Roman fullers cleaned stained woollen clothes by treading them in an alkaline mixture, rinsing them in successive basins and finishing the cloth by hand. Some of them used stale urine as part of the wash. The specialists were called fullones, and their workshops, the fullonicae, are especially well represented in the ruins of Pompeii. The familiar story about Roman laundry and urine leaves out most of their work.
Ancient writers confirm that urine was used in textile cleaning, alongside other substances. Fullers also used water, absorbent earths, sustained physical agitation and finishing treatments. Wool made up much of their work. It could be costly, and careless washing could spoil both its fibres and the appearance of a garment, so customers had good reason to seek experienced cleaners.
The fuller returned cloth whose surface, shape and sometimes drape had been changed by treatment. The work also depended on physical handling and judgment. Behind the carefully arranged folds of a Roman toga stood people who spent their working day in wet stalls, lifting heavy fabric and removing the grime and odours their customers did not want to encounter.
What Roman Fullers Did for a Living
A fullo cleaned textiles professionally and finished cloth for use or sale. New woollen fabric could carry grease from manufacture and have a loose, uneven finish, while worn clothes had collected perspiration, skin oils, smoke, dust and stains from meals. Both might reach a fuller, but they did not necessarily need the same treatment. Fullers worked both on newly manufactured textiles and on clothes already in use.
Cleaning might involve scouring away oil, working the fibres, brushing the cloth or pressing it. Fullers could also improve the appearance of white fabric or treat a coloured surface, depending on what it needed. A merchant might bring a length of newly woven wool, while another customer supplied an old cloak. Professional fullers were part of the clothing trade as well as a service for households.
Miko Flohr’s study of fullers in Roman Italy brings together the evidence of buildings, inscriptions and literary sources from Pompeii, Ostia and Rome. Flohr connects fulling with the market for finished garments and with the needs of people living in Roman towns. Larger workshops made commercial sense where clothing represented a serious expense and owners were willing to pay for professional treatment rather than risk damaging their textiles at home.
Roman clothing was not limited to togas. People wore woollen tunics and cloaks, and linen and other fabrics circulated too. Toga maintenance was especially demanding because the garment was large and depended on careful draping for its public appearance. Maintaining its appearance took considerable work. The different garments used by Roman communities form part of the broader history of Greek and Roman clothing.
The workshops varied in size and equipment. Some businesses had only a few treading stalls and a water supply. Others needed extensive areas for washing, rinsing, drying and finishing garments in quantity. The term fullonica therefore does not imply one fixed design. An excavated basin does not necessarily reveal exactly which treatment took place in it.
Why Stale Urine Could Clean Wool
The chemistry of urine changes as it stands. Fresh urine is largely water, with urea, a compound containing nitrogen. Microorganisms produce the enzyme urease, which helps break down urea as the liquid ages. This releases ammonia and forms ammonium compounds, generally raising its alkalinity. That is why accounts of cleaning distinguish urine left to age from freshly collected urine.
Alkaline liquids can loosen some oily deposits and help separate dirt from wool fibres. Wool naturally contains grease, including lanolin, and everyday wear adds more oil from skin and other sources. Plain water does not remove all of it readily. Moving cloth through a mildly alkaline bath, especially alongside absorbent earths and subsequent rinses, could improve cleaning. Stale urine did not work like a modern detergent or a concentrated industrial cleaner.
The practice is mentioned in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, book 28, which discusses urine among materials employed for cleaning and medicine and refers to fullers in that connection. Pliny even repeats the claim that fullers escaped gout because of their exposure to urine. The claim offers no reason to believe their work prevented illness. For Pliny, the connection between fullers and urine was familiar enough to need no explanation.
Pliny also says camel urine could be useful to fullers. Ancient writers evidently distinguished between types of urine, although Pliny offers no evidence that Italian laundries regularly received camel urine. How ordinary workshops in Italy obtained their cleaning liquids remains much less certain than the references to their use.
A 2016 paper in Acta Archaeologica by Michael Witty examined another possibility: whether craftsmen using materials known in antiquity could concentrate ammonium compounds from urine that had been left to age. His experiments suggested a method of producing struvite crystals, which contain ammonium. The experiment identified a possible chemical process, but it did not demonstrate that Romans used it. Nothing archaeological establishes that Pompeian fullers regularly produced struvite powder or included it in their washing recipes.
Inside a Roman Laundry: Treading, Rinsing and Finishing
Much of the physical work took place in small basins. Standing with the wet material, a fuller stepped on it, turned it and pressed it again and again so that the mixture penetrated the fibres and loosened dirt. The repeated movements also put strain on the legs and back. A wall painting from the Pompeian fullonica of Veranius Hypsaeus, now in Naples’s National Archaeological Museum, depicts several workers treading cloth in separate stalls. The painting shows workers performing the difficult part of the trade, rather than displaying its finished products.
Low partitions divided some of the treading stalls and may have helped workers keep their balance. Excavated stalls show how the task was arranged, but cannot tell us how long a particular worker stood in the liquid or how much urine was mixed into a bath. Nor can we assume every wash used urine. Fibre type, colour and the condition of a garment would have affected which treatment was suitable.
Treading was followed by rinsing, sometimes repeatedly. The dirt, absorbent clay and alkaline residues loosened in the wash all had to be carried away. Some fullonicae used a sequence of larger, connected basins. Workers could move cloth towards cleaner water while water from later stages was reused for dirtier loads. Such arrangements helped make use of a supply that required both constant replenishment and drainage.
In their 2013 paper on water and wastewater management in Roman fullonicae, Giovanni De Feo and Sabino De Gisi examined how these water systems operated. They interpreted the connected basins as evidence of practical water reuse and cautioned against treating urine as the principal explanation for every stage of fulling. The surviving installations document an organized process, but they do not preserve a standard recipe for the contents of each washing basin.
Wet wool was heavy, and drying it carelessly could stretch the garment. Fullers might hang fabric in a courtyard or on an upper terrace before brushing the surface, raising or smoothing fibres, trimming uneven nap and pressing the cloth as required. Cleaning a cloak was of little use if the treatment left it misshapen.
Some materials needed additional finishing. Sulphur fumes were associated with treating pale fabrics, while mineral earths could alter the look and texture of the surface. These were separate operations with their own purposes, not simply more names for washing. A fuller had to consider the garment’s colour and fabric: a technique that improved white wool might damage cloth whose dye was less secure.
The Fullonica of Stephanus at Pompeii
The Fullonica of Stephanus on Pompeii’s Via dell’Abbondanza shows how a textile workshop could fit into the structure of a Roman town. Its working spaces survived when Vesuvius buried Pompeii in AD 79. They had been created by altering a house, rather than by constructing a purpose-built industrial building from the ground up.
The Archaeological Park of Pompeii describes the conversion of the central atrium into washing space. Originally an impluvium, a shallow basin for catching rainwater from an opening in a house roof, stood there. It was raised and adapted for the fullery, and part of the roof became a terrace where cloth could dry. Behind the main rooms, the former garden gave way to treatment basins. The former house had become a working textile-cleaning business.
A workshop like this needed reliable water and room for cloth to pass through different stages of treatment, not merely a container of urine. The modifications represented an investment in equipment and usable space. Stephanus’s business stood along a busy street among households and other commercial premises. The workshop occupied rooms originally intended for domestic life, a reminder that urban work and housing often shared the same buildings.
The connected rinsing installations at Stephanus were important because washing could not finish without clean water. Water moved through successive basins, allowing garments to reach increasingly clean conditions without requiring an entirely fresh bath for each piece. Managing those stages meant keeping dirty cloth apart from finished items, conserving water and avoiding damage to the property customers had left in the workshop.
Stephanus was not Pompeii’s only fuller, and other Roman Italian sites preserve different workshop arrangements. In analysis of fulleries in their urban settings, Flohr argues that the location of fulleries cannot be explained chiefly by unpleasant smells. Access to water, affordable premises, customers and urban space also affected where owners could operate. Fulleries could operate among shops and homes even though some stages of the work were dirty.
Fuller’s Earth, Sulphur and the Rest of the Recipe
Fullers could choose cleaning agents besides urine. The name fuller’s earth covered mineral clays and other earths capable of absorbing greasy material or changing a fabric’s finish. Their properties varied from one deposit to another. Ancient labels for them do not all correspond to one substance sold under a modern name, so we should not assume that all fuller’s earth performed identically.
In book 35 of the Natural History, sections 196 to 198, Pliny differentiates mineral earths associated with Sardinia, Umbria and Cimolos. His account assigns different effects to them, including suitability for white cloth, an improved lustre and changes to coloured fabrics. He also outlines stages of treatment involving earth, sulphur fumes and additional scouring. Such distinctions show why Roman cleaners had to pay attention to the colour and condition of the material they handled.
Pliny also connects fullers with a law attributed to the censors Gaius Flaminius and Lucius Aemilius in 220 BC. Whatever the details, the notice indicates that textile treatment had attracted public concern centuries before the destruction of Pompeii. Pliny’s brief reference does not supply a full body of workshop regulations, so it cannot support the reconstruction of an elaborate Roman laundry code.
Another substance appearing in ancient discussions of washing is nitrum. Ancient writers used the word for naturally occurring alkaline minerals, a broader category than modern English ‘nitre’. Craftspeople also had access to wood ash and other alkaline materials. They could therefore vary their mixtures even though the exact combination used in any one surviving Pompeian basin is unknown.
Wool could be harmed by the very methods intended to clean it. Friction, moisture and alkalinity might change the texture, cause shrinkage, distort the fabric or weaken a dye. Fulling depended on knowing what a garment could endure and when treatment had gone far enough. Fullers needed to know when a fabric had been treated enough.
Would the Finished Clothes Have Smelled of Urine?
The smell in a tub containing aged urine would have been unpleasant, but a finished garment went through rinses and then drying or further treatment. The conditions endured by the worker need not have matched those experienced by the customer. No one can reconstruct the smell of a particular Roman fullery, and the use of urine in an early bath does not mean that finished clothes necessarily retained its odour.
Kaira Shlipak tested part of that question in a small experiment published in the EXARC Journal in May 2026. She washed wool swatches in stale urine diluted with water, compared their treatment with modern castile soap and included an untreated control. In her trial the urine mixture worked well on oil and soil, and the fabric had little noticeable smell after rinsing and drying. Wine and a tomato-based stain were harder to remove.
The experiment had important limits. The study used twelve small wool swatches, only one for each combination of stain and treatment. Shlipak worked the fabric by hand rather than treading it, chose the proportion of urine and water without a surviving ancient recipe, and did not reproduce the whole process involving fuller’s earth. One test substance was tomato sauce, which Roman fullers could not have encountered before tomatoes reached Europe long after antiquity. Its results show what happened under those experimental conditions, not what happened in every Roman fullery.
The diluted stale urine tested in that experiment had a pH around 8, making it only mildly alkaline. Its alkalinity was much lower than that of the concentrated ammonia often assumed in popular descriptions. Agitation, water and possibly additional minerals contributed to the results. The odour of a treading bath, that of a garment after drying and the general smell of the workshop should be considered separately.
How Did Fullers Obtain the Urine?
The supply of urine to fulleries is poorly documented. A Roman town produced plenty of waste, but familiar accounts of jars set outside fulleries for passers-by to use are far more precise than the ancient evidence allows. The picture of a public collection jar by every laundry has been repeated often without convincing proof that it was a standard practice.
In epigram 6.93, the late first-century AD poet Martial compares a bad smell to a fuller’s old pot that has broken in the road. Readers evidently knew the vessel and its odour, but the poem does not tell us that it had been positioned for people to urinate into. It might have broken while being carried. Another anecdote, passed down by Macrobius, mentions men urinating into amphorae in an alley; it never says the containers belonged to a fuller.
Flohr revisited these passages and the archaeology in a detailed discussion of Roman urine collection. He found no convincing case for a regular system of collection jars stationed outside fullonicae. Some archaeological vessels given that label may have served other purposes. An open pot on a public street would also leave urine exposed to rainwater and unwanted contamination, a practical concern for someone entrusted with valuable clothes.
Ancient writers associate fullers with urine closely enough that workshops must have obtained and stored it in some fashion. But the suppliers, places of collection and means of transport are poorly documented and may have differed among towns. Households or controlled gathering places are possible sources. The surviving texts and objects do not establish one universal network of street-corner public urinals.
Vespasian’s Tax and the Value of Waste
Vespasian, emperor from AD 69 to 79, became associated with the commercial value of urine through an anecdote about revenue. Suetonius, Life of Vespasian 23.3 relates how his son Titus complained about money raised from public conveniences. Vespasian held out coins from an early payment and asked whether Titus could smell anything offensive. When his son said he could not, the emperor replied that the money came from urine.
Cassius Dio’s account of Vespasian’s reign gives a version of the same episode. Later tradition attached to it the Latin saying pecunia non olet, ‘money does not smell’, but those exact words are not Suetonius’s verbatim dialogue. Both ancient historians wrote after Vespasian’s reign. The story portrays an emperor willing to tax an unpleasant commodity, but it is not a detailed account of the tax administration.
The accounts do not specify a tax rate that applied throughout the empire, an agreed date when the measure began or how every fullery would have been charged. They certainly do not establish a personal fee paid by each citizen whenever he urinated. What the sources describe is revenue connected with public conveniences and waste with potential commercial use. Elaborate modern descriptions of the scheme often supply details that the ancient texts leave unstated.
Fulling was only one process in which urine could be useful, so its value to other crafts may also help explain interest in taxing it. But Vespasian’s exchange with Titus tells us little about the work at the end of that collection chain. Whatever arrangements provided the liquid, it fell to the fullers to produce textiles their customers could use again.
The Workers Behind Clean Roman Clothes
Fullers spent long hours handling wet, heavy cloth and, at times, foul-smelling mixtures. In the Pompeian painting of treading stalls, workers stand with their legs inside the basins; other images show people handling and finishing material. These scenes preserve aspects of manual labour that the literary writers of antiquity seldom thought important enough to describe.
Some people employed in fullonicae were enslaved, others freed or otherwise employed, but a painted figure does not tell us the worker’s legal status. Owners and managers might supervise a workshop without personally undertaking the heavy treading. A small fuller could run a business of his own, while another worker performed demanding labour on somebody else’s behalf. The workshops survive more clearly than the lives and working conditions of many of their labourers.
Professional skill mattered because customers handed over garments that might be expensive or irreplaceable. Losing them, damaging them or confusing one client’s property with another’s could have legal consequences. In the Institutes 3.205 to 206, the jurist Gaius considers a fuller who accepts clothing for a fee and then has it stolen. He explains that the fuller is liable to compensate the owner, provided the worker is solvent. The argument assumes both that the clothes had value and that the professional had accepted responsibility for them.
A passage attributed to Ulpian in the Digest 19.2.13.6 gives similarly ordinary examples. A fuller can be held responsible if mice gnaw the clothes in his care or if he mistakenly hands one customer’s cloak to another person. The law recognizes what a workshop operator had to manage in practice: storage, pests, distinguishing garments and keeping faith with the people who entrusted him with their belongings.
The trade could be mocked for its smell, as Martial’s broken-pot joke suggests. Yet Roman cities also relied on fullers, and some practitioners had enough standing to enter into public relationships with leading citizens.
Fullers and Eumachia: A Trade Visible in Public
Eumachia, a wealthy woman and public priestess of early imperial Pompeii, paid for a prominent building near the forum. The complex and its inscriptions show how elite patrons could make their presence felt in civic space. A statue of Eumachia was dedicated there by the fullones, as the inscription on its base states. The dedication is direct evidence that members of the fulling trade could act together to honour an influential woman of the city.
The Pompeii Archaeological Park’s account of Eumachia identifies that dedication and discusses the building’s connection with the clothing trade. Its original Eumachia statue is now in Naples and a copy stands at Pompeii. But the statue does not demonstrate that the entire complex was either a fullers’ guild headquarters or a working laundry. The building’s commercial function remains disputed.
The dedication gives a different view of the trade from the jokes about dirty pots. Fullers were numerous or organized enough to commission an honour in a public building. Their daily work might include treading filthy cloth, yet their occupation also connected them with the patronage and civic status of Pompeii’s leading families.
Before any Roman garment could look clean and orderly, sheep had to be raised, wool worked, cloth woven and clothing made, worn and maintained. Fullers handled the difficult cleaning and finishing stage of that process. Their knowledge of water, cleaning minerals and wool fibres helped them return cloth fit to wear after demanding physical treatment. Stale urine might make a workshop smell offensive, but a successful fuller worked to remove the traces of that treatment before the clothing went back to its owner.
