Ancient Rome Mini SGA

Topic	Text References
Punic Wars	page. 172-173
From Pompey to Caesar	page 179-180
Ides of March and From Republic to Empire, Antony and Cleopatra	article page 195
Age of Augustus – The Principate	page 196 – 197
Roman Baths and Aqueducts	page 203 article
Amphitheatres, Gladiators & Circus	page 205 - 206

Roman Baths & Aqueducts

Roman baths were part of the day-to-day life in Ancient Rome. Bath in Somerset, contains one of the best examples of a Roman bath complex in Europe. There are two  good examples at Pompeii. Roman houses had water supplied via lead pipes. However, these pipes were taxed according to their size, so many houses had just a basic supply and could not hope to rival a bath complex. Therefore for personal hygiene, people went to the local baths. However, the local bath complex was also a gathering point and served a very useful community and social function. Here people could relax, keep clean and keep up with the latest news.

Taking a bath was not a simple chore. There was not one bath to use in a large complex such as the one at Bath. A visitor could use a cold bath (the frigidarium), a warm bath (the tepidarium) and a hot bath (the caldarium). A visitor would spend some of his time in each one before leaving. A large complex would also contain an exercise area (the palaestra), a swimming pool and a gymnasium. One of the public baths at Pompeii contains two tepidariums and caldariums along with a plunge pool and a large exercise area.

The building of a bath complex required excellent engineering skills. Baths required a way of heating up water. This was done by using a furnace and the hypocaust system carried the heat around the complex.

Water had to be constantly supplied. In Rome this was done using 640 kilometers of aqueducts - a superb engineering feat. The baths themselves could be huge. A complex built by the emperor Diocletian was the size of a football pitch. Those who built them wanted to make a statement - so that many baths contained mosaics and massive marble columns. The larger baths contained statues to the gods and professionals were on hand to help take the strain out of having a bath. Masseurs would massage visitors and then rub scented olive oil into their skin.

It was very cheap to use a Roman bath. A visitor, after paying his entrance fee, would strip naked and hand his clothes to an attendant. He could then do some exercising to work up a sweat before moving into the tepidarium which would prepare him for the caldarium which was more or less like a modern sauna. The idea, as with a sauna, was for the sweat to get rid of the body's dirt. After this a slave would rub olive oil into the visitor's skin and then scrap it off with a strigil. The more luxurious establishments would have professional masseurs to do this. After this, the visitor would return to the tepidarium and then to frigidarium to cool down. Finally, he could use the main pool for a swim or to generally socialise. Bathing was very important to the Ancient Romans as it served many functions.

The Ides of March

Julius Caesar's bloody assassination on March 15, 44 B.C., forever marked March 15, or the Ides of March, as a day of infamy. It has fascinated scholars and writers ever since. For ancient Romans living before that event, however, an ides was merely one of several common calendar terms used to mark monthly lunar events. The ides simply marked the appearance of the full moon. But the Ides of March assumed a whole new identity after the events of 44 B.C. The phrase came to represent a specific day of abrupt change that set off a ripple of repercussions throughout Roman society and beyond.

On the Ides of March, the senate was to meet in the Curia Pompeii, an annex of the colonnaded Porticus adjacent to the stage of the Theater of Pompeii, which had been built by Pompey (Pompeius) just a decade or so before. Caesar was late. As Brutus and Cassius anxiously waited for him to arrive, one of the senators confided that his prayers were with them. "May your plan succeed," relates Plutarch, "but whatever you do, make haste. Everyone is talking about it by now." But there was nothing the conspirators could do except grasp their daggers and prepare to use them on themselves, if need be. Porcia, the daughter of Cato, whom Brutus had married within a year of her father's death, had insisted that she be told of the plan. The day of the assassination, her anxiety was so great that she became hysterical and fainted from apprehension.

Suetonius relates that a soothsayer had warned Caesar that he was in grave danger, which would not pass until the Ides had ended. Entering the building, Caesar now chided him that the day had arrived. "Yes," he replied, "but they have not yet gone." As Caesar took his seat, the conspirators gathered around him on the pretext of presenting a petition. One then took hold of his purple toga and ripped it away from his neck. A dagger was thrust at Caesar's throat but missed and only wounded him. Another assassin then drove a dagger into his chest as he twisted away from the first assailant. Brutus struck Caesar in the groin. Hemmed in, "Caesar kept turning," writes Appian, "from one to another of them with furious cries like a wild beast." When he saw that Brutus, too, had drawn his dagger, Plutarch relates that Caesar covered his head with his toga and sank to the ground, reproaching him in Greek, says Suetonius, with the words "You, too, my child?"

Even after he had fallen, the conspirators continued to strike, at times cutting one another with their own daggers, until they, too, were covered in blood. (Having recently sworn to defend the person of Caesar, which was sacred and inviolate, the assassins must have paused at enormity of their deed; only the second wound later was thought to have been fatal.) Slumped against the pedestal of Pompey's statue, Caesar died, having been stabbed twenty-three times. "The pedestal was drenched with blood," writes Plutarch, "so that one might have thought that Pompey himself was presiding over this act of vengeance against his enemy, who lay there at his feet struggling convulsively under so many wounds."

If the conspirators had killed in the name of Republican libertas, it was the liberty of the Optimates for which they acted. There was to be no popular support for the deed; nor, perhaps, was what the conspirators had sought to preserve even the same. To Appian, at least, "The Republic has been rotten for a long time. The city masses are now thoroughly mixed with foreign blood, the freed slave has the same rights as a citizen, and those who are still slaves look no different from their masters." It was as if, for the conspirators, the death of the tyrant was sufficient, with no thought being given to what would happen in consequence. It all had been planned, relates Cicero, with the "courage of men and the foresight of children." But the res publica was not to be restored. The only outcome was what Caesar himself had predicted: "It is more important for Rome," Suetonius quotes him as saying, "than for myself that I should survive...should anything happen to me, Rome will enjoy no peace." And so it was: civil war would rage for another thirteen years.