In comparison with the great bathing establishments of Rome, the baths at Pompeii are of moderate size. They have, however, a special interest, due in part to their excellent preservation, in part to the certainty with which the purpose of the various rooms can be determined; and their remains enable us to trace the development of the public bath in a single city during a period of almost two hundred years. From this source, moreover, most of our knowledge of the arrangements of the ancient bath is derived, without which the imposing but barren remains of Rome itself would be for the most part unintelligible. It is not easy for one living under present conditions to understand how important a place the baths occupied in the life of antiquity, particularly of the Romans under the Empire; they offered, within a single enclosure, opportunities for physical care and comfort and leisurely intercourse with others, not unlike those afforded in the cities of modern Europe by the club, the café, and the promenade. Though the Roman baths differed greatly in size and in details of arrangement, the essential parts were everywhere the same. First there was a court, _palaestra_, surrounded by a colonnade. This was devoted to gymnastic exercises, and connected with it in most cases was an open-air swimming tank. The dressing room, _apodyterium_, was usually entered from the court through a passageway or anteroom. A basin for cold baths was sometimes placed in the dressing room; in large establishments a separate apartment was set aside for this purpose, the _frigidarium_. To avoid too sudden a change of temperature for the bathers, a room moderately heated, _tepidarium_, was placed between the dressing room and the _caldarium_, in which hot baths were given. At one end of the caldarium was a bath basin of masonry, _alveus_; at the other was ordinarily a semicircular niche, _schola_, in which stood the _labrum_, a large, shallow, circular vessel resting upon a support of masonry, and supplied with lukewarm water by a pipe leading from a tank back of the furnace. The more extensive establishments, as the Central Baths at Pompeii, contained also a round room, called _Laconicum_ from its Spartan origin, for sweating baths in dry air. In describing baths it is more convenient to use the ancient names.