The Roman Baths at Bath is the best-preserved ancient baths and temple complex in northern Europe. It is here, at the heart of the World Heritage Site of Bath, that the only thermal springs in the UK emerge from deep underground, bringing health and vitality to this beautiful city. In the first century AD, the Romans chose this site to build the most dramatic suite of public buildings of Roman Britain. At the Roman Baths visitors can see in-situ remains and ornate architectural fragments of the magnificent Temple of Sulis Minerva, goddess of the thermal spring, and the remarkably well-preserved bath-house frequented by residents and pilgrims nearly 2,000 years ago. Also on display are coins and curses thrown into the Sacred Spring as petitions to the presiding goddess, inscriptions recording local people and well-travelled pilgrims, and numerous other treasures unearthed through archaeological excavations over the past 300 years. The Essential Roman Baths is the brand-new authorised guide to the

A comprehensive history of Roman Bath

This book examines the survival, transformation and eventual decline of Roman public baths and bathing habits in Italy, North Africa and Palestine during Late Antiquity.

This volume examines the arrival and development of a distinctively Roman building type in an area of southwest Turkey where the numerous cities, who were highly competitive in their public building, left a remarkable wealth of ancient remains. Many new plans and photographs represent the full range of Lycian bath buildings. The building techniques employed and how Roman bathing habits fitted into the sporting life of Asia Minor under the Empire are also explored.

In Gardens of the Roman Empire, the pioneering archaeologist Wilhelmina F. Jashemski sets out to examine the role of ancient Roman gardens in daily life throughout the empire. This study, therefore, includes for the first time, archaeological, literary, and artistic evidence about ancient Roman gardens across the entire Roman Empire from Britain to Arabia. Through well-illustrated essays by leading scholars in the field, various types of gardens are examined, from how Romans actually created their gardens to the experience of gardens as revealed in literature and art. Demonstrating the central role and value of gardens in Roman civilization, Jashemski and a distinguished, international team of contributors have created a landmark reference work that will serve as the foundation for future scholarship on this topic. An accompanying digital catalogue will be made available at: www.gardensoftheromanempire.org.

This ambitious book investigates a major yet underexplored nexus of themes in Roman cultural history: the evolving tropes of enclosure, retreat and compressed space within an expanding, potentially borderless empire. In Roman writers' exploration of real and symbolic enclosures - caves, corners, villas, bathhouses, the 'prison' of the human body itself - we see the aesthetic, philosophical and political intersecting in fascinating ways, as the machine of empire is recast in tighter and tighter shapes. Victoria Rimell brings ideas and methods from literary theory, cultural studies and philosophy to bear on an extraordinary range of ancient texts rarely studied in juxtaposition, from Horace's Odes, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Ibis, to Seneca's Letters, Statius' Achilleid and Tacitus' Annals. A series of epilogues puts these texts in conceptual dialogue with our own contemporary art world, and emphasizes the role Rome's imagination has played in the history of Western thinking about space, security and dwelling.

The Romans developed sophisticated methods for managing hygiene, including aqueducts for moving water from one place to another, sewers for removing used water from baths and runoff from walkways and roads, and public and private latrines. Through the archeological record, graffiti, sanitation-related paintings, and literature, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow explores this little-known world of bathrooms and sewers, offering unique insights into Roman sanitation, engineering, urban planning and development, hygiene, and public health. Focusing on the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia, and Rome, Koloski-Ostrow's work challenges common perceptions of Romans' social customs, beliefs about health, tolerance for filth in their cities, and attitudes toward privacy. In charting the complex history of sanitary customs from the late republic to the early empire, Koloski-Ostrow reveals the origins of waste removal technologies and their implications for urban health, past and present.