Ancient Roman Baths
The Roman Baths are a tourist attraction and historical place of interest in the English city of Bath. They are a very well preserved Roman site of public bathing, and have become a major tourist attraction.
After a morning's work at the office or shop, most Romans enjoyed spending the afternoon at the thermae or public bath. They were a social meeting place.
Men and women enjoyed coming to the baths not only to get clean but to meet with friends, exercise, or read at the library.
The baths had hot and cold pools, towels, 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.
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.
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 sculptures or enjoy athletic events in a theater like rotunda.
The largest of all Roman baths was the Diocletian, completed in A.D. 305 and covered an area of 130,000 sq. yards.
The Roman baths used the Hypocaust system for heating the building and the pools. This under floor heating system had hot air heated from the basement fires flowing between the brick or concrete columns which support the ground floor.
The warm air flows through wall ducts into the rooms at the baths and quickly heats them.
In some baths the floors would be so hot that the bathers would have to wear wooden sandals to stop their feet from being burnt.
The fires in the basement were stocked by slaves of the baths.
The baths were generally crowded, as 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.
Children were not permitted. The baths were not free.
The builder of this famous bath house was Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus (September 18, 53 - August 9, 117), Roman Emperor (98-117), commonly called Trajan. He was the second of the so-called "Five Good Emperors" of the Roman Empire. Under his rule, the Empire reached its greatest territorial extent.
The Baths of Caracalla, the second largest baths complex in ancient Rome, were built between 212 and 219 A.D. by the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, better known by his nickname Caracalla.
By the 3rd century A.D. the Romans had built many baths, in Rome and elsewhere, and had acquired great skill in designing functional, fully integrated complexes. The water supply and drainage system, in particular, required careful planning to ensure an adequate flow to and from the numerous hot and cold basins: it has been calculated that the baths used 15-20,000 cubic meters of water per day.
The baths were fed by a branch of the Aqua Marcia aqueduct, which brought pure water to Rome from springs in the hills near Subiaco, over 90 km away. The water flowed into a huge cistern, divided into 18 separate chambers for easy maintenance and with a total capacity of 10,000 cu. m.
From here it went by gravity flow through pipes underneath the gardens to the main building.Inside the main building a complicated distribution system carried the water directly to the cold pools or to boilers over wood fires where it was heated for the warm and hot baths.
Outlets from each basin and in the floor of each room led to the drains, which ran below the level of the distribution pipes and took the waste water to the municipal drain in the valley.
Both distribution and drainage pipes were housed in tunnels providing easy access for inspection and maintenance.
A third network of tunnels was used to store the enormous amounts of wood required to fuel the furnaces (praefurnia): there were at least fifty of these, some to heat the water and others to heat the rooms by a hot air system beneath the floor (hypocausta).
The heated rooms were on the south-western side of the building. The hottest room of all, the calidarium, projected beyond the line of the building to take full advantage of the sun's rays. Hollow terracotta tubes ran inside the walls to provide insulation and channel hot air.
Sixteen hundred people could bathe here at the same time. There were rooms for cold, hot and warm baths, splendid ceilings, porticoes, pillared halls, gymnasiums, where the rarest marbles, the most colossal columns, and the finest statues were admired by the people; even the baths were of basalt, granite, alabaster.
References
Spielvogel, J. (1991) Western Civilization Volume I To 1715. West Publishing Company. ISBN 0-314-82893-1
Chambers, M. et al. (1991) The Western Experience Volume I To 1715, Fifth Edition. McGraw-Hill, Inc. ISBN 0-07-010625-7
Upshur, J. et al. (1991) World History, Combined Edition. West Publishing Company. ISBN 0-314-79265-1
Webster, H. (1924) Early European History, Revised Edition. D. C. Heath and Company.
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