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Be neighbourly like a Pompeian

Be neighbourly like a Pompeian

A communal toilet might be an unlikely place to seek life inspiration, but we can all learn from Roman community values, Dr Jess Venner tells Dr David Musgrove

On a green background, there is a sketch of a human pyramid of people in togas, all balancing fruit on their heads, arms and feet

Dr David Musgrove, FSA

Published: August 18, 2025 at 2:30 PM

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Would life be better if we all went to the toilet together again? That’s a question that I wonder about sometimes, and if you know your ancient history, you’ll know that I say ‘again’ because I’m drawing on the experience of the Roman communal toilet. Go to somewhere like Chedworth Roman villa in Gloucestershire, or Housesteads Roman Fort on Hadrian’s Wall, and you’ll see the remains of their multi-occupancy latrines. There people sat cheek by jowl doing their business, with no screens to hide their modesty or disguise the fact that they were relieving themselves in the company of their peers.

I’m an enthusiast for lavatorial matters, so I gave a talk on the history of toilets at the fabulous Chalke History Festival this summer. When I raised the idea of a return to communal defecation in the Roman style, it returned a surprisingly positive reaction from the audience in the marquee. That was probably just a response to my rabble-rousing rhetoric in the moment. I rather doubt that a petition for open loos would be well received in reality. However, maybe there is something in the ancient Roman attitude to the importance of community and neighbourly values that we could learn from.

A large Roman stone wall with deep trenches in it. On top, there are round, bowl-like stones. On either side of the wall and in the distance, there are green fields and trees

The communal latrines at Housesteads Fort, at Hadrian’s Wall, are the best preserved from Roman Britain (Image by Getty Images)

Community spirit

Dr Jess Venner is a Roman historian, with a particular expertise in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and when I asked her for a Life Lesson from History, she proposed that we might take something from the Romans’ strong sense of community. “Romans were good neighbours because they built their lives around community,” she explains. “Community was everything to the Romans. They considered it to be honourable and virtuous to rely on one another. And above all, to be kind and to make sure that everything you choose to do is virtuous in the sense that it’s not stepping over other people to get there.”

Community was everything to the Romans. They considered it to be honourable and virtuous to rely on one another. And above all, to be kind.

For Jess, this sense of community is expressed most clearly in a crisis situation. When the chips are down, you default to your base instincts, and that’s what she reckons we see in Pompeii in the year AD 62, when the now-famous Roman city in the Bay of Naples was struck by disaster. If you’re thinking that I’ve got my dates wrong because everyone knows that Vesuvius erupted and engulfed the place in molten rock and pumice in AD 79, that’d be fair comment. But in the decade before that, Pompeii suffered a different disaster – an earthquake.

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The date is slightly contested, because Seneca the Younger says it was in AD 63, but most experts today would plump for disaster striking in AD 62. “A big earthquake hit Pompeii and took out a lot of the city. A lot of the people there, as Seneca tells us, were so shocked by the event that they wandered around aimlessly afterwards and didn’t know what to do with themselves,” says Jess. “People were maimed and people died, and a lot of buildings, public and private, were destroyed. This was the start of the earthquakes that continued up to the eruption of AD 79, which we know today as being a warning sign.”

As if the quake wasn’t bad enough, it precipitated a tidal wave, and released poisonous gases (which curiously, and very specifically, were said to have killed 600 sheep). So, clearly that was a substantial shock, but it’s the crisis response that is interesting. Normally, in this sort of situation, an embattled Roman community might have expected to get imperial support, but in this case that wasn’t forthcoming. Perhaps that was because the emperor Nero was otherwise engaged establishing his reign, or maybe it was a response to Pompeii’s history of rebellion against Rome.

Rebuilding Pompeii

A marble relief shows 5 people at work in a coppersmith's shop. A small child to the left, behind a man holding something hanging from above. Two men in the centre, one holding a piece of copper and the other standing over him with a hammer to hit the copper, and a man to the right, sitting on a stool, working some copper into shape

A marble relief sign of a Coppersmith’s shop from Pompeii in the first century AD. In AD 62 the city was damaged by an earthquake (Image by Getty Images)

Whatever the reason, it seems that the Pompeians were left to deal with the aftermath as best they could themselves. Despite this absence of imperial support, they built back quickly. The first public building to be erected anew was the Temple of Isis, but it was funded privately rather than from the emperor’s purse. The people of Pompeii didn’t just rebuild though – they also creatively responded to the earthquake by making agricultural gardens in the spaces freed up by the fallen buildings.

“I fondly think of Pompeii as an incredibly resilient city. They bounced back by finding opportunity in the gaps, literally. They were taking materials, reusing them from buildings that had been demolished, or they were demolishing them themselves. And they were opening up huge vineyards, orchards and vegetable plots. It was very, very green. Walking through it in the ancient period, it would’ve been amazing. You would’ve had birdsong and trees poking over the side of walls.”

Fruit was grown in these new green spaces, and with the upsurge in post-quake urban gardening, we can see the community ethos of the Romans bursting through. In Pompeii after AD 62, we find the first evidence of the ‘pomari’ or united fruit sellers. This was a support group that was set up to offer financial backing to fruit sellers if they were down on their luck. It provided help in life, and in death: funerary epitaphs make note of their assistance to the deceased.

A red, orange, black and white mosaic shows an image of two men picking apples. One is standing, while the other climbs a ladder into the tree

A mosaic, from Saint-Romain-en-Gal, France, shows apple pickers. The Romans set up groups, known as ‘pomari’, to support fruit sellers (Image by Getty Images)

The fruit sellers are just one example of several occupational support groups, and they appear to be a practical response to the catastrophe. As Jess explains, in Pompeii, they seem to come to prominence in the aftermath of the earthquake: “When crisis hits, you find these things becoming more obvious in towns in the archaeological record: like with the pomari, they suddenly pop up. They may well have existed before this but it is unusual that we have no record before this point.”

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A support network

It wasn’t just money that these groups provided – they were also there for knowledge sharing. As Jess points out, the sharing of expertise is acknowledged today as being a key driver in developing resilience. Over time, the support groups changed from being agriculturally focused to being more involved with merchant activity. But throughout they were allowing people to learn and share from another: they even had apprenticeships of sorts.

We’re talking local initiatives, built around neighbourhoods, with people looking out for each other in an organised and intentional way. There might have been elite individuals or families driving things as patrons, but the impetus was grass-roots.

The Roman empire was a diverse place with a lot of different peoples and communities living together. That was particularly the case in Pompeii. So you might be wondering how a community spirit was fostered in such a cultural melting pot – it’s certainly something we seem to struggle with together in Britain.

The Roman empire was a diverse place with a lot of different peoples and communities living together. That was particularly the case in Pompeii

According to Jess, religion was a powerful connecting force: “There were neighbourhood communities; they had shrines in the neighbourhoods, on street corners, and they would all gather there. There’s graffiti from very many different people around these shrines, acknowledging that lots of people would be passing and interacting with this piece of graffiti.”

So you’ve got occupational support groups, religious worship providing a glue of shared interest, and neighbourhood communities where people knew each other. This might sound like a nostalgic 1950s throwback, but Jess describes life organised around these neighbourhoods, with doors that were left open and a sense that you knew who your people were.

Of course this only goes so far, because clearly there were folks in these communities who probably didn’t have the chance to engage in this neighbourhood structure – I’m talking about the enslaved in this society. Clearly those people broadly had to do what they were told to do, and their lives were far removed from this supportive umbrella.

But for those whose social status did allow them to be part of the network, no doubt this was a great boon. It probably encouraged entrepreneurship and risk-taking because you felt you had something to fall back on if things went awry in whatever venture you attempted. Apparently, according to Jess, the Romans didn’t even have a concept of failure, but instead saw things that hadn’t gone well as simply opportunities for reinvention. That all sounds very positive and forward-thinking – it is the sort of mindset that a 21st-century business cries out for in its employees.

Toilet wisdom

In the foreground, there is a deep Roman wall with smaller blocks of stone on the floor in front of it. In the background, there is a Victorian white and brown lodge

TAt Chedworth Roman Villa, in Gloucestershire, the public today can admire (or shudder at) the prospect of a Roman communal toilet (Image by James Dobson)

So, back to the communal toilet. Is that the ultimate manifestation of Roman community spirit? Surely you can’t get much closer to your neighbours than by unburdening your bowels in their company.

”It was a very communal area. It seems completely wild to us now, and actually it's probably only from the Victorian period onwards that we started getting really fussy about it. But it was a very communal thing,” comments Jess. “So you would go into the public latrines and they would be a lot of benches with semi-circular cut-outs. You would do your business and you would be sitting right next to somebody else. You would be having a conversation with so and so down the road or across from you”.

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The amount of graffiti in these toilets suggest that people were spending a decent length of time in the public latrines, long enough to make their mark on the walls. Jess even goes so far as to opine that it might not have been dissimilar to the experience of going to a pub in Britain – the communal toilets would have been a place to meet, chat, maybe even do business (while you did your business).

Failing well

This might be going too far, I know, and there are obvious safeguarding concerns attendant with toilets that are as public as the ancient examples we’re talking about. So maybe Roman-style toilets isn’t the answer. But there is something we can take from their approach to community, and the clear value they placed on it as something to strive for. Not only would it bring us together and help us find harmony in an ever-more diverse world. But also, and this I find a very diverting line of thought, maybe this sense of a community safety net might unlock our inner risk-taking entrepreneurial selves and inject some blistering fresh energy into the economy as well.

It’s basically the same argument as that proposed by people who talk up the Universal Basic Income as the driver to unlock national productivity, but in this case, without the expense of paying everyone a salary. Because we know our neighbours have got our backs, we’ll all be free to fail and fail big, even if that isn’t a concept that the Romans would have been able to get their heads round. It’s a short step from a communal toilet to a glorious national social and economic rebirth.

As a coda, sadly, we know that even the resilient Pompeians weren’t able to overcome the catastrophe that overtook them a few short years after the earthquake of AD 62. No amount of communal support could hold back the venting fury of Vesuvius and the destruction if wrought on the city. Of course, we know what we do about the neighbourly virtues of Pompeii’s people because the place was preserved under the pumice that pounded it, but there was no chance of the city reinventing itself after AD 79.

This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

Authors

Dr David Musgrove, FSAContent director

David Musgrove is the content director at HistoryExtra

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