Flavian Baths
About
Volubilis built two public bathing complexes during its first Roman century, and one of them went up under the Flavian emperors in the later first century CE. Bathers moved between hot, warm, and cold rooms heated by underfloor hypocaust systems, a standard Roman comfort planted on the empire's western frontier. This Flavian-era bath predated the city's better-known Baths of Gallienus by well over a century. By 117 CE it had already served two generations of Volubilis's citizens and their Romanized Mauretanian neighbors.
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
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 →