Ancient Roman bathing

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This page is on the activity in general - see thermae for buildings in which it was carried out.

Bathing played a major part in Ancient Roman culture and society.

Of all the leisure activities, it was one of the most important, since it was part of the daily regimen for men of all classes, and many women as well. Today many cultures see bathing as a very private activity conducted in the home, but bathing in Rome was a communal activity, conducted for the most part in public facilities called thermae that in some ways resembled modern-day spas. Such was the importance of baths to Romans that a catalogue of buildings in Rome from 354 AD documented 952 baths of varying sizes in the city.^[1]

Although wealthy Romans might set up a bath in their town houses or in their country villas, heating a series of rooms or even a separate building especially for this purpose, and soldiers might have a bathhouse provided at their fort (as at Chesters on Hadrian's Wall, or at Bearsden fort), they still often frequented the numerous public bathhouses in the cities and towns throughout the empire.

Small bathhouses, called balneum (plural balnea), might be privately owned, but they were public in the sense that they were open to the populace for a fee. The large baths, called thermae, were owned by the state and often covered several city blocks. The largest of these, the Baths of Diocletian, could hold up to 3,000 bathers. Fees for both types of baths were quite reasonable, within the budget of most free Roman males.

Republican bathhouses often had separate bathing facilities for women and men, but by the First Century AD mixed bathing was common and is a practice frequently referred to in Martial and Juvenal, as well as in Pliny and Quintilian. However, gender separation was restored by Hadrian.^{[citation needed]}