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What were the Roman Baths Like?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Let’s start with the baths themselves. Though we call them Roman baths today, these went by two slightly different names at the time, depending on where one was in the baths. The parts of the baths where one steamed oneself, the equivalent of what we would call a sauna today, were known as thermae<\/em> from the Greek thermos<\/em> for ‘hot’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The actual bathing chambers or baths were the balneae<\/em> from the Greek balaneion<\/em>, which means something close to ‘a place to bathe’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are numerous examples of Roman baths which are still largely extant today, the most famous being the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, built by an early third-century AD emperor, and the famous baths of the town of Bath in south-western England.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almost every central town in the empire had at least one public bath, while many cities had multiple such cleaning facilities. The wealthy would have had private baths on their estates or villas<\/a>. But despite their proliferation of them, the Roman baths did not necessarily create a clean society. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Water was only changed daily in many instances and without proper filtration systems such as those existing in modern public swimming pools. So whatever came off of one person stayed in the water for hours. As such, the waters of the baths became petri dishes of bacteria and disease as the day went on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This fact was compounded by the fact that Roman physicians and doctors often prescribed ‘taking the hot waters’, i.e. spending large amounts of time in the thermae<\/em> steam rooms as a curative for many ailments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Consequently, sick people were often actively encouraged to go and spread whatever they were carrying in the local public baths. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreover, one of the practices in the public baths was to use scraping devices to scrape a person’s skin clean after being in the thermae<\/em>, a practice that spread bacteria and germs even further. <\/p>\n\n\n\n All in all, while historians agree that the Romans’ obsession with cleanliness constituted a mark of social progress, there were many drawbacks to how they attempted this in the public baths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This contradiction was mirrored in other areas. For instance, the Romans were one of the first civilizations to systematically build latrines or public toilets in their towns and cities. They even constructed them in military forts and other smaller settlements. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Often these consisted of large trenches over which something reasonably similar to modern public toilets were built, with seats of wood or stone that people sat on. A water supply was piped in to keep the waste below running through the trench to a less offensive place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While this was not as effective as a modern sewage system, it had the same fundamental basics to how it operated. However, most homes were not connected to this system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The waste that most people collected in pots was often thrown out on side streets and alleyways, as it was throughout Europe in more modern times until as recently as the nineteenth century in many large urban centers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, one very unpleasant aspect of the public toilets was that the Romans used a device called a tersorium<\/em> to clean themselves. This resembled a modern toilet brush and was effectively a sea sponge connected to the end of a stick. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Visitors used it repeatedly to clean themselves and wash in a bucket with water, salt, or vinegar between users. As well as being disgusting, this was highly unsanitary from a health perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.historydefined.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/2560px-Trajansthermen-1024x683.jpeg\")
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nRoman Public Toilets<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Disease from Hygiene<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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