everyday roman life eating, bathing, public entertaimment

EVERYDAY ROMAN LIFEEATING, 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.