Baths of Antoninus

Interesting facts

The re-erected frigidarium column has a granite shaft 12.5 metres tall weighing about 60 tonnes, topped by a capital of roughly 8 tonnes.

With a footprint of about 35,000 square metres, the complex ranks among the three largest bath buildings anywhere in the Roman Empire.

The cold hall alone covered more than 1,000 square metres, its vaults carried on eight granite columns each about 1.45 metres thick.

The cold swimming pool was a long, narrow basin of about 49 metres by just 6 metres.

Two semicircular latrines served the bathers, each fitted with some 80 to 100 marble seats.

Water arrived through the Zaghouan aqueduct from a mountain about 70 km away, which delivered around 30,000 cubic metres a day to Carthage.

The Mediterranean has risen by roughly half a metre since antiquity, drowning part of the seaward side of the complex, including its pool.

Excavators recovered marble heads of Antoninus Pius, Geta, and the empresses Faustina the Elder and Faustina the Younger from the ruins.

In Byzantine times, when bathing continued on a reduced scale, a potter set up his workshop in the service level beneath the hot room.

A marble-sawing workshop found inside the ruins shows how the building was stripped; its stone may have travelled as far as Canterbury.

Why it is worth it

On the seafront of Carthage, below the hill of Bordj Djedid, lie the remains of the largest Roman bath complex ever built in Africa. The Baths of Antoninus were raised between about 145 and 162, after a great fire had cleared the site, and they took their name from the emperor Antoninus Pius, whose permission is recorded in the dedicatory inscription; the money came from a wealthy provincial capital showing that it could build on the scale of Rome itself. An architect from Rome worked with a local team, and the fabric mixes African and Italian masonry and even Punic and Roman units of measurement.

What survives is chiefly the lower level. Because the coastal ground was soft, the service floor — furnaces, corridors, storerooms — could not be dug into a basement and was built above ground instead, which is why the ruin stands so tall and why a visitor today walks through the building's working heart rather than its bathing halls. The vaults above once rose to the height of a modern apartment block. A single frigidarium column, re-erected in the 1980s during UNESCO's international campaign for Carthage, gives a sense of the scale; the rest must be imagined from the plan of the basements.

The baths were repaired after an earthquake in the late 4th century, shrank but stayed in use in Byzantine times, and were finally abandoned in the 7th century. For centuries afterwards they served as a quarry: marble from here went into buildings in Tunis and was shipped as far as Pisa and Genoa. Cleared and consolidated between 1944 and 1956, the ruins now form an archaeological park by the sea, part of the Carthage World Heritage Site, with the Gulf of Tunis as a backdrop.

Getting there

The baths are in Carthage, about 1 km from the town centre and roughly 10 km from Tunis–Carthage International Airport (TUN). The TGM suburban line runs from Tunis Marine station along the coast; Carthage Dermech is the closest stop, and Carthage Hannibal station is a short signposted walk away.

From the encyclopaedia

The Baths of Antoninus or Baths of Carthage, located in Carthage, Tunisia, are the largest set of Roman thermae built on the African continent and one of three largest built in the Roman Empire. They are the largest outside mainland Italy. The baths are also the only remaining Thermae of Carthage that dates back to the Roman Empire's era. The baths were built during the reign of Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius.

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Baths of Antoninus

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia