Roman Baths

“ Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, Rome
While the Greeks were prior to the Romans in the use of the bath, they considered it effeminate to use warm [39] water, and consequently their bathing establishments never attained the luxury and splendor that later marked the Roman baths. When bath tubs were first introduced into Rome, the wealthy inhabitants fitted up their houses with a bathroom much as do the people of our own time. As the luxury, pleasure and benefit of the bath became better known, more elaborate bathing facilities similar to a modern Turkish bath were installed. ”

“ Passing over this haunted ground along the remains of the mediæval walls, we come to those beautiful ruins called the Roman baths. We are glad to see that the Prussian government has taken measures for purchasing some of the surrounding land, so that the excavations may be continued, and it is probable that valuable discoveries will be made. Nothing can be fairer than the aspect of these ruins in their summer dress; they show to perfection how beautiful an effect may be gained by variegated courses of bricks and tiles. ”

“ The architecture of Rome has been reproached with some justice for bestowing its finest achievements on buildings destined for amusement, or on mere private dwellings. But if from the amphitheatres, the villas, the baths, we turn to the roads, the sewers, and the aqueducts, we shall agree with Frontinus in deeply admiring so grand a combination of the artistic with the useful. A practical recognition of some of the great sanitary laws seem to have early prevailed at Rome, and might well excite our wonder, if such things had not been as a rule passed by in silence by historians. ”

“ Thus, in the Roman baths, the spaces for serious athletic contests, which had formed the principal part of the Greek gymnasion, were wholly subordinated to the departments for indolent luxury and light amusements. The primitive bathing-chambers were enlarged to magnificent halls, which offered the greatest scope for the development of that interior architecture which was cultivated with such great success by the Romans. ”

“ In the earlier stages of Roman history a much greater delicacy was observed with respect to promiscuous bathing, even among men, than obtained at a later period. Virtue passed away as wealth increased, and the public baths became places of meeting and amusement where not only did men bathe together in numbers, but even men and women stripped and bathed promiscuously in the same bath.
Some idea of the magnitude of the baths at Rome can be gained from a statement of the number of bathers they could accommodate at one time. ”

“ That the existence of the great Roman Bath has been transferred from the region of conjecture to the region of fact we owe entirely to the enthusiasm and unwearied zeal of Major Davis, and no fair mind can deny him the credit of being the practical discoverer of the great Roman Bath. ”

“ Lucas's Bath being a plain hall without piers, Sutherland assumed the same form for the hall of the great Roman Bath, and altogether omitted the arcades that divide it into three aisles. (5) Not to dwell on other errors built on the baseless fabric of conjecture, it is evident that Sutherland imagined a system of baths existed west of the great Roman Bath similar in all respects to that known to exist east of the great Roman Bath. But here, again, theory has been upset by facts. ”

“ ON THE EXCAVATIONS OF THE ROMAN BATHS AT BATH. Re-printed from the Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archæological Society. Vol. VIII., part I.
Leland, on his visit to Bath in the year 1530, with tolerable fulness describes the baths, and after completing his description of the King's Bath goes on to say "Ther goith a sluse out of this Bath and servid in Tymes past with Water derivid out of it 2 places in Bath Priorie usid for Bathes: els voide; for in them be no springes;" ”

“ The Roman’s most amiable idiosyncrasy was his devotion to the bath. Every considerable house had an elaborate bathing department with at least a hot room built over a furnace, and a cold room with a swimming-tank. But there were also public baths, on an ever-increasing scale of magnificence. Agrippa alone built 170 of them at Rome. Rich and poor alike made it their daily practice to bathe after exercise, just before their principal meal in the early afternoon. The custom of the noon-tide siesta was universal, except with prodigies of industry like Cicero. ”

“ The Hot Baths at Rome.—The Thermæ of Stabiæ.—A Tilt at Sun Dials.—A Complete Bath, as the Ancients Considered It; the Apartments, the Slaves, the Unguents, the Strigillæ.—A Saying of the Emperor Hadrian.—The Baths for Women.—The Reading Room.—The Roman Newspaper.—The Heating Apparatus.
The Romans were almost amphibious. They bathed themselves as often as seven times per diem; and young people of style passed a portion of the day, and often a part of the night, in the warm baths. Hence the importance which these establishments assumed in ancient times. ”

“ Assisted by Mr. {11} Palmer, an ingenious builder, I have ventured to exhibit a complete ground plot of the Roman Baths,7 a discovery of no less curiosity than instruction.... This ground plot is exhibited in the plate annexed (Pl. V.) as far as the earth is cleared away. The remainder is supposed and drawen out in dotted lines. The plate exhibits also an elevation of the section of the wing discovered, with references."8
Dr. Sutherland published the plan of the bath with this description having "drawen out in dotted lines" the supposed arrangement of the baths. ”

“ I believe the apartments necessary to complete the system of the modern Turkish bath, or rather the ancient bath, with the requisite waiting rooms and corridors, stood there.
After these discoveries of the middle of the last century but very partial excavations were made in proximity to the baths, and those that were made were never sunk to a depth sufficient to reach the ruins. The flood of hot water had no drain to carry it off, and was maintained at such a height in the soil that whenever a sinking was made, it was impossible without pumping machinery to sufficiently overcome it. ”

“ There is no occasion to be wise beyond what is written: 'When, as we may suppose, they have run a length proportionable to their width, they compose a bath, which may indeed be called great, 96ft. by 68ft.' The fact is, Sutherland supposed that the dimensions of the great Roman Bath would observe the same relative proportions as Lucas's Bath. ”

“ The economy of baths was brought to more exquisite and copious perfection by the Romans than it has been since. Vice, luxury, gluttony, fatigue, disease, caprice, indolence, extravagant wealth, inordinate vanity, imperial pomp, were all occupied according to the impulse or the necessity of the individual, or of cities and provinces, to adorn with new contrivances, or to supply the defects of that essential furniture to the comfort of the later Roman. ”

“ While the ruins of aqueducts and tunnels at Jerusalem, Athens and Carthage give some idea of the skill and knowledge of hydraulic and sanitary matters possessed by the engineers of that period, we must turn to Rome and study their system of water supply, drains for sewage and the ruins of their magnificent baths to form a true conception of the skill of the early school of Roman engineers [17] and the lavish expenditures of treasure by the inhabitants to secure an adequate water supply for Rome. ”

“ The era of thermae or public baths began with Agrippa in 27 b.c., and by the end of the third century eleven such existed in Rome exclusive of the smaller baths or balnae, of which there were 850. Nero, Titus, Trajan, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Diocletian, were all builders of thermae. These huge edifices were a great deal more than public baths. They were a Roman form of the gymnasia of the Greeks, and the colossal ruins that remain can give but the barest idea of what they must have been at their best. ”

“ The common people made use of scented oils to anoint their persons, and perfumed the water itself with the most precious perfumes. Bodily health and cleanliness were only secondary considerations; voluptuous pleasure was the main object. The ruins of the baths of Titus, Caracalla, and Diocletian, in Rome, show that they were decorated with prodigal magnificence, and with every thing that could excite the passions—pictures, statues, ornaments, and mirrors. ”

“ The Roman fondness for costly decorations is well illustrated by the elaborateness of the frescoes and the mosaics of the villas of Pompeii, and other sites where excavations have revealed the interiors of Roman public and private buildings. The erection of the many temples, basilicas, baths, aqueducts, bridges, amphitheatres and other structures in Rome, Italy and other provinces supplied a great stimulus to Roman architecture and engineering. ”

“ Here are the same terraces and steps and balustrades, and a system of water-works less impressive, perhaps, but very ingenious and charming.
The whole place is a mixture of old Rome and of the French eighteenth century; for the remains of the antique baths are in a measure incorporated in the modern fountains. In a corner of this umbrageous precinct stands a small Roman ruin, which is known as a temple of Diana, but was more apparently a nymphaeum, and appears to have had a graceful connection with the adjacent baths. ”

“ Bathrooms are rare, and the habit of the daily bath is almost unknown in a city which once boasted the finest baths the world has seen.
If the Roman does not know how to make himself comfortable indoors, no one knows better how to enjoy himself in the open air. The ragged loafer suns himself in the public squares, the workman dozes away his dinner hour at full length under the shelter of a [Pg 100] wall; it is in the streets that a Roman holiday is spent. ”

“ Fall of the Roman Empire—Succeeding Period known as the Dark Ages—Sanitation during the Dark Ages—Beginning of Material Progress in Sanitation—Pilgrimages to Juggernaut—Water Supply to Paris—London Water Supply—Aqueduct of Zempoala, Mexico.
During the period following the fall of Rome, the empire was overrun by barbarians from the north, and the magnificent baths, aqueducts and public edifices reared by the Romans with such painstaking care were suffered to fall into decay. ”

“ The only important building wholly new is the large bathing establishment, the Central Baths, at the corner of Stabian and Nola streets. For the rest, effort seems to have been directed toward restoring the ruined buildings as nearly as possible to their original condition. The wall decoration throughout is of the Intricate Style.
The measurements of buildings in the Roman Period conform to the scale of the Roman foot, while the dimensions of structures antedating the Roman colony in most cases reduce to the scale of the Oscan or old Italic foot. The Roman foot (296 mm.) ”

“ The palaces and modern churches of Rome owe, as I have said, all their ornaments to this passion of the ancients. There is not a doorstep nor a guardstone at the corner of the meanest court in Rome which is not of marble, granite, or porphyry from some ancient building. Almost all the houses, as Raphael said, have been built with lime made of the costly old marbles. The very streets in the newly-formed parts of the city are macadamised with the fragments of costly baths and pillars. ”

“ Greek Baths.—In Greece from very early times inability to read and to swim were considered the marks of the ignorant. In Homer's time over-indulgence in warm baths was considered effeminate. [1] The system of bathing was never so complete in Greece as in Rome, but in the former country there were both public and private baths, and ancient Greek vases display pictures of swimming-baths and shower-baths, and also of [Pg 149] large basins for men and for women round which they stood to bathe. The Greek baths were near the gymnasia. ”

“ The towns were approached by gateways with rounded arches, inside which the streets were determined by the form of the Roman camp or of a British town. They had their public buildings like a miniature Rome: each had its temple, its theatre, its court of justice, and its public baths. With regard to the latter it may be instructive to remark that when the Roman civilisation was swept away in the fifth century, it took Englishmen 1400 years to re-learn the lesson that it is necessary to provide public baths for the inhabitants of our large cities. ”

“ C. Knight mentioned the discovery near the Bank of traces of a Roman building, and of what was “apparently the basis of a Roman pillar (circular?) built of large flat bricks incrusted with a very hard cement, in which the mouldings were formed exactly as is done in the present day.”
Rome itself must have been a city of plastered walls; the Pantheon, the great Basilica of Constantine in the Forum, and the splendid Baths were all, as may be seen to-day, plastered. The tile walls of the Basilica at Trèves were covered with red plastering. The Baths at Silchester were plastered externally. ”

“ These steps are quite devoid of lead (except, in places, the riser of the lower step and at the north-west corner) , and it is not clear whether they had at any time such a covering, although I am inclined to think so, as it evidently went beneath the piers and under the central pedestal. At the bottom step, in the north-east corner, was a bronze sluice. The frame of this sluice, with an opening of 13in. by 12in., I found in position when I excavated my way up the drain, but I was obliged to remove it in order to force my way into the bath. ”