Transcript EVERYDAY ROMAN LIFE EATING, BATHING, PUBLIC ENTERTAIMMENT

EVERYDAY ROMAN LIFE
EATING, BATHING,
PUBLIC ENTERTAIMMENT
Roman breakfast or ientāculum might be bread and cheese or
vegetables with left-overs from the previous night’s dinner. Food eaten
at lunch (prandium) included flat-bread, sausage fried fish and fruit.
The main meal of the day, taken in the late afternoon or evening, was cēna, at
which entertainment was often provided. Eggs were often served as appetisers
and fruit at the end of the meal, hence the phrase ab ovīs ad māla (`from the
eggs to the apples’) also had the meaning `from start to finish.’
Bath complexes (balneae or thermae)normally had a
palaestra or exercise ground attached to them, where
people might play games before entering the baths
themselves.
This is the changing room or apodytērium (Greek for
`undressing-place’) of the Forum Baths at Pompeii.
The apodytērium had shelves of niches for people to leave their
clothes, with slaves to guard them. This imaginative reconstruction
is by the Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema
After undressing, people went into the tepidārium, a kind
of Turkish bath where they sat round enjoying the warmth.
The example here is from Pompeii
Bathers then entered the hot bath or calidārium (shown
here from Herculaneum).
After the hot bath, the bather might have olive oil rubbed
into his skin and then the oil and dirt scraped off with a
metal stirgil.
The final stage was a plunge into the cold frigidārium. The picture
shows a reconstruction of the one in the Hadrianic Baths at Leptis
Magna in Libya. For details, see the website:
http://archpropplan.auckland.ac.nz/virtualtour/hadrians_bath/hadrians_
bath.html
Although in the early days of public bath houses both sexes sometimes bathed
together, there were generally either separate facilities or separate scheduled
times for men and women. The picture is another exercise of imagination by
Lawrence Alma-Tadema.