“Three stones are enough to wipe”: A brief history of toilet hygiene

The last time I visited Boston's Museum of Fine Arts was in 2004 to
see a Rembrandt exhibition. But I might have wandered away from the
works of the Dutch master in search of an ancient Greek artifact, had
I known at the time that the object in question, a wine vessel, was in
the museum's collection. According to the 2012 Christmas issue of the
BMJ (preacronymically known as the British Medical Journal), the
2,500-year-old cup, created by one of the anonymous artisans who
helped to shape Western culture, is adorned with the image of a man
wiping his butt.

That revelation appears in an article entitled "Toilet Hygiene in the
Classical Era," by French anthropologist and forensic medicine
researcher Philippe Charlier and his colleagues. Their report examines
tidying techniques used way back—and the resultant medical issues.
Such a study is in keeping with the BMJ's tradition of offbeat subject
matter for its late December issue—as noted in this space five years
ago: "Had the Puritans never left Britain for New England, they might
later have fled the British Medical Journal to found the New England
Journal of Medicine."

The toilet hygiene piece reminds us that practices considered routine
in one place or time may be unknown elsewhere or elsetime. The first
known reference to toilet paper in the West does not appear until the
16th century, when satirist François Rabelais mentions that it doesn't
work particularly well at its assigned task. Of course, the ready
availability of paper of any kind is a relatively recent development.
And so, the study's authors say, "anal cleaning can be carried out in
various ways according to local customs and climate, including with
water (using a bidet, for example), leaves, grass, stones, corn cobs,
animal furs, sticks, snow, seashells, and, lastly, hands." Sure,
aesthetic sensibility insists on hands being the choice of last
resort, but reason marks seashells as the choice to pull up the rear.
"Squeezably soft" is the last thing to come to mind about, say, razor
clams.

Charlier et al. cite no less an authority than philosopher Seneca to
inform us that "during the Greco-Roman period, a sponge fixed to a
stick (tersorium) was used to clean the buttocks after defecation; the
sponge was then replaced in a bucket filled with salt water or vinegar
water." Talk about your low-flow toilets. The authors go on to note
the use of rounded "fragments of ceramic known as 'pessoi' (meaning
pebbles), a term also used to denote an ancient board game." (The
relieved man on the Museum of Fine Arts's wine cup is using a singular
pessos for his finishing touches.) The ancient Greek game pessoi is
not related to the ancient Asian game Go, despite how semantically
satisfying it would be if one used stones from Go after one Went.

According to the BMJ piece, a Greek axiom about frugality cites the
use of pessoi and their purpose: "Three stones are enough to wipe."
The modern equivalent is probably the purposefully self-contradictory
"toilet paper doesn't grow on trees."

Some pessoi may have originated as ostraca, pieces of broken ceramic
on which the Greeks of old inscribed the names of enemies. The ostraca
were used to vote for some pain-in-the-well-you-know to be thrown out
of town—hence, "ostracized." The creative employment of ostraca as
pessoi allowed for "literally putting faecal matter on the name of
hated individuals," Charlier and company suggest. Ostraca have been
found bearing the name of Socrates, which is not surprising
considering they hemlocked him up and threw away the key.
(Technically, he hemlocked himself, but we could spend hours in
Socratic debate about who took ultimate responsibility.)

Putting shards of a hard substance, however polished, in one's
delicate places has some obvious medical risks. "The abrasive
characteristics of ceramic," the authors write, "suggest that long
term use of pessoi could have resulted in local irritation, skin or
mucosal damage, or complications of external haemorrhoids."

To quote Shakespeare, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends."
Sadly, for millennia the materials used to clean our divinely shaped
ends were decidedly rough-hewn.
salon.com