The ancient Romans were very fond of the baths. Not baths, necessarily, mind you, but the baths. For in ancient Rome the baths were about much more than bathing. This post is about the imperial baths, which emperors Trajan (98-117), Caracalla (198-217), and Diocletian (284-305) built around the city. Still today around the city of Rome you can see many traces of these imperial baths. You’ll find yourself walking along and then suddenly, boom!, an enormous wall with a high arch or an apse appears. It could be a lot of things, but often it’s the remains of what was once a bath complex.
“Bath complex” because while the imperial baths did contain places for bathing – cool pools to warm ones to very hot to cold (not so different from saunas, actually!) – there were many other attractions. There were shops and a palaestra (a place for athletic exercise), and a library! Or, in the case of the Baths of Caracalla, two libraries, one for Greek books and one for Latin. Clearly there was an important social aspect to these buildings. As evidenced by the fact that entrance to them was super-cheap.
The Baths of Diocletian are just north of Termini, the main train station of Rome. We pass by there all the time. And a couple of weeks ago, wandered around the courtyard, which contains lots of inscriptions. A number of them are funerary inscriptions. Inside, enough of the structure remains to give a sense of its size. Which is, to say the least, enormous and impressive. A few mosaic floors remain, and the building houses some sculptures. To see most of the material found in the baths – and during the building of the train station – you have to go to the Palazzo Massimo, which houses the Museum of the Baths. (It does not usually make tourist itineraries, and that’s a shame, because it contains fantastic material, well labelled and displayed.)
The Baths of Diocletian were the largest ever built, although today little of them remains. To see the best remains of a bath complex, you’ll have to go south to the Baths of Caracalla. These were built about 85 years earlier than those of Diocletian (212-216 as opposed to 298-305), but they are in much better shape, and one can get a good sense of the vastness of these complexes, both in terms of their height and in terms of their extent.
What is hard to grasp from the ruins is the level of luxury that imperial baths offered. Not luxury in the sense of individual pampering (though there was that too, if you could afford it!), but rather in the level of decoration and adornment that graced the baths. At the Baths of Caracalla you can rent a VR headset to give you a sense of what things actually looked like. And it was spectacular: floors and wall-facings made of marble, with sculptures and various motifs carved on them; beautiful mosaics in the floors and pavements; bronze and marble statues everywhere; polished metal for the spigots; and abundant daylight streaming in from the high arched windows. (These last faced the south to maximise the sunlight as an additional way of heating the rooms.)
Beneath it all lay a vast complex of tunnels and passageways, essential for burning the fuel used to heat the rooms. (One shudders to think of the amount of wood that had to be burned to provide the intense heat necessary for the hot rooms. Though presumably it’s a fraction of the energy that Bitcoin uses in an hour!) The underground passageways were vast, wide enough to accommodate mule wagons that brought in the fuel and moved it around. And there was a vast network of pipes that moved the heat to the proper room. And of course there was the drainage system to remove waste water, not to mention the nearly a thousand slaves who made the whole thing run.
The next time you’re in Rome, if you haven’t already seen the Baths, they are well worth a trip. We would certainly include them in those things that give some sense of what it was like to live in ancient Rome.
