How the Romans Relaxed

Rome’s public baths were a blissful retreat from toil, say Harry Mount and John Davie

Do you remember those signs in swimming pools saying “No bombing”? Well, bombing is nothing new. In the first century AD, irritating youths also hurled themselves into the gleaming baths of Rome.

The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, who worked in an office above the public baths at this time, complained about the noise from “confectioners, sausage hawkers, cake-sellers, body-builders exercising with heavy lead weights, and those louts who cannonball into the pool, hitting the water with a deafening splash”.

When it came to leisure – or otium – Romans were the quintessential idlers.

Bathers would often have a light snack or take advantage of the bath-house prostitutes – “heavy petting”, another practice banned in modern British swimming pools, was perfectly OK in Rome. Others might linger in the public halls at the baths for a chat over a glass of wine, or read in the neighbouring libraries until closing time.

All human life was there – although, as a rule, women and children bathed at different times from men.

As this anonymous inscription in Rome shows, virtually free access to public baths was a crucial part of Roman life:

Balnea, vina, Venus corrumpunt corpora nostra sed vitam faciunt

Baths, wine and Venus (i.e. sex) corrupt our bodies but they’re the things that make life good.

Roman baths were heated (hence their popular name, thermae – warm baths) by an underground system. Vast aqueducts brought clean water to baths in Rome and other cities throughout the empire.

The baths at Rome were enormous. When the Visigoths sacked the city in AD 410, they were convinced the Baths of Caracalla (Emperor from AD 198 to 217) must have been the emperor’s palace because they were so grand. The Baths of Caracalla are now used for public performances – including the Three Tenors concert during the Italian World Cup in 1990.

Still today at Wroxeter – the Roman fortress Viriconium in Shropshire – the biggest surviving structure is the towering wall of the baths.

By the time of Augustus, there were 170 public baths in Rome. At the height of their popularity, there were a thousand in Rome alone. They were part of the commoda (perks) that the élite offered the masses – a pay-off for their dependence on patronage, now that they’d lost the vote they had enjoyed under the Republic.

Baths were as much a hallmark of Roman civilisation across the empire as theatres were of Greek culture. Tacitus says they went down particularly well in the distant province of Britain, where personal hygiene had not been a priority.

But how did a day at the baths actually work?

The bather, sweating from playing games or wrestling, would undress and leave his clothes in the apodyterium (changing room). He then entered the sudatorium (steam room or sweating room, from sudor – sweat) to continue the sweating process before he entered the caldarium – the hot room with a hot plunge bath.

Here he sprinkled hot water on himself from a large tub and had all the sweat and grime scraped off his body by an attendant with a strigilis – a strigil, or scraper. He would then enter the tepidarium (warm room) to cool off gradually before taking a plunge in the frigidarium (cold pool).

For all the baths’ dazzling marble grandeur, the water was only cleaned irregularly and the use of chlorine was unknown. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius thought the baths constituted a health risk: “What does public bathing look like to you? Oil, nasty refuse, dirty water, everything disgusting.”

You must compare them, though, with the stench of the streets caused by poor sanitation. The city occupied only eight square miles but housed a million inhabitants when Augustus became emperor (27 BC) and five million when he died in AD 14. To most Romans, the baths were a blissful retreat from the day’s back-breaking toil.

In Petronius’s novel, the Satyricon, two students go to dinner with their eccentric host just after he’s had the full luxury treatment at the baths. He’s been “rubbed down with napkins of the finest wool before being wrapped in a scarlet cloak, deposited in his litter and carried off home”. Now that’s the ultimate in idling.

Sculptural masterpieces were installed by emperors in the baths, on mosaic pavements under coffered vaults, for people to enjoy. The Laocoön Group, now in the Vatican, was discovered in the Baths of Trajan in Rome.

The baths, like the gym today, were health-giving. Health was much prized in Rome, as the satirist Juvenal attested in a famous line:

Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.

You should pray to have a healthy mind in a healthy body.

And, Juvenal might have added, the Romans also worked out that Mens felix in corpore otioso – A happy mind comes from an idle body.

Harry Mount and John Davie’s new book Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever (Bloomsbury) is out on 13 October.

Our September/October issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.