Let’s embrace our 14-year-old selves and discuss the funniest toilet humor in Ancient history. Appropriately, it’s found in a bar — in a tavern room from the late first/mid-second century Roman port city called Ostia Antica. The entire space is taken up with jokes about shi*ting – patrons could order wine while reading the walls.
Known as the “room of the Seven Sages,” the tavern featured paintings of seven famed learned men, such as Thales of Melitos pictured here. Each dispenses his wisdom about the best ways to defecate — the clash of scatology with erudition is what makes the humor. Thales, for instance, “advises the man who is taking a crap to push hard.” “To poop well, [the sage] Solon rubbed his belly.” And “”the cunning [wise man] Chilon gave instruction on how to fart silently”.
The most fascinating part of these sh*t jokes, however, is that they are arranged to showcase the Roman class hierarchy. This is because underneath the paintings of the sages were paintings of ordinary Roman men sitting on public latrines, and their commentary also appears. The rank-and-file use much coarser vocabulary, saying things like “I am hurrying up,” and “shake yourself about so you’ll go faster”.
In this post, I have to spell out “sh*t” with an asterisk, and that’s because our culture considers that word obscene. The Romans might not have used such vocabulary in a formal occasion, but they were generally less taboo about poo than we.
This week I will be posting more about the role of swearing in human history.
Source(s): See _Holy Sh*t: a Brief History of Swearing_, by Melissa Mohr, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 22, 23, 32. Image Wikimedia, “Ostia, Baths of the Seven Sages II” (“Durum cacantes monuit ut nitant Thales”). Https:///www.ostia-antica.org. purplemotes.net/2014, “Seven Sages at Ostia Offer Wisdom in Sh*tting,” Jan 19, 2014, by Douglas Galbi.
