Les latrines de Délos. Hygiène, salubrité et environnement d’une ville des Cyclades

Collective latrines, with their pierced benches lining the walls of the room, belong to the classical image of the ancient city as a paragon of urban cleanliness. For some years now, they have attracted renewed interest, in connection with the way in which our present-day societies view the problems of hygiene and health, in a word, of urban ecology. For the first time, the entirety of the latrines of a major agglomeration of the Eastern Mediterranean is taken into account. The island of Delos, in the Cyclades, was home to the prestigious sanctuary of Apollo and a major port. It was therefore a densely occupied city of the late Hellenistic period, with a cosmopolitan population, captured here through its sanitation facilities. A multidisciplinary team of more than ten researchers has been meticulously studying these key areas for almost a decade. Their architecture is precisely analysed, and through the samples taken from the bottom of the soil pipes, people’s diet as well as the state of their health or the environment can be partially restored. Alongside the prestigious stone and marble monuments, the marble or metal statues, it is a completely different vision of the city that emerges – a city of filth, excrement and parasites; a city in which hygiene and health were a matter for private individuals only and not yet for the public authorities.