Baths of Titus

Thermae Titi

BathhouseItalia · Rome, Italy, Esquiline/Oppian HillBuilt 80 CE

About

Public bath complex built quickly by Titus and dedicated in 80 or 81 CE alongside the newly opened Colosseum, incorporating part of Nero's former Domus Aurea. The complex covered roughly 105 by 120 meters on the Oppian slope, with a broad staircase descending 18 meters from its terrace to a colonnaded portico at the Colosseum's plaza — piers of that portico still stand near Piazza del Colosseo today. Excavators first uncovered the ruins in 1895 during work north of the amphitheater. One of the earliest 'imperial thermae,' it established the symmetrical plan later copied at the Baths of Trajan next door; still in operation in 117 CE, though already overshadowed by Trajan's larger complex.

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, Liber Spectaculorum 2
Set beside the new amphitheatre as proof that ground Nero had taken for himself was being handed back to the people.