Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [159]
A massive, rectangular bath hall would be built on a north west axis beside the sacred springs, whose waters would be fed into the pool from one side. On the east side of this main hall, a smaller thermal bath would be constructed, and on the west side a suite of artificially heated rooms including the warm tepidarium chamber and the steaming caldarium, where the bathers could sit and allow the open pores of their skin to sweat profusely. The design of these first buildings would be simple, with plain, bold masonry; but this rather solemn effect would be enlivened by brightly coloured mosaics, and carvings of the Roman and Celtic gods.
It would take several years to build even the first of the baths, but Porteus set to work cheerfully. Perhaps, after all, life in the province might improve.
Numex had never been more excited. Years before, when he had helped the legionaries build the great road from Sorviodunum, he had recognised at once that the new rulers of the island, as well as being militarily powerful, were masters of building crafts and skills far beyond anything he had seen before, and when he heard about the new baths, he almost burst with curiosity. At Porteus’s request, the contractors had enrolled him in the craftsmen’s guild, and this meant that once he had taken the craftsmen’s sacred oaths to their protectress, the goddess Minerva, he was free to join the builders and learn their secrets. From early in the morning until late at night the little craftsman waddled about the place, his round red face gleaming with pleasure, as he poked his long nose into every corner, and engaged the workers in friendly conversation. He observed how the plumbers laid their lead pipes through which water could be pumped and how they made channels with bricks to carry the excess away. He learned the painstaking work of the men who planned and laid out the mosaics, and came to admire the exact, geometric precision with which every aspect of the work was done.
But above all, he studied the intricate system for heating the baths – the hypocaust – the vast network of central heating air ducts which carried the heat from furnaces under the floors. He had never seen anything like this before, and when he thought of the primitive fires that filled the Celtic huts with smoke he laughed. “Compared with these Romans, our Celtic chiefs used to live like cattle,” he said.
After two years he had mastered many of the arts of the workers he had encountered there.
The building of the Roman baths was not the only change taking place in southern Britain. Important political developments were occurring as well. Soon after Vespasian assumed the purple, he decided that the Durotriges he had conquered twenty-five years before were ready for the next stage in the process of civilisation, and a new provincial capital was laid out in the south of their territory at Durnovaria. And when King Cogidubnus of the Atrebates died a little later, his territory also was reorganised and the northern half of his kingdom formed into a new administrative area that stretched past Sorviodunum and on to Aquae Sulis; the capital of this being the new city called Venta Belgarum. It was in this way, at the start of the Flavian dynasty, that the ancient towns of Dorchester and Winchester were founded.
These provincial capitals were important: for each would be run by a native council – the ordo – drawn from the most important local men, and the chief amongst them would be elected magistrates and win the coveted Roman citizenship; so that in this way, too, the former enemies of the empire would be flattered and inveigled into its culture and government.
It was now, after having been ignored for almost thirty years, that Tosutigus