The History of Baths

Latin Glossary of Bathing Through the Ages - I to P

Labrum

This was a hip or waist basin somewhere in the caldarium. Its purpose was to provide sweating bathers with an opportunity to splash themselves with cold water. In more sophisticated and luxurious baths, the labrum was replaced with a multiplicity of heated pools, but it remained popular in smaller facilities.

Laconicum

This was a superheated sweat bath. A brazier would be set in the middle of the round laconicum and bathers would undergo an sauna like experience with dry heat. The laconicum is found more commonly in earlier baths, although examples are known in small facilities as late as the second century AD. In such facilities it was accessible directly from the tepidarium or the palaestra, offering the bathers an alternative and truncated bathing routine. At Pompeii and Herculaneum such a routine appears to have gone out of fashion, since the laconica of the Stabian Baths (Pompeii) and Forum Baths (Herculaneum) were later converted into frigidaria.

Natatio

Open-air swimming pool.

Palaestra

Term usually applied to exercise court; sometimes also called peristyle.

Piscina

Term loosely applied to pools, whether heated or not.

Praefurnium

Furnace room.

Next Article