Few people admire the ancient Romans more than I do. It’s true
that they suffered from blood thirst and debauchery at times,
and they endured a fair share of incompetent or crazy emperors,
but Roman society functioned as a well-oiled machine, operating
so perfectly that even with a madman as emperor at the top of
the political pyramid, the society usually managed to function
for the majority of the empire’s people, provided you weren’t a
slave. Consider that over forty governments today do a poor job
of governing what Rome governed all by itself, using one law and
one currency. Sometimes it’s easy to believe that these cultural
and military titans were different from us, but today I’m going
to prove that, in one respect, they had the same desire as you
and me—they demanded clean toilets! In its heyday, the Roman
city of Ephesus had a population of a quarter of a million
people. And as the title of a famous children’s book wisely
informs: EveryonePoops. Sanitation was a serious issue in
ancient times; dysenter