A Brief History of Roman Britain (Brief Histories) by Joan P. Alcock

Author:Joan P. Alcock [Alcock, Joan P.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781849018135
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

People might have exercised in the palaestra (public training area) beforehand. That at Leicester, which was at least 24 m (80 ft) long, was east of the main baths and was possibly covered to protect it from the weather. At Caistor-by-Norwich a latrine was found leading off the palaestra. After exercising and rubbing with oils any sweat was scraped off with the strigil. Many people had their private slave to do this. It was reported that Hadrian, on one visit to the baths in Rome, noticed an old man scraping himself on a wall because he was too poor to have a slave and gave him several slaves and money for their keep. On a subsequent visit he saw several men scraping themselves on a wall. Exasperated, he commanded them to line up and scrape each other.

Bathers undressed in the apodyterium (changing room), placing their clothes in niches or leaving them with attendants. Not everything was secure. A curse tablet found at Bath made dire threats: ‘I have given to Sulis, the goddess, the thief who stole my hooded cloak, be he slave or free, man or woman. Let him not redeem this gift except with his blood.’ There seems to have been a problem with thieving at Bath judging by the number of curses on those who stole cloaks and other clothes.

Bathing started with a visit to the tepidarium, a warm room that could have a bath of warm water in it. Bathers next moved into the caldarium, where there was usually a bath with waisthigh hot water. The walls of this were very thick to retain the heat so that bathers sweated to open the pores. More scraping by a strigil cleansed the body for there was no soap. Wearing of thick sandals was also necessary because of the hot floors. The bathers then moved back to the tepidarium before finishing in the frigidarium where they bathed in the cold pool. They might have a sauna in the dry heat laconicum or swim in the natatio, a large outdoor pool. Furnaces heated the baths and estimates suggest that even a small bath suite could take 114 tonnes of firewood, a denuding of 23 hectares (57 acres) of coppice a year.

The army may have been responsible for developing Bath into a spa town. Inscriptions indicate that many of the military visited it presumably to take advantage of its healing waters. The Great Bath, 22m (72 ft) by 8.8 m (29 ft) and 1.5 m (5 ft) deep, placed in the centre of a large aisled hall, 33.2 m (109 ft) long and 20.4 m (67 ft) wide, encouraged bathers to relax in its warm waters. The hall was rebuilt with a vaulted masonry roof in the third century ad; its appearance would be very different from the modern colonnaded ambulatory that surrounds it today. In the nineteenth century forty-five sheets of lead were discovered to have lined the base of the bath, indicating that no expense had been spared.

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