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By Root 798 0

biggest thermae, the Baths of Caracalla (216–17) and the Baths of Diocletian (298–306), were reckoned among the wonders of Rome and the fate of their remains gives some idea of their magnificence. When Pope Paul III ransacked the Baths of Caracalla in the sixteenth century to decorate his Farnese Palace, the spoils—marbles, medals, bronzes and bas-reliefs—were enough to furnish a museum (the Farnese Collection, now mainly in the Naples Archaeological Museum). In the twentieth century, the ruins of the hot room alone housed productions of Verdi’s opera Aida that included chariots, horses and camels, as well as the cast and audience. Even more colossal, Diocletian’s thermae were estimated to hold three thousand bathers. In 1561, Michelangelo converted the cold room into the nave of the Basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli. The ruins of the thermae are now home as well to the National Roman Museum and the Oratory of Saint Bernard.

A nineteenth-century recreation of the Baths of Diocletian, the many-splendoured Imperial bath, which also functioned as a gymnasium, club and town square.

As baths and their facilities grew more elaborate, Romans often spent most of their leisure hours there. With pools, exercise yards, gardens, libraries, meeting rooms and snack bars, the bath became a multi-purpose meeting point, a place to make connections, do business, flirt, talk politics, eat and drink. Prostitutes, healers and beauticians often had premises in the bath complex or in the shops around its perimeter, so it was possible to have sex, a medical treatment and a haircut as part of a regular visit. Although well-born men used their favourite bath as English aristocrats would later use their London club, the bathhouse was also the most democratic Roman institution. Unlike the Greek gymnasium, which was limited to middle-class and upper-class men, the Roman bath accommodated men and women, slaves and freedmen, rich and poor. A Roman, at least by the first century B.C., when there were 170 baths in the capital, had plentiful choice but usually settled on one as a regular haunt. It was common, when meeting a man, to ask where he bathed.

The purposes that cafés, town squares, clubs, gymnasiums, country clubs and spas served in other societies, including ours, were fulfilled here. Imagine a superbly equipped YMCA that covered some blocks, with gyms, pools, ball courts and meeting rooms. Then add onto it the massage and treatment rooms of a fancy spa and the public rooms and grounds of a resort. Finally, give it a fee structure that would allow the poorest people to use its facilities. That approximates, but does not equal, an Imperial bathhouse.

BATHHOUSE CAMARADERIE

“Skinship” is the approving Japanese expression for the close relationship that is built by bathing together. In Japan, work groups often bathe communally as part of a professional retreat. In Finland, where the sauna is a national institution, when government leaders cannot agree on an issue, they continue their discussion in the sauna.

Although the emperors had lavish baths in their palaces, most of them bathed in one of the bathhouses occasionally, if only for the sake of public relations. The most famous anecdote about an emperor at the bathhouse involves Hadrian, in the second century A.D. One day, the story goes, he recognized an old army crony in the hot room. The veteran was rubbing himself up against the marble wall, and when Hadrian asked why, he explained that he lacked the money to hire an attendant to strigil him. Hadrian immediately gave him money and slaves. The next day, when the bathers heard that the emperor was in the baths, a number of them began rubbing themselves ostentatiously against the walls. Hadrian suggested that they take turns strigiling each other.

The rosy-coloured vision of the baths in which slave and emperor soak side by side before consulting the bathhouse libraries and discussing philosophy in the lecture rooms, called exedrae, is largely wishful thinking. The libraries and exedrae were smaller and less frequented than the ball