2.2 Baths in the ancient world

At the top of many lists of benefits brought by the Romans you will find the baths. Both private and public bathhouses existed, and mixed the use of hot and cold rooms, dry heat and plunge baths. But what were they really about? How did a strigil and oil substitute for soap, and was the bath experience only about keeping clean?

In Video 3, Helen King asks Dr Patty Baker to explain the remains of the bathhouse that was part of the Roman presence at Caerleon.

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Transcript: Video 3 Baths in the ancient world

HELEN KING

Patty, we’ve come about five minutes walk from the fortress to this building. It’s a bath, clearly. Can you tell me a bit more about what this pool here is all about?

PATTY BAKER

OK. This is actually part of a whole bathing complex. And it would have been used by the Roman soldiers stationed at the fortress as well as probably people who lived in the local surrounding area.

What’s special about Caerleon is it has a swimming pool, which was only part of the bathing experience. Large bath houses throughout the Roman Empire had gymnasia and a swimming pool, but it’s rare to find those in smaller bathhouses around military fortresses. But the way people would use this, they would probably swim laps. As you can see, it’s quite long and narrow, so it suggests lap swimming.

HELEN KING

So taking a bath here isn’t about getting clean. It’s about exercise.

PATTY BAKER

Yes. But part of the whole bathing experience was for both exercise and cleanliness, and it’s also recommended for good health. So this is just the bit about the exercise. The actual bathing is quite different. So let’s have a look.

HELEN KING

Wow. That’s an awful lot of bathhouse.

PATTY BAKER

Yes, it is. And, you know, what’s interesting about this it’s only half the bathhouse. Most of it is actually under the town. But I can show you what we have and explain how a Roman bath would have actually worked.

So we’ll pretend we’re soldiers. So a soldier would come into the bath. And the first thing they would do would go to the changing room. And that’s called an apodyterium. The changing room is thought to be over here. Here, they would take off their clothes. And as I said, they would be naked, so then they would do the rest of the bath naked.

So they would keep their clothes in the changing room. And then they would go into a warm room. And that’s called a tepidarium. And they would start to warm up.

And after spending some time in there, they would move into the hot room, or the caldarium. And here they would really start to sweat. And sweating was actually one of the main ways they would become clean. And then they would put oil on their bodies, and then they would scrape it off with a strigil. So the sweat and the dirt would come off. And you can imagine an oily floor.

But I’ll explain to you how a Roman bathhouse was heated. Over here in the apodyterium, or the changing room, we actually have a room that looks similar to a hot room, or caldarium. A hot room was placed next to a furnace, and then the heat from the furnace would go through a flue, like we have down here. And that would heat the floor underneath.

And you can see those stacks of tiles. They’re called pilae. And on top of the pilae would be marble slabs or stone slabs. And the heat from underneath would heat the stones slabs which would then heat the room. And usually there was a decorated mosaic floor on top of that.

So imagine walking across the hot room with bare feet. So it would have been quite hot to step on. And in some places they even had flue tiles where the heat would go up the walls, as well. So both the walls and the floor would have been heated.

Next to the hot room, the caldarium, was the tepidarium, or the warm room. And that, too, would have been on pilae. But because it’s not next to the furnace it would have been slightly cooler.

Then the cold room wouldn’t be on pilae. It’s just a cold room. That always came at the end of a Roman bath.

So after the soldier was finished oiling up the body and scraping off the oil in the hot room, they would go back to the warm room, start cooling down. And then they would go into the cold room. And here the most interesting bit was they would go into a cold plunge.

HELEN KING

Oh!

PATTY BAKER

So they would end their bath in a very cold pool of water.

HELEN KING

So this is the frigidarium. This is the cold bit here. All of this.

PATTY BAKER

Yeah. This is all the frigidarium. And we assume that’s the hot room, because we have evidence for the furnace there, was over there along with the tepidarium.

HELEN KING

So what about women? Would women have used the baths?

PATTY BAKER

Yes. Men, women, and children bathed in these places.

HELEN KING

Children? How do we know children?

PATTY BAKER

Well, what’s interesting about the baths at Caerleon is they have actually found milk teeth in the drains of the bath. So that definitely suggests that children were here. And one or two of these teeth actually have indentations that suggest they may have been removed surgically with surgical forceps. So perhaps they were getting their teeth pulled here, as well.

HELEN KING

Well that’s interesting isn’t it because from what I’ve read about baths they’re about so much more than the water and the bathing and you can have as we know from literary sources we can have barbers and hairdressers and all sorts working from the baths so that would suggest even more rooms where they would work.

PATTY BAKER

Especially in the larger bathhouses. They did have special rooms or perhaps people just setting up little stalls somewhere in the bath. And they would sell food. And we hear all sorts of stories about people singing in the baths, splashing around.

HELEN KING

It’s quite an experience, isn’t it, for a Roman soldier stationed at Caerleon? I can quite see why they want to come here.

PATTY BAKER

Definitely.

End transcript: Video 3 Baths in the ancient world

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Video 3 Baths in the ancient world