Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/363

 Bk. IV. Ch. IV. BATHS. 331 Italy and Gaul, but in Germany and Britain. Almost all these were principally, if not wholly excavated from the earth, the part above ground being the mound formed by the excavation. If they ever possessed any external decoration to justify their being treated as architectural objects, it has disappeared, so that in the state at least in which we now find them they do not belong to the ornamental class of works of which we are at present treating. Baths. Next in splendor to the amphitheatres of the Romans were their great thermal establishments : in size they were j^erhaps even more remarkable, and their erection must certainly have been more costly. The amphitheatre, however, has the great advantage in an archi- tectural point of view of being one object, one hall in short, whereas the baths were composed of a great number of smaller parts, not perhaps very successfully grouped together. They were wholly built of brick covered with stucco (except perhaps the pillars), and have, therefore, now so completely lost their architectural features that it is with difficulty that even the most practised architect can restore them to anything like their original appearance. In speaking of the great Thermae of Imperial Rome, they must not be confounded Avith such establishments as that of Pompeii for instance. The latter was very similar to the baths now found in Cairo or Constantinople, and indeed in most Eastern cities. These are mere establishments for the convenience of bathers, consisting generally of one or two small circular or octagonal halls, covered by domes, and one or two others of an oblong shape, covered with vaults or wooden roofs, used as reception-rooms, or places of repose aftei- the bath. These have never any external magnificence beyond an entrance-porch; and although those at Pompeii are decorated in- ternally with taste, and are well worthy of study, their smallness of size and inferiority of design do not admit of their being placed in the same category as those of the capital, which are as charac- teristic of Rome as her amphitheatres, and ai-e such as could only exist in a capital where the bulk of the people were able to live on the spoils of the conquered world rather than by the honest gains of their own industry. Agrippa is said to have built baths immediately behind the Pantheon, and Palladio and others have attempted restorations of them, assuming that building to have been the entrance-hall. Noth- ing, however, can be more unlikely than that if he had first built the rotunda as a hall of his baths, that he should afterwards have added the portico, and converted it from its secular use into a temple dedicated to all the gods.