Home to Lice & Bedbugs: Roman baths, preserved by Mt. Vesuvius [OC] Info in comments

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• When a Roman wanted to hang out with his bros, where would he go? Maybe to the amphitheatre to watch some fights. Perhaps he’d swing by the local fast food establishment for a dinner of duck and a few games of dice. Or, he might head down to the baths, strip naked, and hang out with his buddies. Who’d also be naked.

  **Noisy, Smelly, Gross**

  When you think of the word “bath,” what comes to mind? Probably something along the lines of getting clean, right?

  Sure, that was part of the purpose. Romans prided themselves on being clean — being advanced enough to control water with aqueducts and flush the streets of animal shit.

  Here’s part of a notice posted in Herculaneum:

  >“Anyone who wants to throw excrement in this place is warned that it is not allowed.”

  And, of course, they’d bathe. They’d bathe a lot. All the time. Rubbing themselves with oil, meandering through the baths, scraping the oil off. Getting a massage, dousing themselves in perfume.

  Aside from oils and perfumes and naked dudes, Roman baths had something else: Fleas. Lice. Bedbugs. Human shit and tapeworms. Oh yes, tapeworms — those nasty parasites that were likely spread through their use of “garum,” a sauce made of uncooked, fermented fish.

  Depending on the size of the baths, you’d find yourself chilling (or warming, to be more accurate) with your bros in a large tub or a giant pool. And obviously that pool didn’t have chlorine. Some had drains, others relied on slaves to empty them with buckets.

  One way or another, the point I’m trying to make is that you and your bros were lounging in bacteria soup.

  At least some Romans were aware of how incredibly nasty this was. A guy named Celsus wrote a piece called “On Medicine,” where he said:

  >”Bathing, too, while the wound is not yet clean, is one of the worst things to do; for this makes the wound both wet and dirty, and then there is a tendency for gangrene to occur.”

  **What? I Can’t Hear You**

  Know what else Roman baths were? Loud. I mean, they’d be packed with people, all day long. They were reading, eating, napping, and doing god knows what in there. We actually have a lot of evidence of all of this, based on trash that’s been excavated. I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer not to bathe next to some fat Roman dude who’s gobbling down handfuls of pork.

  The Roman philosopher/statesman/playwright/et cetera Seneca lived around the time of Pompeii and Herculaneum. He also lived above a bath, and…well, he complained. A lot. Not just about the people exercising outside the baths, but just the general nonsense going on while he was trying to work:

  >”So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds, which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing! When your strenuous gentleman, for example, is exercising himself by flourishing leaden weights; when he is working hard, or else pretends to be working hard, I can hear him grunt; and whenever he releases his imprisoned breath, I can hear him panting in wheezy and high-pitched tones.

  >”Or perhaps I notice some lazy fellow, content with a cheap rubdown, and hear the crack of the pummelling hand on his shoulder, varying in sound according as the hand is laid on flat or hollow. Then, perhaps, a professional (sports commentator) comes along, shouting out the score; that is the finishing touch.”

  This goes on for a bit, but we’ll come back to it. Seneca is far too eloquent of a whiner to just leave it at that.

  **Stripping Down**

  So this picture is from Herculaneum. For those who aren’t aware, the town was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that also consumed Pompeii. Due to the way the wind was blowing, it was spared a lot of the destruction of Pompeii — you don’t see collapsed buildings that fell under the weight of ash.

  This is what’s called the “apodyterium.” Basically it’s the first room, where you’d take your clothes off. You’d pay a small fee outside the door, stroll in, and start stripping.

  Obviously you’d need a place to put your stuff, hence the shelves. You’d put your clothes there, as well as whatever crap you brought with you — your oils and your perfume and your sandals and your oil scraper, and so on.

  Wealthy people would have a slave come with them to carry all of this, as well as to watch over it. As you might expect, Roman baths were a prime spot for thieves to lurk around, looking for unattended valuables. This, from a Roman schoolbook, where a boy leaves his slave in this room:

  >”Do not fall asleep, on account of the thieves.”

  You could also hire a slave at the baths to watch your shit, called a “capsarius.” And the really wealthy people would show up with a Bieber-sized entourage, to get a good cleaning and a massage, as well as to show off how many slaves they had. Have you noticed how many Bieber analogies I throw into these posts? I feel like my pop culture references are a bit out of date.

  Back to the picture: On the far side in the niche is a basin called a “labrum,” where you would wash your hands. There used to be another in the corner for washing your feet. Whether this made any difference when it came to the lice and tapeworms, I’ll leave to you.

  From here, you could go into the tepidarium, kind of a warm sauna room with a heated floor — and in some cases, heated walls. The Romans were pretty good at using stoves and boilers to warm things up.

  And there was the calderium with its hot baths, and the frigidarium with its cold baths. There were duplicates of each, for men and women. Most baths had some combination of these different rooms, depending on how big they were.

  **Dead Bodies (What You Came For)**

  Now, you’re probably wondering what was found in this particular room, since we are talking about Vesuvius and all. And dead bodies always seem to get a lot of attention around here. You sickos.

  As I’ve mentioned in other posts, Herculaneum didn’t have a lot of human remains. After all, the people there were able to watch Pompeii disappear under the cloud of volcanic ash for hours before things took a turn towards their town.

  So, the vast majority of people got out. But here, two skeletons were found beneath the mud and ash that filled this room — a man and a woman. Presumably they were custodians of the baths, who came here seeking shelter. Obviously the vaulted ceiling held up, but that didn’t save them from being buried.

  Why they didn’t leave is beyond me. Nearly all the bodies found at Herculaneum were in boathouses near the shore, awaiting a rescue that came too late. Presumably even the poor had the time and the means to evacuate, so why they stayed is a bit of a mystery.

  This room remains in really good condition. Most of the plaster and the frescos are gone, but you can see little stucco designs at the base of the ceiling, still intact.

  The biggest difference between then and now? Probably how quiet it is — something our friend Seneca would surely appreciate:

  >”Add to this the arresting of an occasional roisterer or pickpocket, the racket of the man who always likes to hear his own voice in the bathroom, or the enthusiast who plunges into the swimming-tank with unconscionable noise and splashing.

  >”Besides all those whose voices, if nothing else, are good, imagine the hair-plucker with his penetrating, shrill voice, – for purposes of advertisement, – continually giving it vent and never holding his tongue except when he is plucking the armpits and making his victim yell instead. Then the cake seller with his varied cries, the sausageman, the confectioner, and all the vendors of food hawking their wares, each with his own distinctive intonation.”

  And as we reach the end, allow me to join those sausagemen by hawking my own wares: My Instagram @rayoboone. I’ve been getting more human followers as of late, and the number of accounts run by cats has dropped off. So if you know any cats, please encourage them to follow.

  Oh: And as an extra shameless plug, please upvote this post if you didn’t hate it. Reddit just buries anything that doesn’t get a decent amount in the first couple of hours, to my dismay. When you’re done, be sure to check yourself for lice. Can’t be too careful.

  June 7, 2022 at 9:30 pm

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• I completely understand Seneca. I’ve wanted to take my eardrums out a time or two. Silence is underrated.

  June 7, 2022 at 9:38 pm

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• Not in my bathhouse, the waters too hot for anything unholy to live “pompei”

  June 7, 2022 at 11:03 pm

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• Great read 👍🏻

  June 8, 2022 at 4:11 am

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