Roman toilets were fucking gross. Apparently they used to sit in a circle like that and shit while facing each other like that so much that it turned into a social activity, and there were social expectations of what kind of conversation was appropriate or not. So much so that people would make an effort to try to take a shit with powerful people who had a lot of influence, get this, because the strict Roman social order made it so that it was only socially acceptable to have certain discussions or make certain requests apparently if you were both shitting poop out of your ass at the time. That's not even the grossest part - when the Romans build those public shithouses, they didn't have a separate drain pipe for each toilet. Nope, they were build in those horseshoe half-circles like that so they could have input on one side where the water would enter, it would then flow from one toilet to the next to the next to the next until it got to the last toilet, where it would carry that person's shit/feces, as well as EVERY OTHER shitter's feces down and out the drain into the sewers and eventually out to the city's centralized cesspool (Which the city of Rome happened to curiously call "Cloaca Maxima" ... not even gonna think about imagining to touch whats going on there). So if you were shitting on one of the last toilets, and some fecal fiend at the other end had Taco Bell for lunch, you'll probably come to know exactly what they ate. Supposably there was a whole culture around this too, and you were expected to give warnings if you were at the front of the line and in the midst of a battle with your bowels. Failing to do so was considered not just unspeakably rude, but also a serious insult/act-of-disrespect, and not only would people accidentally doing it face serious vengeance from the victim, but sometimes Romans would do it ON PURPOSE to disparage the victim, as an intentional diss and extreme act of derision.

Compare the imperialist chauvinist shitting experience of the Romans with the peaceful non-patriarchal palace economy* of the Minoans and their private room full-fliushing toilet experiences that had advanced sewage treatment and didn't leave you dealing with someone else's shit. And thats not even getting into them having done it literally thousands of years before the Rome had public bathrooms. God damn that fucking volcano that went off and burned down the cities or let loose the minotaurs of however/whatever abruptly ended their actually civilized civilization. We coulda been so much more progress by now.......

*Palace economies were like proto-socialist methods for distributing goods, most famously used by the Minoans, and the very very early Christian Church ( back when it was still literally a 'sell everything you own and give the money to the poor'-type cult and kinda rad). Basically the peeps voluntarily collectivized their stuff in this centralized location of the Palace (Knossos being the biggliest one) , where everything would be doled out to whoever needed something. The actual redistribution was done in this case by a king (or Minotaur, or some high power in charge), but fkn aye nobodys perfect on the first shot, and way cooler than most everything that was to come in the future after them.