Inside Trajan’s Baths: Sweat, Steam, and Roman Crowds

Marcus Valerius

By the eighth hour of a midsummer afternoon, let me tell you, Rome does not smell like marble and triumph. It, it smells like sour wine, baked donkey dung, and the rancid sweat of a hundred thousand working men clinging to your skin. I had spent six hours at my stall near the Forum selling cheap Tuscan red, taking dust in my teeth every time a heavy wagon lumbered past. My tunic was sticking to my back, my skin was itching, and I, I couldn't take it anymore. So I closed up shop, grabbed my single copper quadrant coin, and started walking up the Oppian Hill toward the giant new complex.

Marcus Valerius

Now, Emperor Trajan dedicated these baths just last year, on the Kalends of July in 109 AD. He built them right over the buried remains of Nero's old Golden House, which feels like a bit of a political statement, doesn't it? Where a tyrant once hoarded gold for himself, Trajan built a palace for the rest of us. You pay a single quarter copper at the entrance portico, walk through the high brick archway, and suddenly the roar of the street fades into this massive, echoing boom. The apodyterium, the main changing room, is enormous. Vast vaulted ceilings high above, painted with sky blue and gold stars, and down on the marble floor, hundreds of men stripping down, shouting, and tossing their clothes around.

Marcus Valerius

Of course, undressing in public in Rome is a dangerous sport. The moment you pull your tunic over your head, you are surrounded by the capsarii. These are the clothes guard slaves, and uh, let me give you a piece of advice. You never, ever just leave your tunic on a wooden peg and walk away. If you do, it will be gone before your feet hit the warm tile. I had to negotiate with a particularly shifty looking capsarius named Felix. I looked him dead in the eye, handed him my wool tunic and my hobnailed leather sandals, and promised him an extra copper tip when I came back, but only if every strap was still there. Because walking home barefoot through the sharp basalt cobbles of the Subura at night? No thank you. I, I value my feet far too much for that.

Marcus Valerius

As I stepped into the main hall, bare as the day my mother bore me, I almost got run down by an alipilus, a professional armpit hair plucker, shouting at the top of his lungs. "Smooth skins! Clean underarms! Do not walk around looking like a barbarian!" The man was yelling so loud his veins were bulging, trying to advertise over the general din of splashing water and echoing laughter. Right then, I bumped right into my neighbor Cnaeus, who was leaning against a marble pillar, looking thoroughly annoyed. He was complaining that even though these baths were dedicated only twelve months ago, they are already so packed that you have to wrestle three other men just to get six inches of elbow room on the changing benches. And he wasn't wrong. The place was teeming.

Marcus Valerius

I left Cnaeus grumbling and moved forward into the heat. Before you touch water, you hit the tepidarium, the warm room. Here, you hire a slave or an ointment seller to slather you in cheap olive oil. I got a splash of low grade Spanish oil rubbed across my shoulders, and then came the real ritual. The scraping. The slave took a curved bronze tool, a strigil, and ran the metal blade firmly down my arms, my back, and my legs. It is incredible, and honestly a little disgusting, what comes off your body. A thick, grey, muddy slurry of street grit, dead skin, and old sweat gets scraped off in long ribbons and flicked onto the floor. You don't realize how filthy you are until you see your own mud piling up on the tile.

Marcus Valerius

Once scraped clean, I pushed through the heavy wooden doors into the caldarium, the hot room. The steam in there is so thick it hits your lungs like a hot wet blanket. You can barely see ten paces ahead through the mist. The vaulted marble walls look so pristine and grand, but if you stop and think about it for even a second, the whole thing is a magnificent illusion. You are stepping into a massive pool of hot water, but that water is a murky, stagnant stew shared by hundreds of unwashed men. There are no filters, no clean chemical purifiers. It is just heat and bodies. And where does that heat come from?

Marcus Valerius

Down below your feet, in the suffocating darkness of the hypocaust channels, dozens of sweat drenched slaves are shoveling logs into blazing brick furnaces non stop. They work in the black dust and intense heat beneath the raised floors, sending hot air through hollow terracotta wall tubes so that we can sit above in luxury. A poor man can soak like a king for a quarter copper, yes, but only because a slave is burning alive underground to heat his water. It makes you pause, even when you are enjoying the soak.

Marcus Valerius

To shock my system back to life, I moved on to the frigidarium, the cold room, and plunged straight into the icy water tank. Gods above, it takes your breath right out of your chest! But as I was sitting there, shivering and catching my breath, a merchant I know from the docks cornered me. Right there in the icy water, with bather splashes hitting us and sausage vendors hawking hot pork snacks along the walkways, he started pitching me this shady investment in a cargo of Spanish wine amphorae. "Marcus, my friend, double your coppers in forty days!" I had to duck my head under the water just to get away from his pitch.

Marcus Valerius

By the time I walked back to the changing room, paid off Felix, and pulled my dry tunic back over my head, the sun was setting over the city. Walking out onto the street, I smelled like sweet floral oil and wood smoke. My skin was tingling, my feet were safe in my sandals, and the dust of the Forum was gone. Rome gives us overcrowding, thieves, and foul water, but as I stood on the Oppian Hill looking out over the evening sky, I thought to myself, where else on earth could a simple wine seller live like this?