Roman Britain by Guy de la Bédoyère

Author:Guy de la Bédoyère
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2018-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

149. The Great Bath.

The superstructure of the Great Bath is nineteenth-century work.

One of the ‘curse’ tablets found at Bath shows that there was certainly a temple to Mars in the vicinity. Curved architectural fragments show that either a theatre or a round classical temple of Greek origin (tholos) stood nearby. Curiously for a place that must have had a reputation as a healing cult, there is little or no evidence of this from the various inscriptions that have been found. Perhaps the most interesting is the rededication by the ‘centurion of the region’, Gaius Severius Emeritus, of a sacred spot after it had been ‘wrecked by insolent hands’. Bath, it seems, also attracted rowdy pleasure-seekers, a reminder that the healing cults of the Roman Empire were also plagued by quacks and charlatans, only too happy to relieve the gullible and sick of their funds.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the temple and baths complex matured into what must once have been one of the most beautiful places in Roman Britain. The spring in the end would be its undoing, and also its preservation. As Roman Britain decayed, and as Christianity supplanted paganism, maintenance evaporated. The pool silted up and overflowed, and the site became awash with mud. The buildings themselves eventually collapsed into the mire, from which so much has been recovered from the eighteenth century to the present day.

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