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Lavacra pro sexibus separavit

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Lavacra pro sexibus separavit. With this edict Hadrian ordered to keep the Termae’s women sector divided from the males’ one. Also if for long time having separated sectors for each sex had been the normal custom of bathing, this use had been preserved only till the end of the republic and at the beginning of the imperial times it was disattended. Only few of this old kind of Baths were kept in use and we can still see them, for instance the Terme Stabianae and the Forum ones both at Pompei. In both of them the two sectors were not similar. the men’s one was much more larger of the women’s and this because the Baths for men had ampler rooms, more tepidaria, a very large frigidarium and they usually included a large Palestra were young people could exercise.
As in imperial times the women’s sector of the Termae disappeared, up to Hadrian time both sexes took their baths together and at every time they chose to have it. What prompted Hadrian, who assuredly was not a puritan, to make this edict is not clear, but he published it and Baths’s masters and managers had to take actions. Of course they didn’t destroy their Termae and rebuild them with a women’s sector. What they normally did was to fix a period of time – usually early in the morning for women, and left the rest of the day to men. Thus we don’t find women’s sectors in any Baths, not even - or as also it seemed – in Villa Adriana’s ones.
Of course, before reaching this conclusion, all the "Termae" of the hadrianic complex were carefully examined and, when it was evident that both the Heliocaminus baths, which served Hadrian’s quarters in his Palace, didn’t have any separate sectors for women and the same could be said, or so it seemed, for the Piccole and "Grandi Termae", the fact was accepted, also if we noticed that for the Grandi Terme there was some problem .
This establishment, which had been the earliest to have been built after Hadrian departure for his first travel through his empire, was never finished. Its structures like walls and vaults were completed and even decorated, but all the heated parts of the Baths were still to be done. Only the suspensurae’s floor of the first tepidarium had been covered by bipedali bought before the arrival of the 123 and the 124 A.D consignments, while the suspensurae’s floor of the second one, the only tepidarium through which one could reach both the last tepidarium and the calidarium had been only initiated. After that the first bipedali of this tepidarium had been set on the ground, the work had been interrupted and all this sector, one of the most important functional part of the Baths, had been abandoned probably to finish more urgent works. Thus, when we found a series of heated rooms (two small Tepidaria and a little Calidarium) on the north west corner of the Grandi Terme the fact was explained as a change of the original plans, a system to substitute the part that had to be finished. However, we thought, that this modification was only a temporary accomodation for the reduced staff of the first Hadrianic settlement that lived in Villa Adriana: not more than 300-400 people and for them the small part of the baths would have been more than sufficient.
As this idea was not wrong because this was what afterward really happened, it was not questioned, and twenty years passed before this situation was once more taken in consideration. It was only during a more thorough study of the Grandi Terme that writing my book “Villa Adriana: il sogno di un imperatore” my attention was struck by some particularity that I didn’t notice before. It was not the fact that the Grandi Terme had two apoditeria: that was not noteworthy because other Termae had them. What was interesting was that to reach the small northern series of heated rooms from the northern apoditerium there was a long semicircular corridor which, on the outside, followed the Frìgidarium’s semicircular basin and reached the first small room of the reduced Thermal inplant. There was no explanation for its existence, and I knew that never did Hadrian do something without a good reason. A long corridor joining the northern apoditerium with the strange small Baths? And suddenly everything was clear. These small Baths were not a modification of the Grandi Terme plans. They were a part and also an important part of it: they were the women’s Baths of the hadrianic edict. After having disvested in the apoditerium the women would reach their baths, naked, but not seen by the males. Of course, when the heated part of the large men’s establishment had been left undone the women’s Baths were used at different hours by both sexes, but it is clear that as soon as the Grandi Terme would have been finished, these small Baths would return to their original destination. They were the women’s baths for servants, slaves hairdressers and so on: a small sectors of the servants Grandi Terme.
And what and where were the upperclass women’s Baths? Evidently they were not small sectors of the upperclass men’s "Termae". There probably were an entire establishment by itself, all dedicated to them. Thus, if the Accademy had been built to be Sabina quarters, why were they not here? This was the place where Ligorio saw the rest of some suspensurae, and here in his plan Piranesi draw halls suggestve of termal rooms, ruins that he marked on the south western part of this palace just overlooking the valley. A beautiful place, right where in 1650 Monsignor Bulgarini. destroying everything built his wonderful garden and nothing else was left for us to see.

The order to finish the Grandi Terme and the Earino’s brickstamps.
As we have seen the Grandi Terme were left unfinished and they were still so when Hadrian came back in 134 A.D. In 128 A.D. he had left his Villa Adriana in full works. Now nearly everything was done except the Grandi Terme and some minor changes. However, with the completion of the imperial residence everything would begin, to function in full. All the staff of the imperial house would be there, servants, cooks, gardeners, slaves to do any kind of works and, of course, soldiers: around 2000 people if not more. At this point the small women sector of the Grandi Terme would not be large enough to accomodate all this people and to finish the establishment with all its heated part was necessary. The old working yard which served to build the Grandi and Piccole Terme and was set where now the Great Entrance Hall stood didn’t exist any more. But there was another one that could be used: the working yard placed in the area between the Pretorio and the Grandi Terme, a convenient place, just near the building materials kept in the Pretorio store rooms. Thus the works began starting from the unfinished Calidarium at the south side of the building and proceeding by finishing the next Tepidarium. Just here we have the surprise and the problem of the Earino’s bricks stamps which are only present in the suspensurae’s floors of these two heated rooms. The problem of the Earino’s bricks stamps consist in the fact that they don’t report the name of the consuls who were in charge when the bricks were marked. Thus different scholars dated them at the most different times. Some opted to the first period of Villa Adriana’s building and some set them at Marcus Aurelius time. For a certain numbers of reasons I concord with Bloch who date them at the 135 A.D. and to Hadrian return from his second journey. It also seems right to take them as contemporary to Hadrian’s order to finish the Terme.
Then what could have happened? It sounds to reason that the bipedali which had been caculated and ordered at the beginning of the works had also been used for the changes done during the building. Some new had to be bought on Roman market: Earino’s ones. Their datation is also confirmed by the presence of a 134 A.D. brick stamp found on the threshold of the door between the Calidarium and its adiacent Tepidarium. This date fixes the outset of the works at 136 A.D.. However the heated parts of the Grandi Terme were never finished: the suspensurae of the second Tepidarium, the only one through which it was possible to reach the last Tepidarium and the Calidarium, were never made, and in the nearby Sudatio not even the cement bed on which the floor would have rested was set. Bipedali coming out from the walls pointed out where the pouring of cement had to stop, but no cement was ever mixed and poured. It was the 10 of july of the year 138 A.D. and Hadrian lay dead in Bahia. In Villa Adriana all the works stopped: it seemed that when the hearth of Hadrian ceased to beat also Villa Adriana’s did the same.


Bibliography

- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Villa Adriana: il sogno di un imperatore, L’Erma di Bretschneider, Rome, 2001.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Lavacra pro sexibus separavit in Rendiconti Pontificia Accademia di Archeologia, Vol.LXIV, 1993-1994, pp.77 - 110.