England’s Ancient Roman Public Bath Remains: A Glimpse of Early Roman Ingenuity

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Ruins of an Ancient Hypocaust
“This isn’t the hypocaust at the Stabian Baths, but it is a good example of what they look like. You can see the pillars which supported the floor, and the remains of the floor. The arch at the rear of the room was where the furnace was, and where the hot air from the furnace entered the space under the floor.”

By Matthew Breier

 

Ok, mea culpa—I admit it. I’m a Classics nerd. When I toured the remains of a Roman bathhouse on the outskirts of London, I was like a kid in a candy store.

Ancient Rome lives on in modern England. It’s not often that everyday life in an ancient culture maintains a preserved place many centuries later. If you are in London and want to see a marvel of architectural ingenuity and imagine a slice of life as the Romans knew it, swing by the Roman Bathhouses at Bath, Hertfordshire, and Leicester.1

The precise origin of the ancient Roman bath remains shrouded in mystery, and around six different theories have been proposed.2 The most accepted theory is that the Greeks introduced bathing to the Romans toward the end of the third century BCE, or at the least, Greek culture had a significant influence on this development in the Roman Empire.3 Public bathing was part of Greek culture in athletic facilities (gymnasia and palaestrae) and in designated public baths with heated water (balaneia).4

The Romans would have encountered these balaneia in the Greek poleis of Magna Graecia and in the Greek cities of the West (e.g. in Syracuse and Gela in Sicily).5 Historians note that the early Romans washed off dirt from their extremities on a daily basis but only took whole-body baths every nine days.6 Some accomplished this by swimming in the Tiber, some took hot baths in the room next to the kitchen (lavatrina), and some built bathrooms in their houses for this purpose (balnea).7 The first Roman public baths were built in the second century BCE; by 33 BCE, there were 170 public baths in Rome, and by the fifth century CE, there were an estimated 856.8 Complementary scholarship also suggests that Roman baths originated in Campania (a region in Italy). Garrett G. Fagan asserts the “centrality of Campania in the development history of the Roman-style public bath,” describing that in the third and second centuries BCE, Campania was “a crucible of cultural interaction [and] merely represents the final stage of an evolutionary sequence that surely has roots extending much farther afield and deeper in the past.”9 He notes that Campania has the earliest remains of a public bath at Cumae (dating from 180 BCE) and from the remains buried by Vesuvius.10 In fact, earlier scholarship traces the invention of the pensiles balineae (“hanging baths”) to Sergius Orata, an entrepreneur who lived near Baiae in Campania.11 He installed these into villas, and they have been related (possibly erroneously) to the subsequent hypocaust (or heating system) of the Roman public baths.12 Nevertheless, Fagan states that Campania was a prosperous location with diversity and clear evidence of Greek influence. Campania had a tradition of bathing in communal, heated natural caverns which would have made a ready transition to the constructed Roman public baths.13 What remains clear is that Greek culture (as with so many other aspects of Roman life, in which “Romans took a form from the Greeks, elaborated it, and built on a larger scale”) had a credible influence on the integration of public baths into their lifestyle, and this evolution occurred in the second century, possibly in Campania.14 Roman baths generally featured three rooms with a gradation of heat in sequence.15The first is the frigidarium, an unheated room, then the tepidarium, a warm room, and then the caldarium, a hot room.16 After the hot room, some baths had a final unheated room for a final cold plunge, and some baths featured sudatoria (or dry sweating rooms), like the modern-day sauna.17According to Fagan, in addition to the sequential rooms, Roman baths, by definition, also had heated communal bathing pools termed solia or alveri.18 Roman architectural ingenuity becomes evident with the system termed the hypocaust (or a place heated from below).19 Not only did this technology (invented at the end of the second century BCE) allow “bathing to take off as a cultural phenomenon,” but it represented a crucial component to Roman bathing.20 The system was complex. The floors of the rooms being heated were raised on pilae (or stacks), which were made of stone or ceramic tiles.21This basement cavity held the heat and was fed by a praefurnium (or furnace) through a stokehole.22 The caldarium was heated to approximately forty degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was directly joined to the furnace so it would get the most heat.23 The tepidarium, which was heated to thirty degrees Celsius or eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit, was slightly further away, and the air cooled as it traveled.24 In addition, the praefurnium heated a water tank to supply hot bath water.25 The heat traveled from the basement through flues located in the walls (which were built of ceramic box tiles) and then was vented through the roof.26 These hollow walls, or tubuli, were instrumental in maintaining an even temperature in the lowest and highest spaces.27 The tubuli prevented condensation and increased the area that radiated heat around the bathers, which in turn allowed for thousands of bathers to be accommodated in the larger bathhouses.28 This also made the floors, baths, and walls of the caldarium too hot to touch, and typically, bathers wore sculponea, or wooden sandals, for protection.29

Bathers also wore dedicated bathing clothes and had a toilet kit with bottles of oil and strigils, or curved metal blades, for removing oil and dirt from their skin.30 After arriving at the bathhouse, the Romans could change clothes in the apodyterium, or changing room, and store their clothes in cubbies.31 Interestingly, those who could afford it would pay a slave to watch their clothes or pay an attendant to keep an eye on them instead.32 After changing, the Romans would be rubbed down with oil by a slave, after which men would exercise lightly in the palaestra, which included walking, running, weightlifting, wrestling, or playing ball games.33 Women, on the other hand, rolled a hoop with a stick or swam.34 Once done with the exercise, they would use the strigils to scrape the dust and oil from their skin and proceed to the baths.35 After bathing and drying off, they were “anointed with perfumes and oils.”36 The baths also had “magnificently large windows.”37 Seneca, in the first century, wrote “‘Nowadays…people regard baths as fit only for moths if they have not been so arranged that they receive the sun all day long through the widest of windows, if men can not bathe and get a coat of tan at the same time, and if they can not look out from their bath-tubs over stretches of land and sea.’”38 Interestingly, it seems that aside from their beauty, the windows also enabled the Romans to benefit from solar energy. James W. Ring, after reviewing the scientific heat calculations, states that “with a normal mix of sunny days, a considerable savings of fuel could be accomplished even in the depths of winter” due to the large windows allowing the sun to provide much of the heat needed to keep the bathers warm.39 The Roman baths were communal and intended to be social centers.40 Bathhouses could be free-standing or attached to an inn, villa, military camp, or farmstead.42 Romans typically went to the baths at two in the afternoon, which was after their workday and before dinner, which was usually in the late afternoon or early evening.42 In addition to washing, people socialized and gossiped, conducted business, gamed, received massages and body treatments like depilation (hair removal), and even underwent dental procedures.43Some bathers would spend hours there, enjoying the services and copious amounts of food and drink.44 Also, Roman accounts noted that the baths were a good place to “discuss literature and philosophy…and [have] poetry readings.”45 In general, “baths were loud and crowded.”46 Seneca, “who lived in an apartment above a public bath, describes ‘the assortment of sounds which are enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing.”’47 Seneca “bitterly describes the sounds of straining weightlifters, pummeling masseuses, shouting scorekeepers, splashing swimmers, singing bathers, and the advertising cries of the armpit hair-plucker, and the wails of his customers.”48 After their baths, the Romans went home and had dinner, the main meal of their day.49 Occasionally, they would use the bath as the meeting place for their guests before a dinner party, and to some Romans’ chagrin, others would “seek out dinner invitations at the baths by being obsequious, annoying or harassing.”50There is no doubt that the Roman bath is a fascinating slice of history. The baths incorporated not only engineering brilliance, but also provided the Romans with an amazing gathering place that was “spa, country club, community center, coffee shop and library” all rolled into one.51 This Classics nerd challenges anyone to find a comparable phenomenon in today’s world.    

 

Matthew Breier (’26) is a student at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Anthropology and HSOC with minors in Classical Studies and History.

 

Endnotes

 

  1. “The Roman Baths: Bath, https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/; “Roman Sites in Britain,” Historic UK, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/RomanSites/.
  2. Garrett G. Fagan, “The Genesis of the Roman Public Bath: Recent Approaches and Future Directions,” American Journal of Archaeology 105, no. 3 (2001): 403, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/507363.pdf.
  3. Fagan, “The Genesis,” 414; “Baths & Bathing as an Ancient Roman,” University of Washington Honors Program in Rome, https://depts.washington.edu/hrome/Authors/kjw2/BathsBathinginAncientRome/pub_zbarticle_view_printable.html.
  4. Fagan, “The Genesis,” 414.
  5. Ibid., 414–15.
  6. “Baths & Bathing,” University of Washington Honors Program in Rome.
  7. Ibid.
  8. Ibid.
  9. Fagan, “The Genesis,” 423.
  10. Ibid., 421.
  11. Ibid., 404; Janet DeLaine, “Recent Research on Roman Baths,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 1 (1988): 14, https://doi.org/10.1017/s104775940000996x.
  12. Fagan, “The Genesis,” 404.
  13. Fagan, “The Genesis,” 421–22.
  14. Ibid., 404.
  15. Ibid., 303.
  16. Ibid., 403–4; “Baths and Bathing in Roman Britain,” English Heritage, https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/story-of-england/romans/roman-bathing/.
  17. “Baths and Bathing,” English Heritage.
  18. Ibid.
  19. Ibid.
  20. “Baths & Bathing,” University of Washington Honors Program in Rome; “Baths and Bathing,” English Heritage.
  21. Ibid.
  22. Ibid.
  23. Ibid.
  24. Ibid.
  25. Ibid.
  26. Ibid.
  27. James W. Ring, “Windows, Baths, and Solar Energy in the Roman Empire,” American Journal of Archaeology 100, no. 4 (1996): 717, https://doi.org/10.2307/506675.
  28. Ring, “Windows, Baths,” 717.
  29. “Baths and Bathing,” English Heritage; “Baths & Bathing,” University of Washington Honors Program in Rome.
  30. “Baths and Bathing,” English Heritage.
  31. Ibid.
  32. Ibid.
  33. Ibid.
  34. Ibid.
  35. Ibid.
  36. Ibid.
  37. Ring, “Windows, Baths,” 717.
  38. Ring, “Windows, Baths,” 717–18.
  39. Ring, “Windows, Baths,” 723.
  40. Fordcroft Romano-British Bathhouse and Anglo-Saxon Cemetery (n.p.: Orpington and District Archaeological Society, n.d.)
  41. Fordcroft Romano-British.
  42. “Baths & Bathing,” University of Washington Honors Program in Rome.
  43. Fordcroft Romano-British; “Baths and Bathing,” English Heritage; DeLaine, “Recent Research,” 28.
  44. Ibid., 28; “Baths and Bathing,” English Heritage.
  45. Ibid.
  46. “Baths & Bathing,” University of Washington Honors Program in Rome.
  47. Ibid.
  48. Ibid.
  49. Ibid.
  50. Ibid.
  51. Ibid.

 

Bibliography

 

“Baths and Bathing in Roman Britain.” English Heritage. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/story-of-england/romans/roman-bathing/.

“Baths & Bathing as an Ancient Roman.” University of Washington Honors Program in Rome. https://depts.washington.edu/hrome/Authors/kjw2/BathsBathinginAncientRome/pub_zbarticle_view_printable.html.

DeLaine, Janet. “Recent Research on Roman Baths.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 1 (1988): 11–32. https://doi.org/10.1017/s104775940000996x.

Fagan, Garrett G. “The Genesis of the Roman Public Bath: Recent Approaches and Future Directions.” American Journal of Archaeology 105, no. 3 (2001): 403–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/507363.pdf.

Fordcroft Romano-British Bathhouse and Anglo-Saxon Cemetery. N.p.: Orpington and District Archaeological Society, n.d.

Ring, James W. “Windows, Baths, and Solar Energy in the Roman Empire.” American Journal of Archaeology 100, no. 4 (1996): 717–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/506675.

The Roman Baths: Bath. https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/.

“Roman Sites in Britain.” Historic UK. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/RomanSites/.

Image: https://depts.washington.edu/hrome/Authors/kjw2/BathsBathinginAncientRome/pub_zbarticle_view_printable.html