Ostia was well equipped with public baths. The three most interesting belong to the middle years of the second century A.D. The Baths of Neptune, near the theater (Regio II, Insula iv), have a large entrance hall paved with a spirited mosaic showing Neptune driving four sea-horses, surrounded by Tritons, Nereids, dolphins ridden by Cupids, fabulous sea monsters of every kind, and two young men swimming. The Baths of the Seven Sages (Reg. III,x) are named from a painting in their dressing room which depicts the seven wise men of Greece, each labelled with an off-color couplet describing in some detail the intimate connection between constipation and the intellectual life. The most interesting of all are the Forum Baths (Reg. I,xii). A recent study by an American heating engineer, E. D. Thatcher, underlines how well the Romans understood the principles of radiant heating (of floors, walls, bathing pools, and even vaults), and orientation of bathing rooms to catch the maximum amount of sunlight, and to provide a windbreak, so that, although the large windows were not glazed, the rooms were usable on most days of the year, even in winter, with additional provision, proved by put-holes, of a rigging of canvas for the coldest days. If the windows had been glazed, bathers could not have acquired a tan, whose therapeutic and fashionable implications were the same for an Ostian as for us. Thatcher calculates that an unglazed room in the Forum Baths was usable ninety-eight per cent of the time: hence glazing was not worth while. The Romans knew, as the Forum Baths show, that the flow of heat is always from a hotter body to a colder one, and that air temperature alone is no criterion of comfort. In fact one may be comfortable in a much lower air temperature than that found in most American houses and public buildings, provided one does not lose more heat than one is generating at the time. The floor and wall surfaces of the Forum Baths radiated enough warmth to keep bathers comfortable in relatively cool air with unglazed windows. The courtyard of the baths was paved with white mosaic to reflect light and heat. A room which commanded a maximum of sunlight has radiant heat in the floor only, not in the walls. The various rooms of the baths were heated to different temperatures; Romans achieved with differently heated areas what we achieve with thermostats. The whole complex of the Forum Baths, Thatcher concludes, shows a sophistication in the use of radiant heating well beyond what modern engineers have achieved.
Though brick construction made Ostia more nearly fireproof than a modern city of frame dwellings, the grain for the dole stored in the city’s numerous warehouses was too valuable a commodity to risk, so a cohort of firemen detached from the main corps in Rome was kept at the ready in barracks behind the Baths of Neptune (Reg. II,v). The barracks, built under Hadrian, surround an arcaded courtyard with rooms opening off. A latrine with a shrine in it thriftily combines cleanliness with godliness. At the end of the courtyard opposite the entrance is a platform which still bears the bases of statues of Emperors worshiped by the firemen as a part of the Imperial cult.
As at Pompeii, so at Ostia, the houses are the most interesting part of the city, not least because Ostian houses differ completely in plan from Pompeian ones. The great majority are apartment houses, tall, many-windowed brick blocks, with or without shops on the ground floor. They were designed to be rented out in flats, with separate access to the upper stories from the street. Some have balconies, opening both on the street and on garden courtyards where many families shared the pergolas, fountains, trees, shrubs, pools, and statue-studded lawns, as they shared also the large common latrines. The Casa dei Dipinti (Reg. III,iv; see [Fig. 10.3]) is such a block, built in Hadrian’s reign. The ground-floor flats have mosaic floors and paintings of mythological scenes, figures of poets and dancers, landscapes, and fantastic motifs. At the end of the garden is yet another of Ostia’s combinations of the useful with the ornamental: a number of large dolia, terracotta jars sunk in the ground for storing oil or grain. Despite the panegyrics of the excavators, there is a certain deadly sameness about these flats where the lower middle class lived their lives of quiet desperation, as they do in the unfashionable quarters of Rome today.
Fig. 10.3 Ostia, Casa dei Dipinti, Gismondi’s reconstruction. (Alinari)
The occupants of Ostia’s flats were largely tradesmen or minor civil servants. Their livelihood came from Ostia’s two artificial harbors ([Fig. 10.4]). The earlier, begun under Claudius in A.D. 42, is now the site of a military airport, whose engineers have preserved the traces ([Fig. 10.5]) of the two curving moles which enclosed a basin over 850,000 square yards in area. Ancient sources say there was an artificial island between the arms of the moles, with a lighthouse on it which became the symbol of Ostia: it is often figured in mosaics. A canal, now the Fiumicino branch of the Tiber, connected the harbor with the main stream.
Grandiose as it was, the harbor was ill-protected from prevailing winds: a storm in A.D. 62 wrecked 200 ships anchored or berthed in it. Trajan therefore built a smaller but more efficient basin ([Fig. 10.6]), hexagonal in shape and with numbered berths where ships might tie up to discharge their cargoes directly into warehouses on all six sides. A complicated entrance with a right-angled turn protected it completely from the hazards which had plagued Claudius’ harbor; it also was connected with the Claudian canal. Nowadays it forms a pool on the Torlonia estate, and access to it is almost invariably refused.
Fig. 10.4 Ostia, harbors. (Calza, op. cit.)
