History of Sanitation

54 HISTORY OF SANITATION door, A, which conducts into a small vestibule, 18, thence into the apodyterium, 19, which, like the one in the men’s baths, has a seat on either side built up against the wall. This room opens upon a cold bath, 20, answering to the natiatio of the other set, but of much smaller dimensions. There are four steps on the inside to descend into it. Opposite to the door of entrance there is another doorway which leads to the tepidarium, 21, which also communicates with the thermal chamber, 22, on one side of which is a warm bath in a square recess. The floor of this chamber is suspended and its walls perforated for flues, like the corresponding one in the men’s baths. The comparative smallness and inferiority of the fittings up in this suit of baths has induced some Italian antiqua- ries to throw a doubt upon the fact of their being assigned to women, and ingeniously suggest that they were a set of old baths, to which the larger ones were subsequently added when they became too small for the increasing wealth and population of the city. But the story already quoted of the consul’s wife who turned the men out of their bath at Teanum for her convenience, seems suffi- ciently to negative such a supposition and to prove that the inhabitants of ancient Italy, if not more selfish, were certainly less gallant than their successors. In addition to this, Vitruvius expressly enjoins that the baths of the men and women, though separate, should be contiguous to each other, in order that they might be supplied from the same boilers and hypocaust; directions that are here fulfilled to the letter, as a glance at the plans will demonstrate. Notwithstanding the ample account which has been given of the plans and usages respecting baths in general, something yet remains to be said about that particular class denominated thermæ, of which establishment the baths, in fact, constituted the smallest part. The thermæ, properly speaking, were a Roman adaptation of the Greek gymna- sium. The thermæ contained a system of baths in conjunc- tion with éonveniences for athletic games and youthful sports, places in which rhetoricians declaimed, poets recited