← Back to the map Two granite columns from the Baths of Nero re-erected on Via di Sant'Eustachio, Rome

Surviving columns of the Baths of Nero, Rome · Wikimedia Commons (photo: Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Baths of Nero

Thermae Neronianae

BathhouseItalia · Rome, Italy, Campus MartiusBuilt 62 CE

About

Public baths in the Campus Martius near the Pantheon and Saepta, built by Nero c. 62-64 CE (the earliest of Rome's grand imperial thermae, predating even Titus's); listed among the notable buildings of the city by Martial and later authors. Still standing and in use in 117 CE under its original name (it was only enlarged and renamed Thermae Alexandrinae after Severus Alexander's restoration in the 3rd century).

What happened here

The furnaces are lit before dawn and the water is hot by the eighth hour, which is when the town arrives. The circuit is a habit: undress and hand your clothes to an attendant who may or may not be watching them, exercise in the courtyard, sweat in the hot room, scrape the oil and dirt off with a curved bronze strigil, then the warm pool and the cold plunge. Entry costs a coin small enough that almost nobody is priced out, and on a benefactor's birthday it is free. There is food, drink, ball games, gambling, hair-plucking, business and shouting; a writer complaining about the noise from the flat above is complaining about all of it. Men and women bathe at different hours, or in separate wings.

In ancient writing

Martial, Epigrams 7.34
Martial jokes that nothing was worse than Nero, yet nothing better than his baths, holding up the Baths of Nero as the standard of luxury against a rival's new bathhouse.