Reader, have you ever relaxed in a sauna? Or a jacuzzi or a hot tub? Yes? Congratulations – you have experienced some of the pleasures of a Roman bath. But have you ever smeared yourself with oil, sweated until you were scarlet and then removed the dirty oil and sweat with a curved metal blade known as a strigil? Following up when you were clean with a long relaxing soak in hot water, while chatting to your friends? Or indeed to people you have never met before and never want to meet again? How about the ghastly shock of plunging into a pool of cold water afterwards?

Taking a bath in the proper manner was part of being a Roman, even if some sturdy citizens considered that all the scented oil and massage was a bit self-indulgent.  If you were wealthy, you might have your own private bath house attached to your mansion. If you were a soldier, there would be a bath house attached to your fort. But most people would have gone to a public bath house, paying a small fee for the privilege. Public bath houses were like modern leisure centres. As well as bathing facilities, there were usually exercise areas, massage rooms, libraries, food outlets and gardens for strolling in. Baths were not just a place to get clean and relax, but also an important place to socialise, meet your friends and business associates, and show off how important you were. Some of course had better facilities than others. In the course of my life I have visited a wide variety of Roman bathing establishments in various parts of the empire.

I was loosely attached on one occasion to the excavation of a site which included a private bath house. It was a small Roman country house or ‘villa' in Hertfordshire, at a place called Turners Hall Farm (See Current Archaeology 198). A team based at the museum where I worked excavated it, and I spent some time at the site, although not while the bath building was being excavated. The modest villa, apparently built of timber on flint and chalk foundations, was built at the site of a previous Iron Age farm, presumably by a family who had adopted Roman ways. The bath house had warm and hot rooms and a plunge pool. Perhaps a local British family succumbing to Agricola’s introduction of baths and banquets as part of their enslavement? (Tacitus, “Agricola”, Chapter 21)

That was the nearest I have come to working on the excavation of a Roman bath house, but I have looked after hundreds of  boxfuls of the various sorts of tile required for building them, which filled up many a shelf in the museum store. The basic requirement for any Roman bath house, aside from a good water supply, is a hypocaust, a floor with a space underneath it which can be filled with hot air from the fire in a furnace on an outside wall. The hot air is then led up through the wall through flues or a hollow wall and escapes just under the eaves of the roof. The tiles come in various shapes : flat rectangular tiles to make the floor itself; flat square tiles to be cemented on top of each other to form the pillars which support the floor; box tiles to make the flues; lugged tiles to make the double walls. Even broken bits of them are quite recognizable. All these I have been familiar with since my youth.

There were alternatives to tiles. When I moved north I visited a small Roman military bath house attached to a fort on the Antonine Wall in Scotland. Bearsden bathhouse, in a suburb to the north of Glasgow was built of stone, which is readily available in the area. I found this a fascinating contrast after a lifetime spent with brick and tile. When you visit Bearsden, which is now set unromantically in the middle of a housing estate, you can wander through the foundations of the various rooms: a changing room leading to the usual cold room, two warm rooms, a hot wet room, a hot dry room, a hot bath and a cold bath. There was even a loo. Must have been pleasant after a hard day marching up and down the hills in the freezing rain and driving snow, although the thought of plunging into ice cold water when you have only just warmed up seems a bit macho to me.

At the other end of the scale I visited an enormous public bath house in Rome itself. The Baths of Caracalla were begun by the emperor Severus in 206 CE, and opened in 217CE under the emperor Caracalla. Later emperors completed various areas. The facilities could accommodate 1600 people at once, and thousands of people would use them in a single day. A special aqueduct, the Aqua Antoniniana, was built to provide the massive quantities of water needed by these baths, which included a swimming pool of Olympic proportions. To someone used to seeing only the foundations, the height of the surviving walls and the decoration of the floors of the rooms is stunning, although much of the original marble, statues and decoration have long gone. Unfortunately when I visited, the underground areas were not open. These included not only areas where the water was distributed, and furnaces stoked by an army of slaves using an estimated 10 tons of wood per day, but a temple to the god Mithras, who was usually worshipped in underground shrines.

The Baths of Caracalla were the inspiration for a painting by the 19^th century artist Lawrence Alma Tadema. It may not be strictly accurate but it does convey the atmosphere of luxury and pleasure and lots of people socialising.  My environmental-setting shower in the morning may get me cleaner and doesn’t require an aqueduct and a small wood, but it probably isn’t as much fun!