Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Tepidarium

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rich, Anthony (1849). The illustrated companion to the Latin dictionary, and Greek lexicon. p. vi. OCLC 894670115. https://archive.org/details/illustratedcompa00rich. 

TEPIDA'RIUM or TEPIDARIA CELLA. A chamber in a set of baths kept at a moderate degree of temperature, in order to prepare the body for the great heat of the sudatory or vapour bath, and to break the sudden transition after it before returning into the open air. (Celsus, i. 3. Vitruv. v. 10. 5.) The illustration (Tepidarium/1.1) represents the interior of the tepidarium in the baths at Pompeii. It adjoins the undressing-room (apodyterium), and the thermal chamber (caldarium), as directed by Vitruvius (l. c.), to which the door on the right hand gave admission, as will be perceived by referring to the general ground-plan of the building at p. 74., where it is marked C. It contains three bronze benches (subsellia) in the positions they were found when the excavation was made, and a brazier (focus) at the further end for warming the atmosphere; but the tepidarium of the women's department (marked G on the general plan above referred to) was warmed by flues underneath. The walls all round are divided into recesses under the cornice by a number of male figures (telamones), which thus constitute a series of small closets, where the unguents and other necessaries used by the bathers were deposited. It is likewise believed that in a small establishment, like that at Pompeii, the tepid chamber also served for the oiling-room (elaeothesium, unctorium), to which the bather retired to be rubbed and scraped with the strigil, after the sweating bath. The small dark recess below the window contained an oil-lamp.

2. Tepidarium, sc. ahenum or vas. The boiler which contained the tepid water for supplying a set of baths. (Vitruv. v. 10. 1.) It was placed below the cold-water cistern (frigidarium), and above the hot boiler (caldarium), but communicating by a pipe with both, so that as the heated fluid was drawn off from the latter, the deficieny was supplied by an equal quantity already partially heated from the tepidarium, the vacuum thus occasioned being at the same moment filled up with cold water from the cistern above. Each of these particulars, as well as the process itself, is exemplified by the annexed illustration (Tepidarium/2.1), which exhibits all the three vessels, with the water flowing from them, and their relative positions in respect to the furnace, from a picture representing the interior of a set of baths painted on the wall of one of the apartments in the Thermae of Titus at Rome.

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  Tepidarium/1.1
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  Tepidarium/2.1