Roman Bath Quotes

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

I know a girl from whose body sunbeams rose to the clouds as if they’d fallen from the sun. Her laugh was like a bangle of bells. “Your hair is wet,” I told her one day, “Did you take a bath?” “It is dew!” she laughed, “I’ve been lying in the grass. All morning long, I lay here waiting for the dawn.

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy of poppies. But when it came right down to it, the sink of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent. When she came to my bed and begged me with sighs not to tempt her towards passion nor actions unwise, I told her I’d spare her and kissed her closed eyes, then unbraided her body of its clothing disguise. While our bodies were nude bathed in candlelight fine I devoured her mouth, tender lips divine; and I drank through her thighs her feminine wine. Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent.

I’d loved women who were old and who were young; those extra kilos and large rumps, and others so thin there was barely even skin to pinch, and every time I held them, I worried I would snap them in two. But for all of these: where they had merited my love was in their delicious smell. Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable.

Sacramental attachments to a dying a resurrected savior was a common idea in the Roman Empire. The religion of Mithraism, very popular in the army and open only to males, bathed the initiate in the blood of a bull.

Just tell me i'm not dreaming?" maybe you are," she said. "Probably you are." I don't want to be. Clio, i can't do this on my own." There was a bang. We both jumped, turned towards the Roman bath. A clump of leaves swirled on the surface of the water in a slow spiral. Is there something down there?" Clio nodded. "Yes." What is it?" I don't k now," she said, watching the waters. "Something from down where it gets black." There was another bang. Little waves raced across the littery surface, lapping the bath's mouldy tiled sides. Are you ready? This is it." Clio held me by the tops of my arms and gave me a smile which was meant to be strong and almost was. What? Clee, what's going on?" Bang.

Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.

When I asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrists looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at

I often think that the Romans were fortunate; their civilization reached as far as hot baths without touching the fatal knowledge of machinery.

In their censures of luxury, the fathers are extremely minute and circumstantial;89 and among the various articles which excite their pious indignation, we may enumerate false hair, garments of any colour except white, instruments of music, vases of gold or silver, downy pillows (as Jacob reposed his head on a stone), white bread, foreign wines, public salutations, the use of warm baths, and the practice of shaving the beard, which, according to the expression of Tertullian, is a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator.

Herod was not just the emperor’s client-king. He was a close and personal friend, a loyal citizen of the Republic who wanted more than to emulate Rome; he wanted to remake it in the sands of Judea. He instituted a forced Hellenization program upon the Jews, bringing gymnasia, Greek amphitheaters, and Roman baths to Jerusalem. He made Greek the language of his court and minted coins bearing Greek letters and paga

Cold thermogenesis is a type of cold therapy that uses cold temperatures to create heat in your body. Different types of cold therapies have been around for ages. The ancient Romans took plunges in “frigidarium baths” (large cold pools) and the Norse cracked open icy lakes for a winter swim. Even applying ice to sore muscles is a form of cold therapy. So is finishing your shower with thirty seconds of cold water!

At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated.

Living in filth was regarded by great numbers of holy men, who set an example to the Church and to society, as an evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome and the Breviary of the Roman Church dwell with unction on the fact that St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical uncleanliness; St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing. St. Mary of Egypt was emninent for filthiness; St. Simon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable - the least that can be said is, that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors.

Most people don't realize how sophisticated pool tables are. Yes, tables have bolts and staples on the rails but these suckers hold together mostly by gravity and by the precision of their construction. If you treat a good table right it will outlast you. Believe me. Cathedrals are built like that. There are Incan roads in the Andes that even today you couldn't work a knife between two of the cobblestones. The sewers that the Romans built in Bath were so good that they weren't replaced until the 1950's. That's the sort of thing that I can believe in.

The smell of a woman is her most important quality. I’d loved women who were old and who were young; those with extra kilos and large rumps, and others so thin there was barely even skin to pinch, and every time I held them, I worried I would snap them in two. But for all of these, where they had merited my love was in their delicious smell. Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

By this time in their lives, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory were like lil maids, waking up and making their beds first thing, sweeping and dusting, the house would be shining. We were brought up with cleanliness. All of Lolo’s children knew how to clean, including the boy. “Guess who be out there windin’ them clothes through that wringer? Your big uncle,” Uncle Joe told me. When two of Lolo’s friends whom the children called Aunt Ruth and Aunt Agnes arrived at Roman Street for the annual Mardi Gras and Nursing Club balls, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory pressed their gowns and laid them out on the bed for the women to slip into after they had taken their baths. When they returned from their parties, they found lamplit rooms, their slippers by turned-down beds, their nightclothes already laid out for them.

They think danger means something physical, getting scratched and a little blood running and the newspapers making a big fuss. Well, that hasn't got anything to do with it. Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existing, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to recreate existence instant by instant. You won't find any job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it. And society is basically meaningless, a Roman mixed bath. And school, school is just society in miniature: that's why we're always being ordered around. A bunch of blind men tell us what to do, tear our unlimited ability to shreds.

The decision by the ruling elites in ancient Rome—dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States—to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire. Commodus, like a number of late-Roman emperors, and like Trump, was incompetent and consumed by his own vanity. He commissioned innumerable statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He used his position as head of state to make himself the star of his own ongoing public show. He fought victoriously as a gladiator in the arena in fixed bouts. Power for Commodus, as it is for Trump, was primarily about catering to his bottomless narcissism. He sold public offices to the ancient equivalents of Betsy DeVos and Steven Mnuchin. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax, the Bernie Sanders of his day, who attempted in vain to curb the power of the Praetorian Guards, the ancient version of the military-industrial complex. The Praetorian Guards assassinated Pertinax three months after he became emperor. The Guards then auctioned off his position to the highest bidder. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted sixty-six days. There would be five emperors in AD 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus. Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents.

Augustine's shame reportedly took root when, as an adolescent, he got an erection while at a Roman bath. Embarrassing, yes. But Augustine was so consumed with shame of not being able to control his erections that he spent a decade writing a theological treatise. In the treatise, he set out to prove that the main condition of paradise before the fall was that Adam could control his erections with his own will. Then Eve messed everything up. I feel for him. Augustine, like all of us, had issues. And it was more than fine for him to take his own concerns into the creative project of biblical interpretation. He is allowed, just like we all are. But we must stop confusing his baggage and our baggage and our pastors' baggage and our parents' baggage with God's will. Because while many of Augustine's teachings have been revered for generations, when it came to his ideas around sex and gender, he basically took a dump and the church encased it in amber. But instead of realizing this was one guy's personal shit, we assumed it was straight from God.

It was a warm summer night of a kiss at first. Gentle. Romanic. It matched the dreaminess he’d seen in her eyes when she talked about lovers bathed in starlight. She couldn’t know what she did to him when she had peered up at him, a mixture of sweet innocence and curious desire all at once. He had waged a war within himself. He should leave, he’d thought. If nothing else in his life remained true, he was a gentleman. And gentlemen did not ravish young innocents in their guardian’s library. But when her milky skin flushed pink, he’d lost the battle. Even their talk of consequences had done nothing to tamp down the need that consumed him. For just a taste. Just a taste.

Protestants have avoided signing themselves, mostly in protest of the Roman Catholic tradition. But, as I have told my Protestant students for years, the sign of the cross is no more Roman Catholic than a sermon is Protestant. Christians have crossed themselves from the earliest days. Tertullian, as a powerful apologist for the Christian faith in the late second and early third centuries, said this: At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out [this echoes the Shema], when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign [of the Cross]. The Celtic Daily Prayer order for Morning Prayer begins with this: +In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than like products of human hands. He considers the work he does in his office or factory as essential to the har­monious functioning of the world. The clothes he wears are exactly what they should be, and he laughs at the idea that he might equally well be wearing a Roman toga or medieval armor. He respects and envies a minister of state or a bank director, and regards the possession of a considerable amount of money the main guarantee of peace and security. He cannot believe that one day a rider may appear on a street he knows well, where cats sleep and chil­dren play, and start catching passers-by with his lasso. He is accustomed to satisfying those of his physio­logical needs which are considered private as dis­creetly as possible, without realizing that such a pattern of behavior is not common to all human so­cieties. In a word, he behaves a little like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, bustling about in a shack poised precariously on the edge of a cliff. His first stroll along a street littered with glass from bomb-shattered windows shakes his faith in the "naturalness" of his world. The wind scatters papers from hastily evacuated offices, papers labeled "Con­fidential" or "Top Secret" that evoke visions of safes, keys, conferences, couriers, and secretaries. Now the wind blows them through the street for anyone to read; yet no one does, for each man is more urgently concerned with finding a loaf of bread. Strangely enough, the world goes on even though the offices and secret files have lost all meaning. Farther down the street, he stops before a house split in half by a bomb, the privacy of people's homes-the family smells, the warmth of the beehive life, the furniture preserving the memory of loves and hatreds-cut open to public view. The house itself, no longer a rock, but a scaffolding of plaster, concrete, and brick; and on the third floor, a solitary white bath­ tub, rain-rinsed of all recollection of those who once bathed in it. Its formerly influential and respected owners, now destitute, walk the fields in search of stray potatoes. Thus overnight money loses its value and becomes a meaningless mass of printed paper. His walk takes him past a little boy poking a stick into a heap of smoking ruins and whistling a song about the great leader who will preserve the nation against all enemies. The song remains, but the leader of yesterday is already part of an extinct past.

The first night Churchill and members of his party spent in the White House, Inspector Thompson—also one of the houseguests—was with Churchill in his room, scouting various points of danger, when someone knocked at the door. At Churchill’s direction, Thompson answered and found the president outside in his wheelchair, alone in the hall. Thompson opened the door wide, then saw an odd expression come over the president’s face as he looked into the room behind the detective. “I turned,” Thompson wrote. “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.” The president prepared to wheel himself out. “Come on in, Franklin,” Churchill said. “We’re quite alone.” The president offered what Thompson called an “odd shrug,” then wheeled himself in. “You see, Mr. President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide.” Churchill proceeded to sling a towel over his shoulder and for the next hour conversed with Roosevelt while walking around the room naked, sipping his drink, and now and then refilling the president’s glass. “He might have been a Roman at the baths, relaxing after a successful debate in the Senate,” Inspector Thompson wrote. “I don’t believe Mr. Churchill would have blinked an eye if Mrs. Roosevelt had walked in too.” —

Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas. Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor. Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt. Withfinocchioin fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot. In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.

Rome was not the first state of organized gangsterdom, nor was it the last; but it was the only one that managed to bamboozle posterity into an almost universal admiration. Few rational men admire the Huns, the Nazis or the Soviets; but for centuries, schoolboys have been expected to read Julius Caesar's militaristic drivel ("We inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy, our own casualties being very light") and Cato's revolting incitements to war. They have been led to believe that the Romans had attained an advanced level in the sciences, the arts, law, architecture, engineering and everything else. It is my opinion that the alleged Roman achievements are largely a myth; and I feel it is time for this myth to be debunked a little. What the Romans excelled in was bullying, bludgeoning, butchering and blood baths. Like the Soviet Empire, the Roman Empire enslaved peoples whose cultural level was far above their own. They not only ruthlessly vandalized their countries, but they also looted them, stealing their art treasures, abducting their scientists and copying their technical know-how, which the Romans' barren society was rarely able to improve on. No wonder, then, that Rome was filled with great works of art. But the light of culture which Rome is supposed to have emanated was a borrowed light: borrowed from the Greeks and the other peoples that the Roman militarists had enslaved.

The only point that everyone I spoke with in Rome agrees upon is that Armando al Pantheon is one of the city's last true trattorie. Given the location, Claudio and his family could have gone the way of the rest of the neighborhood a long time ago and mailed it in with a handful of fresh mozzarella and prosciutto. But he's chosen the opposite path, an unwavering dedication to the details- the extra steps that make the oxtail more succulent, the pasta more perfectly toothsome, the artichokes and favas and squash blossoms more poetic in their expression of the Roman seasons. "I experiment in my own small ways. I want to make something new, but I also want my guests to think of their mothers and grandmothers. I want them to taste their infancy, to taste their memories. Like that great scene in Ratatouille." I didn't grow up on amatriciana and offal, but when I eat them here, they taste like a memory I never knew I had. I keep coming back. For the cacio e pepe, which sings that salty-spicy duet with unrivaled clarity, thanks to the depth charge of toasted Malaysian peppercorns Claudio employs. For his coda alla vaccinara, as Roman as the Colosseum, a masterpiece of quinto quarto cookery: the oxtail cooked to the point of collapse, bathed in a tomato sauce with a gentle green undertow of celery, one of Rome's unsung heroes. For the vegetables: one day a crostini of stewed favas and pork cheek, the next a tumble of bitter puntarelle greens bound in a bracing anchovy vinaigrette. And always the artichokes. If Roman artichokes are drugs, Claudio's are pure poppy, a vegetable so deeply addictive that I find myself thinking about it at the most inappropriate times. Whether fried into a crisp, juicy flower or braised into tender, melting submission, it makes you wonder what the rest of the world is doing with their thistles.

Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas. Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor. Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt. With finocchio in fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot. In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.

The Romans were too practical-minded to appreciate Euclid; the first of them to mention him is Cicero, in whose time there was probably no Latin translation; indeed there is no record of any Latin translation before Boethius (ca. A.D. 480). The Arabs were more appreciative: a copy was given to the caliph by the Byzantine emperor about A.D. 760, and a translation into Arabic was made under Harun al Rashid, about A.D. 800. The first still extant Latin translation was made from the Arabic by Adelard of Bath in A.D. 1120. From that time on, the study of geometry gradually revived in the West; but it was not until the late Renaissance that important advances were made.

February 20 Abba, Father Because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”—Romans 8:14-15 I stood glued to my spot in front of the nursery window. My son-in-law bathed my firstborn granddaughter, Rachel, as I watched. Three hours later I relinquished my spot to another new grandparent. What miracles children are! They are screaming testimonies of God’s creation. My granddaughter, Rachel, is now a teenager. She is still beautiful. However, she eats meat, walks, talks and understands so much more than she did that first morning. When we acknowledge that we are sinners, repent and give our lives to Christ, we are babies in Christ. We drink milk. We grow as we learn more about Christ through Bible study, prayer and church attendance. If we avail ourselves of opportunities, we give up the bottle and become mature Christians. However, that doesn’t always happen. This problem is addressed in Hebrews 5:11–14.the writer is admonishing Jewish Christians to grow up. He tells them that milk is for beginners. Solid food is for the mature. He tells them that instead of expecting to be fed, they should be teachers themselves. I have heard several Christians give the same testimony time and time again. I want to ask, “What is the Lord doing for you right now? Did your salvation experience put your Christian testimony on pause?” Ask yourself some questions. What is Christ doing in my life right now? Am I closer to Him today than I was a year ago? How am I growing in Christ? What new service has He called me into? Is anything exciting happening in my prayer life? Am I growing more in love with Jesus and digging into His Word? Dear Father, help us get out of diapers and off the bottle in our Christian maturity.

A loaf of bread cost a quarter of a sesterce. So did a glass of wine.2 We know from graffiti at Pompeii that a prostitute, perhaps not a very elegant one, charged half a sesterce for her services. Entrance to the public baths was just twice that. Roman soldiers earned 1,200 sesterces a year and although there were some perks, they had to buy their own equipment. A casual labourer earned perhaps 2-3 sesterces a day – when he got work. A charity scheme to support poor children, presumably at a fairly basic level, paid between 10 and 12 sesterces a month. A lecturer in rhetoric under Vespasian received 100,000 sesterces a year and this was considered remarkable. It was a similar amount to the purchase price of a first-rate, intelligent slave in the second century, when lessening warfare had reduced the market. One foot of road cost 22 sesterces to lay and a large and elaborate tomb anything from 100,000 to half a million sesterces.

He built public buildings in all places and without number, but he inscribed his own name on none of them except the temple of his father Trajan. At Rome he restored the Pantheon, the voting enclosure, the Basilica of Neptune, very many Temples, the forum of Augustus, the baths of Agrippa . . . Also he constructed the bridge named after himself, a tomb on the bank of the Tiber and the temple of the Bona Dea.

The ladders of glory we are told to climb to behold the “naked God” are now marked, “Danger: No Entry.” Just as we would not have expected to find God in a feeding trough of a barn in an obscure village, much less hanging, bloody, on a Roman cross, we do not expect to find him delivering his gifts in such humble places and in such humble ways as human speech, a bath, and a meal. Think cross, not glory.

the carnivorous garden encircles the Roman bath house.

But one dreadful day, somewhere about the middle of the nineteenth century, somebody discovered (somebody pretty well off) the two great modern truths, that washing is a virtue in the rich and therefore a duty in the poor. For a duty is a virtue that one can't do. And a virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily; like the bodily cleanliness of the upper classes. But in the public-school tradition of public life, soap has become creditable simply because it is pleasant. Baths are represented as a part of the decay of the Roman Empire; but the same baths are represented as part of the energy and rejuvenation of the British Empire. There are distinguished public school men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and high politicians, who, in the course of the eulogies which from time to time they pass upon themselves, have actually identified physical cleanliness with moral purity. They say (if I remember rightly) that a public-school man is clean inside and out. As if everyone did not know that while saints can afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean. As if everyone did not know that the harlot must be clean, because it is her business to captivate, while the good wife may be dirty, because it is her business to clean. As if we did not all know that whenever God's thunder cracks above us, it is very likely indeed to find the simplest man in a muck cart and the most complex blackguard in a bath.

Hadrian finds a man scratching his back against a post in the public baths and donates a slave to perform the duty for him, and money to keep him; on his next visit the emperor finds a whole group of old men hopefully rubbing their backs on posts, and confounds them by genially suggesting that they scratch each other.

strangely, on the verge of storming Rome itself, Attila withdrew. Why? For many centuries the official answer was that God had intervened in some mysterious way to protect his chosen city, Rome, seat of the papacy. In more recent times, such supernatural explanations have fallen out of favor and the question has arisen anew. Some have suggested that Attila was overawed by the sanctity of Rome. But why would a pagan warlord like Attila stand in awe of a Christian center? Attila was by no means an ignorant barbarian: For example, he invited Roman and Greek engineers into Hun territory to install bathing facilities. However, his respect for Roman civilization was clearly of a pragmatic rather than a religious nature. Another theory is that Attila was worried about leaving unattended his newly acquired homeland, in what is now Hungary. But then why did he venture out almost as far as Rome and hang around indecisively for so long before returning? All these explanations founder on the same point. It seems clear that Attila did indeed set out with every intention of taking Rome, but his expedition came to a premature halt. Mounting modern evidence suggests that Attila was stopped by a virulent epidemic of dysentery, or some similar disease. Most of his men were too ill to stay on their horses, and a significant number died. In short, bacteria saved Rome.

The Roman Englishman put his road from London to Bath, along valleys and around hills.

Amid all the variability in responses to the choices presented by the Roman presence, we can recognize significant patterns, and they may represent common features in all situations of interaction between expanding complex societies and indigenous groups. Especially striking is initial eager adoption of Roman luxury goods and lifestyle by the urban elites in the conquered territories, while rural areas and others in the society maintained the traditional Iron Age material culture. Over the course of a few generations, rural communities also began to adopt new patterns, but after another few generations, signs of re-creation, or renewal, of old traditions appeared, perhaps as forms of resistance to provincial Roman material culture and society. Over time, new traditions developed, adapting elements of both indigenous and introduced practices and styles to create patterns different from any of the antecedents. In the unconquered regions, the patterns are different but related. The elites embraced many aspects of the imperial lifestyle that they consumed and displayed privately, such as ornate feasting paraphernalia, statuary, personal ornaments, and coins, but they did not adopt the public expressions of their affiliation with the cosmopolitan society - the dwellings, baths, or temples of the Roman provinces. Except near the frontiers, as at the site of Westick, the nonelite members of the societies beyond the frontier did not adopt the new cosmopolitan styles, probably because they had no direct access to the required goods. Beyond the frontier we see no clear resurgence of long-dormant styles, as in the case of the La Tene style in the provinces. When elements of the cosmopolitan lifestyle were integrated with those of local tradition, such as in the emergence of the confederations of the Alamanni and the Franks, that development was driven more exclusively by the elites than was the case in the Roman provinces.

The prime example of a small town centred on a religious sanctuary is Bath (Aquae Sulis).

with light. A doorway in the back led to a half bath. On a cot against the far wall, his son, Evan, reclined, one arm thrown over his back, the other attached to a support beam by a wrist manacle and chain. His son’s wrist was raw where he’d struggled against the metal cuff. With the aid of the sedative Nathan had slipped him, Evan was sleeping deeply. A sliver of guilt sliced through Nathan. Keeping his son prisoner was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but no one ever said parenting was easy. A father often had to make unpopular decisions for his child. Someday, Evan might forgive him. But as long as the boy remained healthy—and able to sleep—Nathan could live with the consequences. Nothing mattered more than his son. Modern medicine had no cure for the disease that waited in Evan’s genes. Nathan would follow in his uncle’s footsteps and try the old way. As his Druid ancestors had bargained with the gods to repel the Romans from the shores of Britain, he would make a deal for his and Evan’s futures. No sacrifice was too great. Nathan would walk through fire to save his son. He watched, mesmerized, as Evan snored. His son was as yet unaffected by the sickness. Once afflicted, sedatives and sleeping aids only worsened the condition. Nathan should know. In the beginning of his illness, his uncle had been prescribed every known tranquilizer. Nathan thanked the gods he’d had the foresight to accumulate the medication.

In a villa in Ephesus, forty-six children were lying clean and bathed in comfortable beds. Although their life had been terrible, it had held a sort of routine. Now everything had changed. The change had given them hope. And with hope came fear that their hope might be in vain. Then the music began, lyre and flute blending together, rising up from the courtyard below and filling the rooms with a wordless song of comfort. The children had never heard such music before. It took them from their dark places and transported them to sun-dappled glades, with warm sunshine, cool breezes and birdsong. The notes were like a mother’s fingers, gently brushing the hair from the forehead, soft and infinitely loving. And soon all the children were asleep.

Go ahead then!’ she cried. ‘Look at it. You won’t be able to read it even if you tried. I dropped it in the bath last night.’ Tranquillus took the tablet and opened it and frowned. Then his eyes grew wide as he read: ‘Give me a thousand kisses, Flavia, then another hundred, then a thousand, then a second hundred, then a thousand more—’ ‘It does not say that!’ Flavia snatched the tablet back. ‘You’re just quoting Catullus.’ She eagerly examined the two inner leaves of the tablet, but they were perfectly blank. ‘You’re disappointed!’ cried Tranquillus triumphantly. ‘You actually thought he wrote that.’ Then his smile faded. ‘You love him, don’t you, Flavia? You love Flaccus?’ ‘No I don’t!’ Tranquillus looked at her friends. ‘She loves Flaccus, doesn’t she?’ Aristo and Lupus both shrugged their shoulders and Nubia looked down at her lap. ‘No, I don’t,’ repeated Flavia, biting her lower lip. ‘Of course I don’t!’ ‘If you say so,’ said Tranquillus. He looked away. Flavia turned her head too, and looked out the back of the carruca at the passing tombs. And for some reason the Greek epitaph came to mind: Eat, drink, be merry and make love; all below here is darkness.

The decline of the baths was due more directly to the fall of Rome than to the rise of Christianity, but there is no denying that the three events—one apparently mundane, but close to the heart of Roman civilization, and two with vast, long-term consequences—were intertwined

The Roman writer Cato the Elder believed that cabbage surpassed all other vegetables and that it had medicinal properties. He recommended that babies be rinsed in the urine of cabbage-eaters and also advised women to bathe in the urine of cabbage-eaters so as to cure diseases.

The sun, enormous and blood-red, began to sink into the sea. Its dying rays lit the ash-covered mountains and cove, so that the whole landscape seemed to be bathed in blood. The sky above it was livid purple, the colour of an angry bruise. There would be no stars that night

Nothing so defined urbane luxury as the baths that became the mark of Romanness: ‘To bathe is to live,’ a Roman scrawled on a wall, while the gravestone of a jolly bon vivant declared, ‘Baths, sex and wine ruin our bodies but make life worth living.’ A timeless truth. Yet it is ironic that the baths define Roman civilisation since they also probably spread the waterborne diseases that killed so many.

But the knowledge that Filippo sought to uncover was unique. In calculating the proportions of columns and pediments he determined the measurements specific to the three architectural orders (Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian) that had been invented by the Greeks and then imitated and refined by the Romans. These orders were governed by precise mathematical ratios, a series of proportional rules that regulated aesthetic effect. The height of a Corinthian entablature, for example, is a quarter of the height of the columns on which it stands, while the height of each column is ten times its diameter, and so forth. Numerous examples of these three orders existed in Rome in the early 1400s. The columns in the Baths of Diocletian are Doric, for instance, while those at the Temple of Fortuna Virilis feature the Ionic, and the portico of the Pantheon the Corinthian. The Colosseum makes use of all three: Doric on the lowest level, Ionic on the second, and Corinthian at the top.

Yet Hadrian’s architects were not entirely successful, for a series of cracks are visible along the inside of the dome, running like lightning strokes down the ceiling to the springing line, the point where the dome begins to curve inward. These fractures are the result of the hoop stress that causes the dome to spread at its haunches, stretching the fabric horizontally around the circumference. Filippo could have seen a similar pattern of radial cracks around the base of the semidome in the Baths of Trajan, and indeed such cracks have been an all too common feature of masonry domes. Containment of this horizontal stress—one that it appears not even a concrete wall 23 feet thick could neutralize—was therefore of paramount importance in constructing a stable cupola. For all their ingenuity, not even the Romans, it seemed, could provide the solution to the challenge laid down by Neri di Fioravanti and his committee.

The historical significance of the fall of Constantinople would not be apparent for many years. For most, the obvious association was that it marked the final gasp of the Roman Empire. Byzantium was a thousand-year rut behind the wheels of Ancient Rome, and though it enjoyed splendor for a time, it finally evaporated like a water stain under the bright sun. Once, ancient Romans had whistled in their grand, magnificent baths, thinking that their empire, like the granite that made up the walls of the pools in which they floated, would last forever. No banquet was eternal. Everything had an end. Everything.

I use the word in reference to dance bands, cinemas, electric signs, and so on. Your plumbing is quite rightly as modern as you can get it, the only certain boon, to my mind, that the East can take from the West. I often think that the Romans were fortunate; their civilization reached as far as hot baths without touching the fatal knowledge of machinery.

Wandering around Bath. People come here to learn about Jane Austen and to tour the old Roman baths, but I stumbled upon a small museum off the tourist paths. And there was a painting, a man weeping over his bride. I stared at it for hours. I couldn’t tell you why.

In our own fevered, changing, and precarious age, where all is in flux and nothing is accepted, we must survey with respect a period when, with only three hundred thousand soldiers, widespread peace in the entire known world was maintained from generation to generation, and when the first pristine impulse of Christianity lifted men’s souls to the contemplation of new and larger harmonies beyond the ordered world around them. The gift which Roman civilisation had to bestow was civic and political. Towns were planned in chessboard squares for communities dwelling under orderly government. The buildings rose in accordance with the pattern standardised throughout the Roman world. Each was complete with its forum, temples, courts of justice, gaols, baths, markets, and main drains. During the first century the builders evidently took a sanguine view of the resources and future of

As I have said before, the bishops talked about sharing with the poor, but they fail to set an example by their own actions. They meet in the best hotels in Washington and enjoy the best meals. They even hold one of their meetings in Chicago's luxurious Palmer House. How can they justify that? Why don't they meet at a seminary and dine on a seminary menu? Why don't' they give up the luxury of private baths, king-sized beds, expensive liquor, and suites with the best air conditioning? Their actions are so inconsistent with their words that they have lost a tremendous amount of prestige.

In your care I will be released from my worries” (CIL 11.137). In a few brief sentences, this man’s colorful life, during which he passed from freedom to slavery to freedom and ultimately to prosperity, is memorialized. An aspect of life that these tombstones bring to light is the strong emotions that tied together spouses, family members, and friends. One grave marker records a husband’s grief for his young wife: “To the eternal memory of Blandina Martiola, a most blameless girl, who lived eighteen years, nine months, five days. Pompeius Catussa, a Sequanian citizen and a plasterer, dedicates this monument to his wife, who was incomparable and very kind to him. She lived with him five years, six months, eighteen days without any shadow of a fault. You who read this, go bathe in the baths of Apollo as I used to do with my wife. I wish I still could” (CIL 1.1983). The affection that some parents felt for their children is also reflected in these inscriptions: “Spirits who live in the underworld, lead innocent Magnilla through the groves and the Elysian Fields directly to your places of rest. She was snatched away in her eighth year by cruel fate while she was still enjoying the tender time of childhood. She was beautiful and sensitive, clever, elegant, sweet, and charming beyond her years. This poor child who was deprived of her life so quickly must be mourned with perpetual lament and tears” (CIL 6.21846). Some Romans seemed more concerned with ensuring that their bodies would lie undisturbed after death than with recording their accomplishments while alive. An inscription of this type states: “Gaius Tullius Hesper had this tomb built for himself, as a place where his bones might be laid. If anyone damages them or removes them from here, may he live in great physical pain for a long time, and when he dies, may the gods of the underworld deny entrance to his spirit” (CIL 6.36467). Some tombstones offer comments that perhaps preserve something of their authors’ temperaments. One terse inscription observes: “I was not. I was. I am not. I care not” (CIL 5.2893). Finally, a man who clearly enjoyed life left a tombstone that included the statement: “Baths, wine, and sex ruin our bodies. But what makes life worth living except baths, wine, and sex?” (CIL 6.15258). Perhaps one of the greatest values of these tombstones is the manner in which they record the actual feelings of individuals, and demonstrate the universality across time, cultures, and geography of basic emotions such as love, hate, jealousy, and pride. They also preserve one of the most complicated yet subtle characteristics of human beings—our enjoyment of humor. Many of the messages were plainly drafted to amuse and entertain the reader, and the fact that some of them can still do so after 2,000 years is one of the best testimonials to the humanity shared by the people of the ancient and the modern worlds.

The Umayyad period (661-750) produced a frankly profane and worldly art, the like of which was never to be seen again on Islamic soil where there is normally no distinction between the sacred and the secular except in the use to which works of are put, and not in their forms; a house is built in a style in no way differing from a mosque. This worldly art of the Umayyads can be explained by the fact that Islamic art at this period was still in the process of formation, and by the sovereigns' need to surround themselves with a certain ostentatious display that would not fall behind that of their predecessors. But the works of art that adorn the hunting pavilions or the winter residences of the Umayyad princes are not only eclectic--paintings in the Hellenistic mode, Sasanid or Coptic sculpture and Roman mosaics--but are examples of actual paganism, even without judging them according to the standards and example of the Prophet's Companions. The sight of these scenes of hunting and bathing, those naively opulent statues of dancing-girls and acrobats and effigies of triumphant sultans, would have filled someone like the Caliph 'Umar with holy anger

Man, no wonder Kat left you. You smell, your hair is knotted, and you haven't shaved in how many days? Forget fighting the gallu. One whiff of you would kill them." He looked at Kish as he stood up. "Don't strike a match. The alcohol fumes alone would send him up like a Roman candle." "Shut up," Sin snarled as he got up and grabbed the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's off the coffee table. He headed for his bedroom so that he wouldn't have to put up with their nagging anymore. At least that was the plan, but the walls were so thin, he couldn't help but overhear them. "When was the last time he changed those clothes?" Damien asked. "I think it was the last time he bathed ... the day Kat left." Sin heard the sound of glasses clinking together. Damien cursed. "How much shit is he drinking?" "Let me put it to you this way ... I restock the cabinet twice a day now." "Damn, how can he fight the demons and be that wasted?" "I think you were right earlier. He strikes a match and breathes at them. Like a human blowtorch.

He saw how the virginal circles of Eudoxus had led to a more coherent astronomy, how the conic sections of Apollonius had prefigured the spirit of universal gravitation. The world had its uses, yes; ideas could be rotated to expedient planes. It wasn’t his method to test the disposition of the physical universe but this didn’t “mean he reacted skeptically to those who drove hooks into nature. He considered the case of Archimedes, son of astronomer, floating body, lever adept, nude runner, catapulter, weigher of parabolas, tactician of solar power, sketcher of equations in sand and with fingernail on own body anointed in after-bath olive oil, killed by dreamless Romans.

The Roman bath culture died slowly, fizzling out at various times and places in the waning empire. Ironically, as political and economic troubles made it difficult to maintain the great thermae where the people bathed, bishops, popes and emperors continued to build and enlarge lavish baths in their residences. From being a resource for all, the baths declined into an aristocratic preserve.

the hamam remains the only living descendant of the Roman bathing tradition, and it was via the hamam that the Roman custom would return to medieval Europe.

It’s not wheel science… just aim and fire.

Then there is Roman engineering: the Roman roads, aqueducts, the Colosseum. Warfare, alas, has always been beneficial to engineering. Yet there are unmistakeable trends in the engineering of the gamgster states. In a healthy society, engineering design gets smarter and smarter; in gangster states, it gets bigger and bigger. In World War II, the democracies produced radar and split the atom; German basic research was far behind in these fields and devoted its efforts to projects like lenses so bog they could burn Britain, and bells so big that their sound would be lethal. (The lenses never got off the drawing board, and the bells, by the end of the war, would kill mice in a bath tub.) Roman engineering, too, was void of all subtlety. Roman roads ran absolutely straight; when they came to a mountain, they ran over the top of the mountain as pigheadedly as one of Stalin's frontal assaults. Greek soldiers used to adapt their camps to the terrain; but the Roman army, at the end of a days' march, would invariably set up exactly the same camp, no matter whether in the Alps or in Egypt. If the terrain did not correspond to the one and only model decreed by the military bureaucracy, so much the worse for the terrain; it was dug up until it fitted inti the Roman Empire. The Roman aqueducts were bigger than those that had been used centuries earlier in the ancient world; but they were administered with extremely poor knowledge of hydraulics. Long after Heron of Alexandria (1st Century A.D.) had designed water clocks, water turbines and two-cylinder water pumps, and had written works on these subjects, the Romans were still describing the performance of their aqueducts in terms of the quinaria, a measure of the cross-section of the flow, as if the volume of the flow did not also depend on its velocity. The same unit was used in charging users of large pipes tapping the aqueduct; the Roman engineers failed to realize that doubling the cross-section would more than double the flow of water. Heron could never have blundered like this.

Just as we would not have expected to find God in a feeding trough of a barn in an obscure village, much less hanging, bloody, on a Roman cross, we do not expect to find him delivering his gifts in such humble places and in such humble ways as human speech, a bath, and a meal. Think

Augustin Mouchot was far from the first to realize that the sun’s energy could be tapped. For more than two thousand years Chinese architects had been aligning windows and doors with the southern sky to let sunlight flood into rooms during winter, heating cold interiors. Thousands of miles away, Greek savants expounded the same architectural principles to their disciples. So, later, did the Romans, according to the solar-energy chronicler John Perlin, whose work I am drawing upon here. To heat the rooms in public baths, Romans built giant south-facing windows—those in Pompeii’s caldarium were 6′7 x 9″10.

like that. Many of the mighty cities of North Africa like El Djem in what is now Tunisia were left to decay in peace. Even today they have massive ruins. El Djem has its vast Roman amphitheatre. Orange, in southern France, has a Roman theatre and an aqueduct. Athens has a vast Roman temple of Zeus and a library built by the emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138), who passed this way on his travels (see Chapter 17). Baalbek in the Lebanon has two colossal temples, and one of them – the temple of Bacchus – is still practically intact. Rome itself remained home to some of the most enormous ruins: The Colosseum, the city’s biggest amphitheatre, is still largely in one piece (see Chapter 8); the ruins of the imperial palaces still cluster across the Palatine Hill, and the baths of Caracalla look like a giant’s cave complex. The Aurelian walls of Rome, built in the 270s (see Chapter 19 for information on the emperor Aurelian), still surround most of Rome. The survival of Roman books Roman writers were all hugely influential in different ways, but it’s thanks to the survival of their texts that we know what we do about the Roman world. Consider these examples: Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (106–43 BC): Cicero was a great orator, lawyer, and statesman. Well aware of his importance, he published his speeches, treatises on government (De Re Publica), duty (De Officiis), the nature of gods (De Deorum Natura), and also a vast collection of his private correspondence. A great deal survives and he had a huge influence on thought and literature in early modern times. Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar) (100–44 BC): Caesar wrote his own account of his war in Gaul (Bellum Gallicum), and also part of his civil war with Pompey (Bellum Civile). The texts are famous for sounding objective (though they aren’t at all), and for their spare, terse style, but are exceptional historical resources for the time. To find out more about Julius Caesar, go to Chapter 14. Catullus

According to Savot’s reasoning, which he shared with his age, the Greeks and Romans needed baths because they failed to understand the cleansing properties of linen.

For Britain the end began in 367 when a concerted attack was made on the province by barbarians from all sides. The Bath region seems to have suffered. Villas were destroyed and the slaughtered inhabitants thrown down wells. Within a few years some semblance of stability was restored for a decade or two but in the face of increasing barbarian raids and immigration and the general disintegration of the authority of the empire, the province of Britannia dissolved into a confusion of warring factions. Populations fled from the cities and no longer was there the will or the ability to maintain the urban infrastructure.

Unlike the modern church or mosque where participants in the religious ceremony congregate inside the building, in Roman religious observances the rituals generally took place outside in the precinct around the large sacrificial altar.

The Romans built houses, shops, public buildings, and baths from concrete. The breakwaters, towers, and other structures that made up the colossal man-made harbor of Caesarea,8 in what is now Israel, were built with concrete, as was the foundation of the Colosseum, along with countless bridges and aqueducts9 across the empire. Most famously, Rome’s Pantheon, built nearly 2,000 years ago, is roofed with a spectacular concrete dome—still the biggest concrete structure without reinforcing steel in the world. Like so much other knowledge the Romans had accumulated, though, the science and technology of concrete faded from memory as the empire slowly crumbled over the centuries that followed. “Perhaps the material was lost because it was industrial in nature and needed an industrial empire to support it,” writes scientist and engineer Mark Miodownik in Stuff Matters. “Perhaps it was lost because it was not associated with a particular skill or craft, such as ironmongery, stonemasonry, or carpentry, and so was not handed down as a family trade.”10 Whatever the reasons, the result was striking: “There were no concrete structures built for more than a thousand years after the Romans stopped making it,” notes Miodownik.

The plentiful black stones making possible all this cooking, heating, and bathing were lumps of coal, a source of energy that had been used throughout China for at least a thousand years. Yet in Marco’s day, the notion of burning coal rather than wood for heat was practically unheard of in Europe. The existence of this black, dusty, carbon-rich substance had been noted at infrequent intervals throughout Western history, beginning with the Roman occupation of Britain and continuing to Marco’s time, but not until the eighteenth century did coal become a common source of energy in European countries.