The first human baths were taken in the natural waters of rivers and lakes; but as civilisation advanced, special structures began to be built for the bathers. The earliest artificial baths probably date from the time of ancient Egypt and ancient Sumer, but the archaeological remains are fragmentary and it is impossible to guess exactly wht they were like. More important examples have been found in Crete and the Greek mainland, but these were on a small scale compared with the great baths constructed in Roman Italy.
The Romans can be said to have turned bathing into one of the fine arts. The earliest Roman baths, built in the fourth century B.C., were cold-water baths,but they were soon replaced by warm-water baths. These were at first quite simple and it was not until 21 B.C. that the first of the great Roman baths was built by Agrippa. Succeeding emperors regarded it as a matter of personal pride to build ever larger and more beautiful structures, and during the first four centuries of our era( the first century to the fourth century A.D.) Roman baths were constructed of a splendour and magnificence unsurpassed by any later civilisation.
The typical Roman bath contained swimming baths, warm baths, hot air and vapour baths, a gymnasium, and sometimes even a theatre and library. The main rooms were the apodyterium where the bathers undressed, the alipterium where they were anointed with oil and ointments, the frigidarium or cool room, the tepidarium or room of moderate heat, and the calidarium or hot room, which was situated over the furnace. The order in which the different rooms were used varied at different periods, and according to the taste of the bathers. It was customary to sweat a little at first in the tepidarium in one’s clothes, then to proceed first to the apodyterium to undress, and then to the alipterium to be anointed.Next, after a period of heavy sweating in the calidarium, the bather would be cooled by jars of water poured over his head-first warm, then tepid, then cold. He was then scraped with an instrument known as a strigil to remove the dirt, sweat, and ointment from his body, and finally might take a dip in the large cold-water swimming bath situated in the frigidarium.
Those who took baths simply for health or hygiene usually came only once or twice a week. But others looked on the baths as a sort of social club, and among these it was common to bath five or six times a day. These same people indulged in the practice of mixed bathing, which was frowned upon by the more respectable citizens. Two of the ablest emperors, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, actually forbade mixed bathing, and encouraged bathers to use the separate apartments for their own sex.
The baths themselves were beautifully ornamented and the largest could take 2,ooo bathers at a time, with marble seats for 1,600 spectators. One of the most magnificent, built by the Emperor Caracalla( A.D.217), had, besides the usual bathing rooms, shops, exercise courts, lecture and reading rooms, and a stadium. It was luxuriously furnished, with floors of marble and mosaic. Remarkably enough, the admission fee was so very small that this luxury was available to rich and poor citizens alike. But in the fifth century A.D. the barbarian invasions damaged the aqueducts which supplied the city with water, and the baths had to be closed, thus bringing to an end the golden era of the bath. Although bathing has become an essential part of life in the hygiene- minded twentiety century, it has also become a purely private and very modest business, completely different from the splendour and luxury of the marble-walled baths of imperial Rome.
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