Baths

If it is the case that a culture’s priorities can be divined from the function of its largest public buildings, then the cityscape of ancient Rome was dominated by structures devoted to the provision of public leisure, and the same can be said of many Roman provincial cities (Dodge 1999; Coleman 2000b). The Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum) and the Circus Maximus (seating capacity of about 200,000) were among ancient Rome’s most impressive monuments (Humphrey 1986: 56-131; Bomgard-ner 2000: 1-31). By Constantine’s day the city boasted no less than four permanent stone theaters, some with supplementary amenities attached, such as the gardens, ambulatories, porticoes, and galleries that stood behind the stage of Pompey’s Theater (L. Richardson 1992, s. v. theatrum; LTUR 5.35-8, s. v. Theatrum Pompei [Gros]). The huge open spaces of the Roman Forum and the nearby Imperial Fora were frequently used to stage cash hand-outs, public banquets, and (before permanent amphitheaters became available) gladiatorial games and beast hunts. The fora would also regularly host market days and, it must be imagined, hucksters, snake-oil salesmen, performers, reciters, sidewalk orators, and traveling troupes of entertainers must have been a constant feature of these piazzas, as well as of other public spaces in the city (D. Chr. 20.10; Luc. Alex. 6; Origen, C. Cels. 350; Blumner 1918; Kudlien 1983).

But above the lot stood the vast public baths. When Constantine added his suite in about 315 CE, it was the eleventh set of imperial baths built in Rome since those of Agrippa, opened in 29 bce. These buildings could cover huge areas of land (32 acres in the case of Diocletian’s Baths, completed in 306 ce), comprise dozens of rooms,

Figure 19.2a and b Suburban baths, Pompeii. The establishment, located outside the Porta Marina to attract travelers as they entered or left the town, is famous for the graphic sexual frescoes in its changing room (b) Suburban baths, Herculaneum. This small bathhouse, located near the town’s entrance, overlooked the sea and had a heated indoor swimming pool. The fine cut-marble floor allowed even the poorest to feel pampered for a few hours a day

And offer a great array of services, so that they were far more than places to get clean. Rather, the imperial baths were public pleasure palaces, immense cathedrals to the cult of the Roman people’s commoda (conveniences), which the emperor and the upper classes were expected to provide by virtue of their ability to do so. The sheer scale of the imperial baths declares that public leisure was a serious business for the Romans, rulers and ruled alike.

The origins ofthe baths are obscure, but the developed Roman bathhouse is evidently a product of divergent cultural influences. The peculiarly Roman feature of hot bathing in communal pools deployed in carefully gradated heated spaces is coupled with manifestly Greek elements, such as exercise yards (palaestrae). The technology employed to facilitate these practices (the under-floor heating system called the hypocaust) also had Greek precursors in underground heating channels, but the Romans transformed it into something more ambitious and practical: the fully-fledged suspensura, whereby the entire floor of a room, not just a section of it, was raised on pillars and, later still, the walls rendered hollow to allow the passage of hot gases from the furnace. The available evidence points to Campania in the third century bce as the best context for the combination of all these features into the truly Roman-style bathhouse (Fagan 2001).

Once established among the Romans by the second century bce, the habit of public bathing became a diagnostic characteristic of Roman-ness. Newly conquered peoples adopted the habit as a sign of their embracing the new order (Tac. Agr. 21.2) and, indeed, baths are found in every sort of Roman settlement, no matter how large or small, central or remote. A wooden bathhouse has even been identified in a temporary fortress (occupied between 15 and 28 ce) along the German frontier which, if the structure is correctly identified, constitutes startling testimony as to the centrality of bathing in Roman daily life by this time (Bosman 1999). The enormous volume of allusions, anecdotes, metaphors, and similes drawn from the world of the baths by Roman authors only further reflects the importance of the habit. For example, satirists of Roman society, such as Martial, set many of their pungent jokes in the familiar setting of the baths (Fagan 1999a: 12-39), and the way emperors bathe is used to calibrate their moral characters in such works as the Historia Augusta (Merten 1983). We only have to read that Elagabalus held parties for the ruptured in the palace baths to know he was not a good man (HA Heliogab. 25.6). In contrast, the probity of Antoninus Pius is reflected in his opening to the public a set of baths he owned, and at no charge to boot (HA Ant. Pius 7.6).

Unlike many Roman buildings, the baths can boast a wealth of ancient evidence that allows them to be examined from a variety of perspectives. Recent studies of their physical remains have revealed much about their operation. The scale of the baths varied enormously, from tiny corner establishments to the larger community-owned facilities and up to the vast imperial pleasure palaces of the capital (Nielsen 1993). Most communities had multiple public facilities (by 79 ce Pompeii could boast seven, while Constantinian Rome had hundreds), of varying scale and quality that probably reflect the divergent preferences and means among the general population. Since the bathing habit did not follow a rigidly prescribed form in every place, the architecture of the baths also displays great variation (Yegul 1992). Local tastes would dictate the form of a community’s establishments, as was the case with the great bath-gymnasia complexes common in Asia Minor that incorporated into the traditional Hellenistic gymnasium elements imported from the Roman bath of the Western Mediterranean (Yegul 1986). More focused studies of regional forms of baths are needed to elucidate variations in the bathing culture at a local level (Farrington 1995). Particularly intriguing is Roman Egypt, where Greek-style baths appear to have continued in use well into the first century ce and where a wealth of papyrological evidence remains to be fully mined for bath-related information. The requirements of heating, water supply, and drainage demanded by the Roman bath mean that it may have been the single most technologically complex structure developed in the ancient Mediterranean basin (see relevant chapters in Nielsen 1993 and Yegtil 1992; see also specific studies such as De Haan 2001; Garbrecht and Manderscheid 1994; Parslow 2000). Indeed, the baths were partly a testament to the symbolic power of the Romans over nature, and especially of the emperors who built the huge complexes in the capital, in that they harnessed the threatening forces of fire and water and deployed them for the enjoyment of the masses (Zajac 1999).

The sculptural decoration of the baths appears to be aimed chiefly at evoking images of pleasure and abandon, via Venus and Bacchus, and of healthfulness, via Aesculapius and Hygeia (Manderscheid 1981; Marvin 1983). In this observation lies a clue to the popularity of the baths. They were places to have fun, but also to maintain one’s health. Whatever the truth about the actual benefits of ancient hydrotherapy (Heinz 1996), the healthful properties of bathing, whether remedial or preventive, appear repeatedly in the comments and allusions ofthe written sources. That such notices are found in non-medical works suggests that the belief in healthy baths was not some rarified hypothetical construct restricted to elite medical treatises but a widespread and common assumption that can only have added to the popularity and attraction of the habit (Fagan 1999a: 85-103). The precise nature of ancient hydrotherapeutic practices is another area that needs further work, especially as they appear in the massive Galenic corpus.

Whatever the form of the facility or the motive for visiting it, the essence of Roman bathing was the communality of the experience, whether in private baths at home (with invited companions) or in public ones (with whoever happened by). This aspect of the baths gives them an unusual appeal, since here we can view the Romans in an informal context so often denied us by the nature of our evidence. The volume and complexity of the bath-related evidence from archaeological, literary, and epigraphic sources is formidable, and it cannot be fitted together at all neatly. Our impressions remain patchy and rooted to specific times and places, so that distinguishing the typical from the extraordinary is particularly difficult (Fagan 1999b). Nevertheless, a picture of Roman bathing culture can be painted in broad brush strokes, if not in minute detail. For instance, many private baths have been identified in the town-houses and villas of those who could afford them, although more work needs to be done on understanding these facilities and relating them to their better-studied public counterparts (see De Haan 1997; Entero 2001). What does emerge, however, is that access to private facilities did not preclude the use of public baths by the elite. Even if it was deemed preferable to bathe ‘‘without the mob’’ (Petron. Sat. 73.2), being seen at the public baths of one’s community was part of what declared membership in it. Thus the Digest defines a person’s legal domicilium for tax purposes as that place where he takes part in public life, which includes use of the public baths (D. 50.1.27.1). The communality of life in Roman towns, and the centrality of public bathing to that communality, is made clear by this ruling.

The vibrancy of the atmosphere at the baths shines through in dozens of sources, but perhaps most famously from Seneca’s complaints about the din emanating from a bathhouse over which he rented a room in Baiae (Sen. Ep. 56.1-2). Other aspects of the bathing experience as alluded to in the sources - mixed bathing, sex, snacking, drinking, or the use of baths as places to meet dinner guests - only confirm Seneca’s portrayal (Fagan 1999a: 12-39). That thieves habitually lurked in the baths, ready to snatch the belongings of the unwary, is a sufficient indication in itself of their being crowded and busy places (Plaut. Rud. 382-85; D. 47.17.1). The baths were thus nodes of social interaction for the Romans, but the nature of that interaction is not self-evident. It has long been recognized that Romans of all classes gathered together in the baths. Emblematic is the anecdote told by Pliny the Younger about the expraetor Larcius Macedo, who was accidentally struck in the face while bathing in public at Rome because his slave touched an eques who reacted violently (Pliny Ep. 3.14.6-8). The story puts a slave, a senator, and a knight in close proximity in the baths, and it is by no means a unique notice. All sorts of evidence point to a wide social mix at the typical public bathing facility (e. g. Cic. Cael. 61-7; ILS 5672). The problem lies in what we are to make of such scenarios. A common response has been to see the baths as ‘‘leveling’’ agents, where social distinctions broke down and moral norms were threatened. On this model, the baths were places which ‘‘threatened to undermine existing social identities’’ (Toner 1995: 53-64, quote at 57). While the moral ambiguity of the baths is clear enough, the supposed status anxiety they harbored seems unlikely, or, at least, as no more intensely experienced at the baths than in any other open public setting where the elite could expect to confront the non-elite (in the forum, the street, the circus, etc.). When they moved about in public, the self-important employed various strategies to make their status clear to all, and the baths seem no different. Slave retinues, quality of towels or wine or bathing accoutrements, the wearing of expensive jewelry and the application of exotic perfumes, or the very posture and accents of the well-to-do - all of these would have ensured that status distinctions were maintained inside the bathhouse as carefully as they were outside of it. Further, epigraphy reveals that the local elites were often responsible for the provision and maintenance of a Roman community’s public baths. Can we really believe that such people would provide baths, have their names inscribed on the commemorative inscription, and then face possible humiliation and loss of face when they went inside? Is it plausible that when the ex-consul Pliny the Younger entered one of the modest public baths in the small town near his Laurentine villa, he risked demeaning his rank (Pliny Ep. 2.17.26)? Far from being social levelers, then, the baths more likely provided one more environment where the elite declared their status to all, in this instance in an intimate setting, and so reinforced their claim to leadership in a Roman community all the more forcefully.