Garbage and trash disposal

[john roberts]

Can't give an attribution just now, but there were supposedly trash pits to the northeast of Rome just beyond the Servian wall where garbage, including unclaimed corpses, was collected and burned from time to time. The wind from that quarter in the summer must have made the city all but uninhabitable. In what must have been one of the most gratefully received acts of eurgesia in Rome's history, Macaenas had them cleared out and planted his famous public garden on the site.

[Sean Manning]

Can't give an attribution just now, but there were supposedly trash pits to the northeast of Rome just beyond the Servian wall where garbage, including unclaimed corpses, was collected and burned from time to time. The wind from that quarter in the summer must have made the city all but uninhabitable. In what must have been one of the most gratefully received acts of eurgesia in Rome's history, Macaenas had them cleared out and planted his famous public garden on the site.

Contractors started to dig into the garbage dumps of Rome in the 19th century. The garbage dumps on the Esquiline contained "a uniform mass of black, viscous, pestilent, unctuous matter" from all sorts of human and animal carcasses when Lanciani excavated them in the 19th century. An adjacent section of the moat of Servius Tullius was just as bad, but may have been covered up as soon as the mass of corpses filled the thirty foot deep ditch. Lanciani had to give his workmen special breaks because they were overpowered by the fumes.

Edit: A translation of his book on the excavations is on Bill Thayer's site here. Of course, Rome was one of the half dozen largest cities in the ancient world; smaller settlements were probably better able to deal with their garbage.

[john roberts]

Then maybe "covered over" is a better description than "cleared out."

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

Good fertiliser for those gardens.....