North Baths
About
Timgad's largest bathhouse, some 40 rooms in all, rose north of the original walled grid as the colony outgrew its 100 CE boundaries. Bathers moved through mirror-image wings of warm and hot rooms toward a shared central frigidarium and its cold plunge pool. Its scale reflected Timgad's growth over the 2nd and 3rd centuries, far beyond the modest veterans' colony Trajan first chartered. In 117 CE the ground it covers still lay outside the city's newly finished walls. Built outside the colony's original 100 CE wall circuit during its later expansion; no precise construction year is documented, but its position outside the founding grid places it after 117 CE.
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.
Sources
Nearby
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Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →