Baths of the Marine Gate (Terme di Porta Marina)
About
A large bath complex just outside Ostia's Porta Marina gate, built to catch sea breezes on the road out toward the beach. Trajan broke ground around 110 CE, but construction dragged on through Hadrian's whole reign; a dedicatory inscription now in the Vatican Museums records that Hadrian funded the baths with two million sesterces before Antoninus Pius finished the job with further money and marble, dedicating it in December of 138 or 139. Its frigidarium held a polychrome mosaic floor, and the changing room's black-and-white mosaic depicted athletes at their exercises. Archaeologists have excavated the site in phases since Pietro Campana's dig of 1831-35, most recently in 1987. It was still an active building site when Trajan died in 117.
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 →