Ancient Rome
After a morning's work at the office or shop, most Roman's enjoyed spending the afternoon at the thermae or public bath. Men and women enjoyed coming to the baths not only to get clean but to meet with friends, exercise, or read at the library.
Generally, Romans would first go to the unctuarium where they had oil rubbed onto their skin and would then exercise in one of the exercise yards. From here they would move to the tepidarium or warm room where they would lie around chatting with their friends. Next, it was on to the caldarium, similar to a Turkish bath, hot and steamy. Here they sat and perspired, scraping their skin with a strigil, a curved metal tool. Attendants would serve them snacks and drinks. Finally came a dip in the calidarium
(hot bath) and a quick dip in the frigidarium (cold bath). After swimming, the bather might enjoy a massage where he might have oils and perfumes rubbed into his skin.
Feeling clean and relaxed, the Roman might drift through the beautiful gardens decorated with mosaics and colossal scruptures or enjoy athletic events in a theaterlike rotunda.
The largest of all Roman baths was the Diocletian, completed in AD. 305 and covered an area of 130,000 sq. yards.
Roman houses had water supplied via lead pipes. However, these pipes were taxed according to their size, so many houses had just a basic supply and could not hope to rival a bath complex. Therefore for personal hygiene, people went to the local baths. However, the local bath complex was also a gathering point and served a very useful community and social function. Here people could relax, keep clean and keep up with the latest news.
Taking a bath was not a simple chore. There was not one bath to use in a large complex such as the one at Bath. A visitor could use a cold bath (the frigidarium), a warm bath (the tepidarium) and a hot bath (the caldarium). A visitor would spend some of his time in each one before leaving. A large complex would also contain an exercise area (the palaestra), a swimming pool and a gymnasium. One of the public baths at Pompeii contains two tepidariums and caldariums along with a plunge pool and a large exercise area.
The building of a bath complex required excellent engineering skills. Baths required a way of heating up water. This was done by using a furnace and the hypocaust system carried the heat around the complex.
Water had to be constantly supplied. In Rome this was done using 640 kilometers of aqueducts - a superb engineering feat. The baths themselves could be huge. A complex built by the emperor Diocletian was the size of a football pitch. Those who built them wanted to make a statement - so that many baths contained mosaics and massive marble columns. The larger baths contained statues to the gods and professionals were on hand to help take the strain out of having a bath. Masseurs would massage visitors and then rub scented olive oil into their skin.
It was very cheap to use a Roman bath. A visitor, after paying his entrance fee, would strip naked and hand his clothes to an attendant. He could then do some exercising to work up a sweat before moving into the tepidarium which would prepare him for the caldarium which was more or less like a modern sauna. The idea, as with a sauna, was for the sweat to get rid of the body's dirt. After this a slave would rub olive oil into the visitor's skin and then scrap it off with a strigil. The more luxurious establishments would have professional masseurs to do this. After this, the visitor would return to the tepidarium and then to frigidarium to cool down. Finally, he could use the main pool for a swim or to generally socialise. Bathing was very important to the Ancient Romans as it served many functions.
However, not everyone was overjoyed by them:
As the Romans advanced west in England, building the Fosse Way as they went, they crossed the River Avon. Near here they found a hot water spring. It brought over one million litres of hot water to the surface every day at a temperature of about 48 degrees centigrade. They built a reservoir to control the water flow, baths and a temple. A town, Bath, quickly grew around this complex. Many Romans viewed the springs as sacred and threw valuable items into the springs to please the gods. An altar was also built at Bath so that priests could sacrifice animals to the gods. The waters at Bath gained a reputation as being able to cure all ills. As a result, may travelled to Bath from all over the Roman Empire to take to the waters there.
The ancient Romans might hit the baths first, and then wander down to the Forum, although many did prefer to get their shopping done early. In all but the largest baths, there were separate hours for men and women. The women's time slot was apparently much shorter, so that women probably had to be more careful scheduling. Large baths had duplicate facilities.
The Public Baths were extremely popular. Roman women and men tried to visit the baths at least once every day. The baths had hot and cold pools, towels, slaves to wait on you, steam rooms, saunas, exercise rooms, and hair cutting salons. They had reading rooms and libraries, as among the freeborn, who had the right to frequent baths, the majority could read. They even had stores, selling all kinds of things, and people who sold fast food. The baths were arranged rather like a very large mall, with bathing pools.
The baths were packed. The people loved them. At one time, there were as many as 900 public baths in ancient Rome. Small ones held about 300 people, and the big ones held 1500 people or more! Some Roman hospitals even had their own bathhouses. A trip to the bath was a very important part of ancient Roman daily life.
Could kids use the baths? No. Was there an admission charge to the baths? Yes. Could slaves use the baths? Properly, no. But the people who could, as a matter of course, brought their slave attendants with them.
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Entrance
Welcome to the Baths of Caracalla, one of the most elegant and massive Roman baths ever built. As late as the fifth century A.D., over 200 years after it was built, it still was ranked as one of Rome's seven wonders.
If you were a Roman, you would know that the public baths were as much a way of life as they were a place to wash. By the early fifth century A.D., there were almost 900 baths in Rome alone. The typical bath had a mosaic of uses and served as a community center, restaurant, fitness center, bar, and also as a performance center, where a juggler, a musician, or even a philosopher might entertain.
The most likely time you would have visited is in the afternoon, as the Roman workday for most ended by noon. If that time wasn't convenient, you could bathe in the morning or evening, when some baths were lit by torch. The Baths of Caracalla covered 27 acres and could accommodate 1,600 people at a time, so you would have had plenty of company. All would come: infants and elderly, men and women, healthy and ill, freemen and slaves, all of whom often bathed naked and together. If you were there at the right time, you might even share a bath with the emperor himself.
At your service (if you had the money), would be masseurs and food vendors, bartenders and slaves, poets and musicians. The baths were a bustling place, and one man who roomed above one wrote a letter chronicling its noise, complaining of the "grunt" of a weight lifter, a masseur's "pummeling of a shoulder," the occasional "arresting of a pickpocket," and the "racket of a man who likes to hear his own voice."
But his complaints were drowned out by most Romans, who were devotees of the baths. Roman affection for them was typified by the remark one Roman emperor made to a foreigner who asked why the emperor took the trouble to bathe once a day. "Because I do not have the time to bathe twice a day," he replied.
Palaestra
Before stepping into a series of baths, you and other visitors—young and old, male and female—exercised in open courtyards.
The exercise was usually neither extremely vigorous nor competitive. It was done, instead, to maintain health, as was recommended by the Roman medical profession. Doctors believed that bathing, exercise, massage, and a good diet—all things that a bath provided—were the basic ingredients of good health.
Exercise also worked up a light sweat recommended before a bath. If you were a man, your workout might consist of running, wrestling, boxing, or fencing. Ball games such as handball were also played.
Women also partook in this prelude to bathing. Trochus, a game that consisted of rolling a metal hoop with a hooked stick, was considered a more appropriate woman's exercise, as was swimming. One Roman, Juvenal, mocked brazen society women who worked out with weights and dumbbells for infringing on a sport that he obviously considered solely part of the male domain.
Apodyterium
This is the changing room, your entry into the baths. An apodyterium had cubicles or shelves where you could tuck away your clothing and other belongings while you bathed. Leaving belongings behind unprotected was a risk, of course, for one of the most common visitors to the Roman baths apparently was thieves.
Privately owned slaves, or one hired at the baths, called a capsarius, would watch your belongings while you enjoyed the pleasures of the baths. One Roman schoolbook quotes a wealthy young Roman schoolboy who entered the baths, leaving his slave behind in the apodyterium. Master reminded slave: "Do not fall asleep, on account of the thieves."
If you were wealthy, you might even bring more than one slave along, as parading your slaves at the baths was a way to show your elevated social status.
Slaves washed their masters and mistresses at the baths.
If you were a wealthy free man or woman, slaves carried your bathing paraphernalia: exercise and bathing garments, sandals, linen towels, and a toilet kit that consisted of anointing oils, perfume, a sponge, and strigils, curved metal instruments used to scrape oil, sweat, and dirt from the body. Slaves might also wash you or give you a massage.
If you were robbed, you could respond by appealing to one of the Roman gods for retribution. A curse on the wrongdoer was written on tablets and offered up to the gods, who were asked to intervene.
Many of these curse tablets were found at the spring at Bath, England. One of them reads: "Solinus to the Goddess Sulis Minerva. I give to your divinity and majesty [my] bathing tunic and cloak. Do not allow sleep or health to him who has done me wrong, whether man or woman, whether slave or free, unless he reveals himself and brings goods to your temple.
Tepidarium
After changing in the apodyterium and working up a sweat in the palaestra, you would step into the tepidarium. This was the first stop on the way to the hot caldarium and then the cool-watered frigidarium.
The tepidarium was the place where "strigiling" often took place, the Roman habit of using curved metal tools to wipe oil, and with it sweat and dirt. Instead of using soap, Roman bathers would cover their bodies with oil to loosen dirt and then wipe off the mixture with various strigil devices. This might have been done by your own slave, if you had one, or by one who worked at the baths, if you could afford one.
Depilation was never fu
You could receive a massage here. That was definitely less painful than a depilation, which consisted of having your body hairs plucked out, as hairless bodies were fashionable during much of the Roman Empire. One man who lived above the baths complained of the "hair-plucker with his penetrating shrill voice—for purposes of advertisement—continually giving it vent and never holding his tongue except when he is plucking the armpits and making his victim yell."
The often-gloomy Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius could have been describing a tepidarium when he said: "What is bathing when you think about it—oil, sweat, filth, greasy water, ‘everything loathsome." "
The hypocaust system heated bath water and air.Caldarium
This was the hottest room in a Roman bath. At the Baths of Caracalla, the room was 115 feet wide and crowned with a concrete dome.
The hot water and steamy air were designed to open your pores, and water and air temperatures may have risen well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with a sticky 100 percent humidity to exaggerate the effect. At the Baths of Caracalla, the caldarium consisted of a large hall that contained a large pool a little over three feet deep. If you had slaves attending you, they might use a pouring dish called a patara to refresh you with cool water.
This room and its waters, like the tepidarium, were heated by the hypocaust, the system's furnace. The hypocaust, below ground and stoked by slaves, heated a tank of water transported by pipe to the appropriate pool.
The furnace heated the air drawn underneath the floor of the caldarium to heat its tiles. You would have probably worn sandals or wooden clogs so as not to scorch your feet. Hot air then rose up through hollowed-out bricks that lined the walls before exiting through chimneys.
Frigidarium
You have already taken a warm bath in the tepidarium and a hot one in the caldarium, and may even have stopped in other sauna-like rooms.
Now it's time to close all the skin pores that have been opened. You can do this by plunging into the frigidarium's cold waters. The dip is meant to refresh and is often the final bath of a visitor.