The great hypocausts, or subterranean furnaces, can be still examined, as also the caleducts in the walls for hot air, and the metal pipes for hot and cold water. The baths were supplied by an aqueduct constructed for that purpose, the arches of which may be seen bestriding the Campagna for a distance of fourteen miles from the city. There were hot, and cold, and tepid baths, caldaria, or sweating chambers, frigidaria, or cooling rooms, unctoria, or anointing rooms, and many others sufficient to accommodate sixteen hundred bathers at once. There were also a vast gymnasium for exercise, a stadium, or race-course, and a pinacotheca, or art gallery. Here were found the famous Farnese Bull, the largest group of ancient statuary extant, and many chefs d'œuvre of classic sculpture and mosaics.
The Baths of Diocletian, built by the labours of the Christians during the last great persecution, one authority says, were twice as large, and could accommodate eighteen thousand bathers in a day, but that seems incredible. One of its great halls, a hundred yards by thirty in area, and thirty yards high, was converted by Michael Angelo into a church. Of the remainder, part is used as a monastery, part as barracks, and part as an orphanage, a poor-house, and an asylum for the blind, and much is in ruins. At Pompeii is a public bath in perfect preservation, with the niches for the clothing, soaps, and unguents of the bathers, and even the strigils, or bronze instruments for scraping the skin—the same after eighteen hundred years as though used but yesterday. By these means we are able to reconstruct the outward circumstances of that old Roman life, almost as though we had shared its busy movement.
As Ligurius Rufus drew aside the heavy matting of the doorway of the Thermæ, of Caracalla, which then, as now, kept out the summer heat from the buildings of Rome, a busy scene burst upon his view. A great hall, lighted by openings in the roof, was filled with gay groups of patrician Romans, sauntering, chatting, laughing, exchanging news, betting on the next races, and settling bets on the last. As the modern clubman goes to his club to see the papers and learn the current gossip, so all the idlers in Rome came to the baths as to a social exchange, to learn the latest bit of court scandal or public news.
"Ho, Calphurnius!" said Rufus, to the now sobered son of the city Prefect; "what's in the wind to-day? You know all the mischief that's going."
"Sorry I cannot maintain my reputation then. Things are dull as an old strigil. Oh, by the way," and he beckoned them into a recess behind a porphyry pillar, "there is going to be a precious row up at the palace. I tell you in confidence. The old vixen, Fausta, has got a new spite against the Empress Valeria, whom all the people of the palace love. The termagant is not fit to carry water for her bath. She has found some mare's nest of a Christian plot,—by the way you are mixed up in it, friend Isidorus. I would advise you to have a care. In the fight of Pagan against Christian, I fear Valeria will get the worst of it, dii avertant."
"The palace walls are not glass," laughed Isidorus, "nor have you a Dionysius' ear. How know you all this?"
"As if the Roman Prefect did not know what goes on, that he thinks worth knowing, in every house in Rome! He has eyes and ears in his pay everywhere; and when honest Juba, or Tubal, come with their secret intelligence, they are not above accepting double pay and letting me into the secret, too. Besides that crafty old vulture Furca was closeted with the Prefect for an hour by the clepshydra, and you always smell carrion when he is hovering round."
"What is it all about?" asked Rufus. "I am sure Valeria is as much beloved by the people as the old termagant Fausta is hated."
"There's the rub—a bit of spiteful jealousy," answered Calphurnius. "But when that old basilisk hates, she will find a way to sting."
"But what have I to do with the quarrels of the palace?" asked Isidorus, a little anxiously, for he knew not how far he might be compromised by the commission he had executed, of which he had felt not a little proud.