompeii, toilets were usually built beside the kitchen, and only one had anything resembling a flush.

This arrangement led to what might politely be called “efficient” design—and what we might call a public-health nightmare. Cooks worked next to latrines, dumping food scraps and liquids into the same pits used for human waste. Smells, insects, and cross-contamination would have been constant. Ironically, many Romans preferred cesspits to sewer connections, since sewers frequently flooded and, without traps, allowed rats, snakes, and worse to emerge. One Roman writer even recounts an octopus swimming through a sewer and into a merchant’s house to raid his pantry.

Public toilets were social spaces—but also dangerous ones. With no U-bends, methane and hydrogen sulphide built up beneath the seats, sometimes causing explosions that injured or killed sewer workers. As for hygiene, the famous sponge-on-a-stick was shared, whether for cleaning bodies or benches, and that communal uncertainty is perhaps the most disturbing detail of all.

At night, many Romans avoided public latrines altogether and relied on chamber pots. Come morning, the contents were meant to be emptied responsibly—but not everyone bothered. Some carried them to latrines; others simply tipped them out of windows onto the street below. Roman law records fines, lawsuits, and at least one fatality caused by a falling chamber pot. In ancient Rome, watching where you stepped—or indeed where you stood—was quite literally a matter of life and death.

Sewers

The Romans were immensely proud of their sewers. Ancient writers ranked them alongside roads and aqueducts as proof of Rome’s greatness. Strabo marvelled that some were large enough for wagons to pass through, while Pliny the Elder described them as a feat “more stupendous than any other,” with rivers forced to flow beneath the city itself. Dionysius of Halicarnassus was blunt: aqueducts, roads, and drains were Rome’s three greatest achievements. Beneath the streets, an entire hidden world carried away the waste of a city of over a million people—tens of thousands of kilograms of human filth every single day.

But this triumph had a brutal beginning. According to Pliny, Rome’s earliest sewers were dug under King Tarquinius Priscus by conscripted labourers from the lower classes. The work was so harsh that many chose suicide over continuing. Tarquinius responded by ordering that suicides be crucified after death and left on public display—a grim deterrent rooted in Roman fear of shame. The project continued, and the Cloaca Maxima grew into a vast network swollen by rainwater, fountains, and runoff, all thundering toward the Tiber.

Despite their filth, sewers were considered sacred. Flowing water, even when mixed with excrement, was “living” and divine, protected by Venus Cloacina—the goddess of the drains. Keeping those drains clear, however, fell to the unlucky. Sewer cleaning was done by slaves and condemned men, forced into dark, unventilated tunnels thick with methane, hydrogen sulphide, and stagnant waste. Suffocation and poisoning were constant risks. Yet neglecting the sewers was just as dangerous: blocked drains could undermine foundations and bring buildings down. In Rome, the sewers were both a marvel—and a deadly necessity.

Baths

By the 4th century AD, Rome had almost 1,000 bathhouses. Entry cost just a quadrans—the smallest coin in circulation—making the baths accessible to almost everyone. Open daily and possibly not always cleared at night, they were warm, steamy spaces where people lingered for hours, sometimes even sleeping inside. Bathing was a daily habit, not a luxury.

Romans didn’t wash the way we do. Instead of soap, bathers coated themselves in oil and scraped it off with a strigil, removing sweat and dirt surprisingly effectively. The problem wasn’t the people—it was the water. Baths were rarely drained and cleaned. Instead, they were occasionally flooded to skim off surface grime, leaving behind a cloudy mixture of oil, skin, sweat, and organic matter. Roman writers noted the irony of citizens seeking health while soaking in everyone else’s residue. Although the sick were encouraged to bathe later in the day, there was no routine cleaning overnight, meaning yesterday’s illnesses greeted the next morning’s bathers.

Aquae Sulis Roman Baths in Bath, UK

The baths were far more than places to get clean. They were gyms, social hubs, medical spaces, and political meeting points all rolled into one. A typical visit meant circulating through cold, warm, and hot rooms, with most people lingering in the tepidarium—a large, warm pool ideal for conversation. Think of it as a crowded swimming pool with no chlorine, no filtration, and constant reuse of the same water. Add sweat, oils, skin flakes, urine, and whatever pathogens bathers brought with them, and you have an ideal breeding ground for disease.

One small mercy: children were usually barred from the baths. Adults went daily, while kids were expected to wash at home with water drawn from public fountains. It wasn’t much, but in a city where cleanliness was more theatrical than sanitary, it was at least a nod toward hygiene.

Aqueducts

None of Rome’s baths, toilets, or sewers would have functioned at all without the aqueducts: the backbone of Roman sanitation. By the early Empire, nine major aqueducts were feeding the city, with more added later, their arches still marching across the landscape today. Yet this abundance came surprisingly late. Before the first aqueduct was completed in 312 BC, Romans depended on the Tiber, rainwater cisterns, and scattered springs. For generations, the city flushed waste away without a dependable system to bring clean water back in—a one-way solution to a growing problem.

Pont du Gard, just outside Nimes. Photo credit: Wolfgang Staudt

Pont du Gard, just outside Nimes. Photo credit: Wolfgang Staudt

Even once the aqueducts arrived, most of Rome’s water wasn’t used to improve hygiene. It fed fountains, baths, ornamental pools, and industries like textile fulling, not street cleaning or sanitation. Ancient writers proudly ranked aqueducts alongside roads and sewers as Rome’s greatest achievements—and they were spectacular feats of engineering. They were efficient, monumental, and transformative. And yet, for all that ingenuity, Rome still stank.

Streetlife in a Roman City

Walking through ancient Rome meant enduring a sensory assault. Streets were strewn with human and animal waste, and in some areas even the bodies of dead slaves or unwanted infants were left exposed. There were no daily street-cleaning crews as we’d understand them today. Urban upkeep fell to the aediles—magistrates with limited manpower, limited funds, and many other responsibilities competing for attention.

When the sewers overflowed, filth didn’t stay neatly underground. Contaminated water spilled back into the streets, where rubbish was torn apart by dogs, pigs, and scavenging birds, and clouds of flies filled the air. In Pompeii, the raised stepping stones still visible today were a practical response to this reality, not decorative flourishes. They allowed pedestrians to cross streets without wading through the slurry of mud, dung, urine, and household waste flowing between cart ruts—a city quite literally designed with the expectation that its roads would often run with filth.

Learn More Filthy Facts about Rome through Our Tours

If you’d like to experience ancient Rome in person (minus the smell), Carpe Diem Tours would love to show you around. Our Rome walking tours, Colosseum tours, and famously indulgent Tipsy Tour fully immerse you in the ancient city: from the bustle of the Roman Forum to the underbelly of the Suburra — ancient Rome's red light district.

Want to visit an ancient Roman city, immaculately preserved in place with your expert private guide? Check out our Private Ostia Antica Tour.



Alexander Meddings Author Image
Alexander Meddings
Check iconVerified Writer
Alexander Meddings is a Rome-based historian and travel writer. After graduating with his MPhil in Roman History from the University of Oxford, he moved to Florence and then Rome to carry out his research on the ground and pursue his passion at the source. He now works as a travel writer and tour guide, and regularly features on BBC History Hit podcasts Betwixt the Sheets and After Dark.
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