Consider Rome’s public toilets.

They had no stalls. You did your business literally in public, surrounded by other people with similar interests. Are we to believe that urban Romans, who commonly lived in private apartments, had no interest in privacy within the bathroom?

When I lived in China during the turn of the millennium, I noticed that Beijing’s public toilets had similar issues. You also had no stalls. Worse: these were squatting toilets, so you had long lines of people squatting next to each other, in front of each other.

The way people secured some privacy was holding typically huge newspapers, “broadsheets” that they read while squatting, so the newspaper would cover their face and most of their bodies. Walking in, you saw hands holding papers, you saw feet. You certainly would smell stuff. But there was a degree of privacy, thanks to the newspapers.

I wonder if the Romans did something similar. They had no newspapers, but did their reading with papyrus rolls, fairly easy to use as blinds. Perhaps illustrations of Roman public toilets shouldn’t have people awkwardly staring at each other, but people reading Plautus and Seneca.