Baths of Trajan · Wikimedia Commons

Baths of Trajan

Thermae Traiani

BathhouseItalia · Rome, Italy, Oppian HillBuilt 109 CE

About

The first of Rome's monumental 'imperial' bath complexes, built on the Oppian Hill over part of the buried Domus Aurea and the earlier Baths of Titus; designed by Apollodorus of Damascus and formally inaugurated on 22 June 109 CE. Its southwest and southeast exedras held twin libraries, Greek and Latin, identified from the double tier of rectangular wall niches built into them, sized to hold papyrus scroll cabinets. Covering roughly 330 by 340 meters, the complex absorbed the best-preserved surviving wing of Nero's Golden House into its own underground service corridors. By 117 CE the baths had been operating at full scale for eight years, one of the largest leisure complexes the city had ever known.

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

Cassius Dio, Roman History 69.4.1
names the baths among the works Apollodorus of Damascus built for Trajan in Rome, in the anecdote explaining Hadrian's later grudge against the architect