I have shown you the ancients in their public life; at the Forum and in the street, in the temples and in the wine-shops, on the public promenade and in the cemeteries. I shall now endeavor to come upon them in their private life, and, for this end, to peep at them first in a place which was a sort of intermediate point between the street and the house. I mean the hot baths, or thermæ.
V.
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.