Roman Baths of Butrint
About
Augustus's veteran colonists built this bathhouse after 31 BCE, complete with a hypocaust-heated calidarium, a semicircular plunge pool, and a frigidarium floored in a black-and-white geometric mosaic. Underfloor pillars called pilae carried hot air from a furnace beneath the heated rooms. A further renovation in brick-faced concrete followed in the mid-2nd century CE, after this snapshot, but the original Augustan bathhouse was already decades old and in daily use when Hadrian became emperor.
In ancient writing
- Virgil, Aeneid 3.293-297
Describes Aeneas landing at Buthrotum and finding it ruled by the Trojan Helenus, who had taken the Greek city and kingdom once held by Pyrrhus.
Sources
Nearby
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