Pompeii red, and other pieces of a pinkish colour; a portion of a British amphora, and fragments of black Roman earthenware; a small jug (D) of grey glazed ware of the fourteenth century entire and in good preservation; a Dutch glass bottle and a Dutch earthenware bottle with embossed heads projecting from the sides, with holes through which a cord was passed for facility in carrying; this last is of the time of Car. I.
Roman Pottery. |
D. |
Drain tile, C.
The flue tiles are of excellent terra cotta, see B, and may possibly have been used for passing the metal pipe through which carried hot water to the baths, a use adopted by the Romans to keep the water warm; on some of the tegulæ bessales were potters' marks, but too much defaced to be legible.
At the ancient city of Ofen or Buda, on the right bank of the Danube, and opposite to the modern commercial city of Pesth, is still in constant use, and excellent preservation, a large Roman calidarium and laconicum: it is circular, with a domed roof: around the walls is the pulvinus and a series of niches, each forming a separate sudatorium—there is the alveus, the pluteus, and the schola, with the sunken balneum in the centre. When I visited it numbers of persons of the lower orders were using the baths, some the water, others the sudatio, and several lying on the hot suspensura, with their faces downwards, as I was told for medicinal purposes. All were naked, the heat and steam was almost insupportable; the approach to this bath was through a cold vestibule and a long narrow tepidarium, or, more properly, warm passage. The edifice is considered to be undoubtedly of Roman construction, and may have been repaired by the Turks in more modern times. Some of the baths at Constantinople are similar. C. TUCKER.
