Saturday, January 18, 2025

Lavish private baths found in a recently uncovered villa in the old Roman town of Pompeii, destroyed by the wrath of Vesuvius, which menacingly still smolders and rumbles today.

One of the largest bath complexes ever discovered in a private home at Pompeii has been unearthed in Insula 10 of the Regio IX neighborhood. Very few households in Pompeii were wealthy enough to have their own private baths, and only three villas have bathing complexes comparable in size and complexity. Unique to this domus is the direct connection between the thermal spaces and the triclinium (the banqueting hall). This suggests that the owner offered his dinner guests the full spa experience as well as a sumptuous repast.


The Banqueting Hall.  What feasts must have happened there!  What deals were struck!  What conquests planned over glasses of Syrian wine!


Dude!  What happened to your britches?  No one wants to see that!  His mother is clearly dismayed at the behavior of her dissolute youth.

The bath complex consists of a calidarium (hot room), tepidarium (warm room), frigidarium (cold room) and an apodyterium (changing room) which had built in benches along its walls. The benches were large enough accommodate up to 30 people, far more people than just the homeowner’s family. The walls are painted in vivid black and red and the floor is inlaid with marbles imported from across the Roman Empire.


The changing room

The frigidarium is also an imposing room, featuring a peristyle (a courtyard bounded by a portico supported by columns) with brightly-painted red columns. The space measures 32 by 32 feet with a large rectangular pool at the center that could also have accommodated 20-30 people. The walls are frescoed with athletes engaged in sports, giving it the cultured vibe of a Greek gymnasium.


The cold room, or frigidarium - Brrr!


Banquet guests would start out in the changing room, then move to the hot room where the hypocaust heating system channeled hot air under the floor and through the walls to create a sauna-like environment. 

Next was the warm room where bathers could enjoy massages and a thorough cleaning by having oil applied and then scraped off with metal strigils (curved scraping tools) of various sizes. The frigidarium finished off the spa experience with a dip in the cold water to close the pores.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, enslaved workers stoked the furnace that heated the room and water. The boiler room is on the other side of the hot room, and its mechanisms have survived. A pipe that brought water in from the street connected to a lead boiler with a diversion pipe that led to the frigidarium pool and heated water from the boiler was piped into the calidarium. The pipes, boiler and the valves that controlled the inbound and outbound flow of water look so pristine that at first glimpse they could be mistaken for modern utility infrastructure.

Next door to this beautiful space, in a cramped room with barely any decoration, a stark discovery was made - the remains of two Pompeiians who failed to escape from the eruption.


The skeleton of a woman was found lying on top of a bed, curled up in a foetal position. The body of a man was in the corner of this small room.



"She's dead, Jim."


"The pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius came along the street just outside this room, and caused a wall to collapse, and that had basically crushed him to death," explains Dr Sophie Hay, an archaeologist at Pompeii.


"The woman was still alive while he was dying - imagine the trauma - and then this room filled with the rest of the pyroclastic flow, and that's how she died."


Analysis of the male skeleton showed that despite his young age, his bones had signs of wear and tear, suggesting he was of lower status, possibly even a slave.


The woman was older, but her bones and teeth were in good condition.

 


Archaeologist Alessandro Russo holds a gold coin found with the female skeleton

"She was probably someone higher up in society," says Dr Hay. "She could have been the wife of the owner of the house - or maybe an assistant looking after the wife, we just don't know."

An assortment of items were found on a marble table top in the room - glassware, bronze jugs and pottery - perhaps brought into the room where the pair had tucked themselves away hoping to wait out the eruption.


But it's the items clutched by the victims that are of particular interest. The younger man held some keys, while the older woman was found with gold and silver coins and gold and pearl earrings.



A pair of gold and natural pearl earrings found close to the female skeleton.


Probably told to stay behind and guard the house, hence the boy with keys, supervised by the higher status woman.  She had a little money, perhaps to buy food while everyone else was gone, or passage on a ship out of the harbor.  Guess they stayed a bit too long.


Via (hey, a little latin there - That's Roman talk!  SPQR!) the always good History Blog.




6 comments:

  1. CW, with photo #2, you're just encouraging the slimy lib asshole commenter, I'm sorry to say...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maybe, but I'm not changing what I post because of that.

      Delete
  2. They used lead sheet for making the piping, its speculated lead poisoning caused mental problems for the ruling class as they spent a lot of time in the baths. Winder if there is a modern analog, cause we sure got some lunatics in charge these days.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Who read ‘holocaust heating system’ instead of ‘hypocaust’?
    Reckon I should clean me glasses..

    ReplyDelete
  4. Some famous chef prepared a few dishes from the era, from written cookbooks of the time. The verdict was, they were ungodly salty, (even worse than Campbell's soup). One of the first symptoms of acute lead poisoning is the inability to taste salt. So not just bathing, but ingestion as well. Virtually the small Dia. plumbing was lead based.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Photo 2:
    HIM: "I'm sorry, I've been in the water too long".

    HER: "It's alright, I have a headache anyway".

    ReplyDelete