Letters

bathing apartments, and the open and covered places of exercise.

At each side of this northern entry there were different exhedræ (outdoor conversation seats), with seats placed in a semicircular manner, where the philosophers met to perform their learned disputations, as a situation more remote from the other exercises, and on many accounts the most agreeable; more shaded with plane trees, and more free from any noise, except the grateful murmur of fountains emptying themselves into a large pond for swimming, which, like the warm bath, had several apartments and features peculiar to it.

The baths (balnea)

It is certain that the chief elegance and beauty of the palæstra were the rising fabrics of the balnea; the structure of which, and the contrivances to supply such a quantity of water with different degrees of heat, were particularly curious.

The anterior part was divided into two distinct uniform orders of baths. One at the right, the other at the left side of the hypocauftum (furnace room) So called from the furnace underneath., which was situated in the middle; and each order consisted of four separate chambers, on either side of the hypocauftum: they were called the Laconicum (sweat-bath), tepidarium (warm room), calidarium (hot room), and frigidarium (cold room). All these chambers had, by passages, a communication with each other.

Different apartments for men and women.

It is more than probable, from the best accounts, that this double order of bathing-apartments was designed for the separate uses of men and women. Hesiod, a very ancient writer, takes notice in this sense of baths peculiar to women: