Page 18 - ACTL_Win23

Professor Frischer began his photo and video tour with the enormous swimming pool, known in Latin as the natatio. Here is how it looked when we visited on Saturday evening.
Near the great swimming pool were two exercise courts that were surrounded by columns, known as palestra. One is on the east side of the bath block and the other on the west. They both had the same design. Here is what
the west palestra looks like today.
Bernie noted that in the reign of Rome’s first emperor, Augus- tus, the state began to take steps to improve public health and hygiene in the city. The population of Rome then was an esti- mated one million people who lived mainly in very poor hous- ing. Constructing huge public bathhouses was essential. Ulti- mately, Rome came to have seven public bath facilities spread around the city. The complexes were not simply places to go to take a quick shower; in fact, they didn’t have showers. Think of them instead as health spas for the masses. At the public baths, one could while away the hours by strolling in the gardens, tak- ing a swim, engaging in competitive sports, gawking at great works of art, listening to lectures and concerts, getting a mas- sage, eating a snack, and drinking some wine. It was probably the last three activities that most people were most interested in.
After swimming and exercising in the palestra, the ancient Roman would proceed to the baths proper, progressing through a series of rooms starting with the hot laconicum, or sauna, and then a caldarium, or steam bath. Next, our an- cient citizen would proceed to other rooms, climaxing with the grand frigidarium, with its cold plunges. This is how it appeared when the Fellows visited on Saturday evening.
17
JOURNAL
innumerable monuments around the world for which this is the case. The field of Roman archaeology is the oldest in the western world—dating back to the Papal Court in the mid-15th century. It is also highly organized. For example, we have a compendious topographical lexicon in six volumes that for us is an indispensable reference work. In the case of the Baths of Caracalla, we also have a small library of recently published books seen in this slide, as well as dozens of special- ized articles that we have been able to use.
Bernie and his team found a small library of monographs that adequately covered all they needed to know to reconstruct the architecture of the baths. They found many plans, sections, and elevations that reconstructed the complex on paper. From these it was relatively easy for the team of modelers to make a highly accurate digital reconstruction of the architecture.
One could proceed through rooms of differing temperature, ranging from very hot to very cold. Each room had pools of heated or cooled water. All of this was available at a nominal price. The Baths of Caracalla were built in five years—from 211 to 216 CE – and were able to host an estimated 10,000 people at any given time. They were built by the Emperor Lucious Septimius Bassianus, nicknamed Caracalla, a cruel and tyrannical ruler who murdered his brother and executed his wife, and who was himself assassinated in 217 CE, shortly after the Baths were completed.
You can see why these reconstructions are so important. The random state of the ruins today gives one very little idea of how these buildings looked in antiquity, let alone how they functioned and what they meant to the people who used them.
The style of the building suggested an integration of statues with the architecture. Although there were some studies about