Why Bathhouses Were the Heart of Roman Culture | Life in Ancient Times with ‪@DariusArya‬

Rome is a city of water. It's always been a city of water. And what you have historically is 12 aqueducts for the seven hills of Rome. And they're distributed throughout the city in hundreds and hundreds of fountains. You're doing this because over time you have to accommodate a growing population. Rome's going to arrive at a million inhabitants. It's absolutely incredible and antiquity to have a city of that size. So sure, the majority of the water is going to public fountains. But you need even more water for the bathers and the imperial bath complexes. There were eight in total. And think that each one of them is the size of your average Roman city, like 30 acres. These are sprawling complexes for thousands of bathers at a time. This is one of the quintessential experiences as a citizen of Rome. It's a great experience and we have some of it still today because we have aqueducts still working. The many aqueducts of Rome were constructed over 500 years. Impressive remains are still visible today. How did you get so much water into the city of Rome? You have aqueducts. And how do they work? You choose a water source, natural springs or a river at a much higher elevation. And then you leave part of that water through channels all the way to Rome. But when you're getting to this point in today's park of the aqueducts, the land is rather flat and level. So you have to prop up those channels with arcades. And here we have the aqua claudia and it dates the middle of the first century CE. Piggybacking on top is another aqueduct, the aqua annual novel. So you have incredible engineering. You have incredible arcades still today, miles long that we can admire and keep in touch with the engineering that was undertaken to supply the people of Rome, to sustain a million people. Such a wonderful tradition to drink from the fountains of Rome. Now there are 90 historic fountains and there are over 2,500 Nazone. And a lot of them tap into the ancient aqueduct lines of the Romans. Why was there so much water coming into the city? Well, so much of it went to public fountains and a lot went to the imperial bath complexes. And then other lines went to private houses, if you could afford to pay for it, and businesses. Here is a beautiful example of a wealthy late antique house from Ostia Antica. The house of Cupid and Psyche boasts a large-scale private interior fountain. Water from the city aqueduct came at an extra cost and you can still see the fountain's lead pipe. Businesses like the Philonikas required a lot of water and you paid extra for it. This was the urban dry cleaner and cleaning agents included urine for ammonium. So you'd need to rinse quite a lot afterwards. But when we really think of water in the ancient world, we think of the baths. Let's get some insights from my archaeologist colleague. Bath culture was a big part of Roman life. What actually happened on a daily basis? The Roman daily routine was scheduled so that work started early in the morning and business would go on until midday. And eventually most of people would transfer after a quick snap to the bathhouse. So the bathhouse was the most important place to get clean but also to socialize and to increase your visibility. So baths were located near the Forum and places of business and frequently located in residential districts. You've got to admire this amazing bath complex. It's built in the time of Hadrian and we have it so well preserved. We have an outdoor section. We have the palestra where you're lifting weights, where you're working out. And the area is lined with spaces for shops, places for services, places to have a bite to eat. There's even a shrine of the imperial cult. We have a series of rooms that were covered and that were heated and unheated. And the large unheated halls we'll call the frigidarium section. And you have it today still lined with the original mosaics depicting Neptune and his wife the goddess Amphitrite. And you also have the sea monster Scylla. The baths were a place to see and be seen in ancient Rome. In the baths you could go and meet people. An important concept was the fact that you would be seen accompanied by slaves. The more you had the more influential you were considered. You would go around and organize your evening. So if you were a wealthy person you would go around inviting people over to your dinner. If you were on the opposite side of the spectrum you would try to get invited to one of those fancy dinners. Now let's take a tour of the largest public baths in Ostia and rooms in which you would socialize and bathe. We are in the forum baths. The forum baths were sponsored by none other than Marcus Gavius Maximus. And he is the Praetorian prefect in the Antonine period. So he is the celebrity. He's the person who gets recognized for making this contribution to the city right off the forum piazza. So you enter right over here in the apodotarium, the changing room where you take off your clothes because you experience the baths naked. If you're in the frigidarium section it's the unheated area and there are pools that are unheated for you to swim in. But we got to consider that this is the largest area. It's got the highest ceiling because you don't have to heat it. But as we pass on to the other spaces that were heated then we have smaller more intimate spaces. Let's check it out. I'm passing through a whole series of heated rooms and they call these tepidarium spaces. And this is how the mechanism works. The floors are heated. The floors are hollow. They call this the hypocaust system. And from the heat passing underneath we have slaves stoking fires to make that heat. They'll pass upwards along the walls through a series of chimneys. These hollow bricks are those chimneys. We call them tubally bricks. But they were hidden away behind panels of marble some of which is still preserved. So it was an intense experience. There's a lot of heat. But there's another room that's even hotter. It's right over here. Here is the final room. The one with all the heat. The caldarium. And you have three heated tubs. So what an experience. Basically like a jacuzzi experience. And the heat overall was over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking at the space today you'd think that all the heat would be escaping. But in antiquity this was roofed over and even the spaces here with the columns it was walled off with glass windows to retain all of that heat. So this was the intense experience that you could have ultimately to relax after a busy day at the Forum. It's unheated pools. It's heated pools. It's sweat rooms. And in addition outside there's a large piazza which is the outdoor palestra. The gym. Also a place for ball games. And there are other related rooms for massages for places to eat and other leisure experiences. But just how sanitary was it? In the Roman mentality going to the bath was considered a very healthy practice. And in fact it was even a part of medical treatment in case of special illnesses and diseases. But definitely what we can see from archaeology is that when they had big pools such as the Natazio they didn't have the water treatment that we expect of today. They definitely didn't have chlorine. So where would you go for better quality bathing? Sometimes you didn't want to go to the big public baths with so many people. You wanted a more intimate experience. You'd come to like a kind of a private club. Here we are in the baths of Boutikosis, the owner. And so you see the caldarium space and the dimensions have shrunken down. So that means you're with fewer people maybe with your friends. Think of it like a private personalized club experience. As Rome grew it matched its population with the proliferation of aqueducts. They quickly appeared in Roman cities in provinces everywhere. The abundance of water provided average citizens with bathing establishments as a standardized social experience of leisure and relaxation. A tradition we can still benefit from today. Behind me is the Trevi Fountain of the 18th century. Arguably the most famous fountain of Rome. One of the most famous fountains in the world. And the thing is, where's the water come from? It comes from the aqueduct, the Aquavergo of 19 BCE that was first created by Agrippa in the reign of Augustus from natural springs 14 miles away. The water still flows through it, comes right through this fountain. It's an exploratory experience today. The beauty, the sculpture, the sound of the water that evokes what was the reality in imperial Rome.