THE THERMÆ.
The Hot Baths at Rome.—The Thermæ of Stabiæ.—A Tilt at Sun Dials.—A Complete Bath, as the Ancients Considered It; the Apartments, the Slaves, the Unguents, the Strigillæ.—A Saying of the Emperor Hadrian.—The Baths for Women.—The Reading Room.—The Roman Newspaper.—The Heating Apparatus.
The Romans were almost amphibious. They bathed themselves as often as seven times per diem; and young people of style passed a portion of the day, and often a part of the night, in the warm baths. Hence the importance which these establishments assumed in ancient times. There were eight hundred and fifty-six public baths at Rome, in the reign of Augustus. Three thousand bathers could assemble in the thermæ of Caracalla, which had sixteen hundred seats of marble or of porphyry. The thermæ of Septimius Severus, situated in a park, covered a space of one hundred thousand square feet, and comprised rooms of all kinds: gymnasia, academic halls where poets read their verses aloud, arenas for gladiators, and even theatres. Let us not forget that the Bull and the Farnese Hercules, now so greatly admired at Naples, and the masterpieces of the Vatican, the Torso at the Belvidere, and the Laocoon were found at the baths.
These immense palatial structures were accessible to everybody. The price of admission was a quadrans, and the quadrans was the fourth part of an as; the latter, in Cicero's time, was worth about one cent and two mills. Even this charge was afterward abolished. At daybreak, the sound of a bell announced the opening of the baths. The rich went there particularly between the middle of the day and sunset; the dissipated went after supper, in defiance of the prescribed rules of health. I learn from Juvenal, however, that they sometimes died of it. Nevertheless, Nero remained at table from noon until midnight, after which he took warm baths in winter and snow baths in summer.
In the earlier times of the republic there was a difference of hours for the two sexes. The thermæ were monopolized alternately by the men and the women, who never met there. Modesty was carried so far that the son would not bathe with his father, nor even with his father-in-law. At a later period, men and women, children and old folks, bathed pell-mell together at the public baths, until the Emperor Hadrian, recognizing the abuse, suppressed it.
Pompeii, or at least that portion of Pompeii which has been exhumed, had two public bathing establishments. The most important of these, namely, the Stabian baths, was very spacious, and contained all sorts of apartments, side rooms, round and square basins, small ovens, galleries, porticoes, etc., without counting a space for bodily exercises (palæstra) where the young Pompeians went through their gymnastics. This, it will be seen, was a complete water-cure establishment.
The most curious thing dug up out of these ruins is a Berosian sun-dial marked with an Oscan inscription announcing that N. Atinius, son of Marius the quæstor, had caused it to be executed, by order of the decurions, with the funds resulting from the public fines. Sun-dials were no rarity at Pompeii. They existed there in every shape and of every price; among them was one elevated upon an Ionic column of cipollino marble. These primitive time-pieces were frequently offered by the Roman magistrates for the adornment of the monuments, a fact that greatly displeased a certain parasite whom Plautus describes:
"May the gods exterminate the man who first invented the hours!" he exclaims, "who first placed a sun-dial in this city! the traitor who has cut the day in pieces for my ill-luck! In my childhood there was no other time-piece than the stomach; and that is the best of them all, the most accurate in giving notice, unless, indeed, there be nothing to eat. But, nowadays, although the side-board be full, nothing is served up until it shall please the sun. Thus, since the town has become full of sun-dials, you see nearly everybody crawling about, half starved and emaciated."
The other thermæ of Pompeii are much smaller, but better adorned, and, above all, in better preservation. Would you like to take a full bath there in the antique style? You enter now by a small door in the rear, and traverse a corridor where five hundred lamps were found—a striking proof that the Pompeians passed at least a portion of the night at the baths. This corridor conducts you to the apodyteres or spoliatorium, the place where the bathers undress. At first blush you are rather startled at the idea of taking off your clothes in an apartment with six doors, but the ancients, who were better seasoned than we are, were not afraid of currents of air. While a slave takes your clothing and your sandals, and another, the capsarius, relieves you of your jewels, which he will deposit in a neighboring office, look at the apartment; the cornice ornamented with lyres and griffins, above which are ranges of lamps; the arched ceiling forming a semicircle divided off in white panels edged with red, and the white mosaic of the pavement bordered with black. Here are stone benches to sit down upon, and pins fixed in the walls, where the slave hangs up your white woollen toga and your tunic. Above there is a skylight formed of a single very thick pane of glass, and, firmly inclosed within an iron frame, which turns upon two pivots. The glass is roughened on one side to prevent inquisitive people from peeping into the hall where we are. On each side of the window some reliefs, now greatly damaged, represent combats of giants.
Here you are, as nude as an antique statue. Were you a true Roman, you would now step into an adjoining cabinet which was the anointing place (elæthesium), where the anointing with oil was done, and, after that, you will go and play tennis in the court, which was reached by a corridor now walled up. The blue vault was studded with golden stars. But you are not a true Roman; you have come hither simply to take a hot or a cold bath. If a cold one, pass on into the small room that opens at the end of the hall. It is the frigidarium.
This frigidarium or natatio is a circular room, which strikes you at the outset by its excellent state of preservation. In the middle of it is hollowed out a spacious round basin of white marble, four yards and a half in diameter by about four feet in depth; it might serve to-day—nothing is wanting but the water, says Overbeck. An inside circular series of steps enabled the Pompeians to bathe in a sitting posture. Four niches, prepared at the places where the angles would be if the apartment were square, contained benches where the bathers rested. The walls were painted yellow and adorned with green branches. The frieze and pediment were red and decorated with white bas-reliefs. The vault, which was blue and open overhead, was in the shape of a truncated cone. It was clear, brilliant, and gay, like the antique life itself.
Do you prefer a warm bath? Retrace your steps and, from the apodyteros, where you left your clothing, pass into the tepidarium. This hall, which is the richest of the bathing establishment, is paved in white mosaic with black borders, the vault richly ornamented with stucature and white paintings standing forth from a red and blue background. These reliefs in stucco represent cupids, chimeras, dolphins, does pursued by lions, etc. The red walls are adorned with closets, perhaps intended for the linen of the bathers, over which jutted a cornice supported by Atlases or Telamons in baked clay covered with stucco. A pretty border frame formed of arabesques separates the cornice from the vault. A large window at the extremity flanked by two figures in stucco lighted up the tepidarium, while subterranean conduits and a large brazier of bronze retained for it that lukewarm (tepida) temperature which gave it the peculiar name.
This bronze brazier is still in existence, along with three benches of the same metal found in the same place; an inscription—M. Nigidius Vaccula P.S. (pecuniâ sua)—designates to us the donor who punning on his own name Vaccula, had caused a little cow to be carved upon the brazier; and on the feet of the benches, the hoofs of that quiet animal. The bottom of this precious heater formed a huge grating with bars of bronze, upon which bricks were laid; upon these bricks extended a layer of pumice-stones, and upon the pumice-stones the lighted coals.
What, then, was the use to which this handsome tepidarium was applied? Its uses were manifold, as you will learn farther on, but, for the moment, it is to prepare you, by a gentle warmth, for the temperature of the stove that you are going to enter through a door which closed of itself by its own weight, as the shape of the hinges indicates.
This caldarium is a long room at the ends of which rises, on one side, something like the parapet of a well, and on the other a square basin. The middle of the room is the stove, properly speaking. The steam did not circulate in pipes, but exhaled from the wall itself and from the hollow ceiling in warm emanations. The adornments of the walls consisted of simple flutings. The square basin (alveus or baptisterium) which served for the warm baths was of marble. It was ascended by three steps and descended on the inside by an interior bench upon which ten bathers could sit together. Finally, on the other side of the room, in a semi-circular niche, rose the well parapet of which I spoke; it was a labrum, constructed with the public funds. An inscription informs us that it cost seven hundred and fifty sestertii, that is to say, something over thirty dollars. Yet this labrum is a large marble vessel seven feet in diameter. Marble has grown dearer since then.
On quitting the stove, or warm bath, the Pompeians wet their heads in that large wash-basin, where tepid water which must, at that moment, have seemed cold, leaped from a bronze pipe still visible. Others still more courageous plunged into the icy water of the frigidarium, and came out of it, they said, stronger and more supple in their limbs. I prefer believing them to imitating them.
Have you had enough of it? Would you leave the heating room? You belong to the slaves who are waiting for you, and will not let you go. You are streaming with perspiration, and the tractator, armed with a strigilla, or flesh brush, is there to rasp your body. You escape to the tepidarium; but it is there that the most cruel operations await you. You belong, as I remarked, to the slaves; one of them cuts your nails, another plucks out your stray hair, and a third still seeks to press your body and rasp the skin with his brush, a fourth prepares the most fearful frictions yet to ensue, while others deluge you with oils and essences, and grease you with perfumed unguents. You asked just now what was the use of the tepidarium; you now know, for you have been made acquainted with the Roman baths.
A word in reference to the unguents with which you have just been rubbed. They were of all kinds; you have seen the shops where they were sold. They were perfumed with myrrh, spikenard, and cinnamon; there was the Egyptian unguent for the feet and legs, the Phœnician for the cheeks and the breast, and the Sisymbrian for the two arms; the essence of marjoram for the eyebrows and the hair, and that of wild thyme for the nape of the neck and the knees. These unguents were very dear, but they kept up youth and health.
"How have you managed to preserve yourself so long and so well?" asked Augustus of Pollio.
"With wine inside, and oil outside," responded the old man.
As for the utensils of the baths (a collection of them is still preserved at the Naples museum on an iron ring), they consisted first of the strigilla, then of the little bottle or vial of oil, and a sort of stove called the scaphium. All these, along with the slippers, the apron, and the purse, composed the baggage that one took with him to the baths.
The most curious of these instruments was the strigilla or scraper, bent like a sickle and hollowed in a sort of channel. With this the slave curried the bather's body. The poor people of that country who bathed in the time of the Romans—they have not kept up the custom—and who had no strigillarii at their service, rubbed themselves against the wall. One day the Emperor Hadrian seeing one of his veterans thus engaged, gave him money and slaves to strigillate him. A few days afterward, the Emperor, going to the baths, saw a throng of paupers who, whenever they caught sight of him, began to rub vigorously against the wall. He merely said: "Rub yourselves against each other!"
There were other apartments adjoining those that I have designated, and very similar to them, only simpler and not so well furnished. These modest baths served for the slaves, think some, and for the women, according to others. The latter opinion I think, lacks gallantry. In front of this edifice, at the principal entrance of the baths, opened a tennis-court, surrounded with columns and flanked by a crypt and a saloon. Many inscriptions covered the walls, among others the announcement of a show with a hunt, awnings, and sprinklings of perfumed water. It was there that the Pompeians assembled to hear the news concerning the public shows and the rumors of the day. There they could read the dispatches from Rome. This is no anachronism, good reader, for newspapers were known to the ancients—see Leclerc's book—and they were called the diurnes or daily doings of the Roman people; diurnals and journals are two words belonging to the same family. Those ancient newspapers were as good in their way as our own. They told about actors who were hissed; about funeral ceremonies; of a rain of milk and blood that fell during the consulate of M. Acilius and C. Porcius; of a sea-serpent—but no, the sea-serpent is modern. Odd facts like the following could be read in them. This took place twenty eight years after Jesus Christ, and must have come to the Pompeians assembled in the baths: "When Titus Sabinus was condemned, with his slaves, for having been the friend of Germanicus, the dog of the former could not be got away from the spot, but accompanied the prisoner to the place of execution, uttering the most doleful howls in the presence of a crowd of people. Some one threw him a piece of bread and he carried it to his master's lips, and when the corpse was tossed into the Tiber, the dog dashed after it, and strove to keep it on the surface, so that people came from all directions to admire the animal's devotion."
We are nowhere informed that the Roman journals were subjected to government stamp and security for good behavior, but they were no more free than those of France. Here is an anecdote reported by Dion on that subject:
"It is well known," he says, "that an artist restored a large portico at Rome which was threatening to fall, first by strengthening its foundations at all points, so that it could not be displaced. He then lined the walls with sheep's fleeces and thick mattresses, and, after having attached ropes to the entire edifice, he succeeded, by dint of manual force and the use of capstans, in giving it its former position. But Tiberius, through jealousy, would not allow the name of this artist to appear in the newspapers."
Now that you have been told a little concerning the ways of the Roman people, you may quit the Thermæ, but not without easting a glance at the heating apparatus visible in a small adjacent court. This you approach by a long corridor, from the apodytera. There you find the hypocaust, a spacious round fireplace which transmitted warm air through lower conduits to the stove, and heated the two boilers built into the masonry and supplied from a reservoir. From this reservoir the water fell cold into the first boiler, which sent it lukewarm into the second, and the latter, being closer to the fire, gave it forth at a boiling temperature. A conduit carried the hot water of the second boiler to the square basin of the calidarium and another conveyed the tepid water of the first boiler to the large receptacle of the labrum. In the fire-place was found a quantity of rosin which the Pompeians used in kindling their fires. Such were the Thermæ of a small Roman city.