Or use a chamber pot. I’ve seen thrones whose seat had a hole (specifically, it was in Stirling Castle); a chamberpot could be inserted and removed from the back. That way the king didn’t need to leave the room to attend the kind of business one cannot delegate.
Rio de Janero had no sewer system: human wastes was scooped into baskets and carried on slaves’ heads to be dumped at the beach. The porters were called tigres from the streaks that were bleached on their skin.
Last year there was a BBC documentary on the history of such sanitation, from Rome to the golden lavatories of today’s far east; including outhouses, but connected to the sewers, of the back-to-back housing of the poor in the recent past of Britain.
In the days before flush toilets the ‘honey wagon’ would come round ever night to take the soil away.
If you go back to the 17th century then places like London must have stunk.
From Pepys Diary:
“Saturday 20 October 1660
This morning one came to me to advise with me where to make me a window into my cellar in lieu of one which Sir W. Batten had stopped up, and going down into my cellar to look I stepped into a great heap of turds.”
Not so fast. The full sentence reads,
In other words, Pepys did not usually have heaps of shit in his cellar, he regarded it as a serious problem when he discovered that he did and he then thought it necessary to do something about it, probably as a matter of urgency. So he viewed this in exactly the same way that we would a broken pipe from a toilet.
The less obvious point is that properly maintained cesspits, which Turner’s clearly wasn’t, usually didn’t smell. Which is precisely why most people did make an effort to maintain them properly.
Exactly what I was going to ask. Why not use a chamber pot, and have one of your many, um, servants dispose of the contents for you?
Oh.
I had just assumed that the Romans were really, really, really well hung.
What? I must be dense, I still don’t understand.