page_title: Ancient Roman bathing
section_title: Roman bathhouses
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Roman bathing / Roman bathhouses
caption_attribution_description: English: The Roman Baths (Thermae) of Bath Spa, England. This is a 6 segment panorama taken by myself with a Canon 5D and 24-105mm f/4L IS lens. Français&#160;: Les thermes romaines de la ville de Bath, en Angleterre. Cette image est un panorama obtenu en assemblant six clichés pris avec un appareil Canon 5D équipé d'un objectif 24-105mm f/4L IS.
context_page_description: Bathing played a major part in ancient Roman culture and society. It was one of the most common daily activities in Roman culture and was practiced across a wide variety of social classes.
  Though many contemporary cultures see bathing as a very private activity conducted in the home, bathing in Rome was a communal activity. While the extremely wealthy could afford bathing facilities in their homes, most people bathed in the communal baths. In some ways, these resembled modern-day destination spas. The Romans raised bathing to high art as they socialized in these communal baths. Communal baths were also available in temples such as The Imperial Fora. Courtship was conducted, as well as sealing business deals, as they built lavish baths on natural hot springs.
  Such was the importance of baths to Romans that a catalog of buildings in Rome from 354 AD documented 952 baths of varying sizes in the city.
context_section_description: The Romans emulated many of the Greeks' bathing practices and surpassed them in the size of their baths. As in Greece, the Roman bath became a focal center for social and recreational activity. With the expansion of the Roman Empire, the idea of the public bath spread to all parts of the Mediterranean and into regions of Europe and North Africa. By constructing aqueducts, the Romans had enough water not only for domestic, agricultural, and industrial uses but also for their leisurely pursuits. Aqueducts provided water that was later heated for use in the baths. Today, the extent of the Roman bath is revealed at ruins and in archaeological excavations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
  These Roman baths varied from simple to exceedingly elaborate structures, and they varied in size, arrangement, and decoration. Most contained an apodyterium— a room just inside the entrance where the bather stored his clothes. Next, the bather progressed into the tepidarium (warm room),  then into the caldarium (hot room) for a steam, and finally into the frigidarium (cold room) with its tank of cold water. The caldarium, heated by a brazier underneath the hollow floor, contained cold-water basins which the bather could use for cooling. After taking this series of sweat and/or immersion baths, the bather returned to the cooler tepidarium for a massage with oils and final scraping with metal implements called strigils. Some baths also contained a laconicum (a dry, resting room) where the bather completed the process by resting and sweating.
  The layout of Roman baths contained other architectural features of note. Because wealthy Romans brought slaves to attend to their bathing needs, the bathhouse usually had three entrances: one for men, one for women, and one for slaves. The preference of symmetry in Roman architecture usually meant a symmetrical facade, even though the women's area was usually smaller than the men's because of fewer numbers of patrons. Usually, solid walls or placement on opposite sides of the building separated the men's and women's sections. Roman bathhouses often contained a courtyard, or palaestra, which was an open-air garden used for exercise. In some cases, the builders made the palaestra an interior courtyard, and in other cases, the builders placed the palaestra in front of the bathhouse proper and incorporated it into the formal approach. Sometimes the palestra held a swimming pool. Most often a colonnade outlined the palaestra's edges.
  Republican bathhouses often had separate bathing facilities for women and men, but by the 1st century AD mixed bathing was common and is a practice frequently referred to in Martial and Juvenal, as well as in Pliny and Quintilian. However, gender separation might have been restored by Emperor Hadrian but there is evidence it wasn't. To many Roman moralists, baths illustrated how far the Rome of their own day had fallen into decline and so became a negative image; Cato the Elder publicly attacked Scipio Africanus for his use of the bathhouses.
  Roman bathhouses offered amenities in addition to the bathing ritual. Ancillary spaces in the bathhouse proper housed food and perfume-selling booths, libraries, and reading rooms. Stages accommodated theatrical and musical performances. Adjacent stadia provided spaces for exercise and athletic competitions. Inside the bathhouses proper, marble mosaics tiled the elegant floors. The stuccoed walls frequently sported frescoes of trees, birds, and other pastoral images. Sky-blue paint, gold stars, and celestial imagery adorned interior domes. Statuary and fountains decorated the interior and exterior.
  The Romans also constructed baths in their colonies, taking advantage of the natural hot springs occurring in Europe to construct baths at Aix and Vichy in France, Bath and Buxton in England, Aachen and Wiesbaden in Germany, Baden in Austria, and Aquincum in Hungary, among other locations. These baths became centers for recreational and social activities in Roman communities. Libraries, lecture halls, gymnasiums, and formal gardens became pa
caption: Roman baths in Bath, England
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "3033", "Image ImageLength": "2506", "Image BitsPerSample": "[16, 16, 16, 16]", "Image Compression": "PackBits", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "4", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2008:04:25 16:33:09", "Image ExifOffset": "256", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "394", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "8207", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2638", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2296"}