ent of Caesar in
mid-winter 45 B.C., nothing is said of a siesta; the Dictator worked
till after mid-day, then walked on the shore, and returned, not for a
nap but for a bath.[436]

Caesar, as he was Cicero's guest, must have taken his bath in the
villa, probably that at Cumae (see above, p. 257). Most well-appointed
private houses had by this time a bath-room or set of bath-rooms,
providing every accommodation, according to the season and the taste
of the bather. This was indeed a modern improvement; in the old days
the Romans only washed their arms and legs daily, and took a bath
every market-day, i.e. every ninth day. This is told us in an amusing
letter of Seneca's, who also gives a description of the bath in the
villa of the elder Scipio at Liternum, which consisted of a single
room without a window, and was supplied with water which was often
thick after rain.[437] "Nesciit vivere," says Seneca, in ironical
allusion to the luxury of his own day. In Cicero's time every villa
doubtless had its set of baths, with at least three rooms,--the
_apodyterium_, _caldarium_, and _tepidarium_, sometimes also an open
swimming-bath, as in the House of the Silver Wedding at Pompeii.[438]
In Cicero's letter to his brother about the villa at Arcanum, he
mentions the dressing-room (apodyterium) and the caldarium or hot-air
chamber, and doubtless there were others. Even in the villa rustica of
Boscoreale near Pompeii, which was a working farm-house, we find the
bath-rooms complete, provided, that is, with the three essentials of
dressing-room, tepid-room, and hot-air room.[439] Caesar probably, as
it was winter, used the last of these, took in fact a Turkish bath, as
we should call it, and then went into a tepidarium, where, as Cicero
tells us, he received some messenger. Here he was anointed (unctus),
i.e. rubbed dry from perspiration, with a strigil on which oil was
dropped to soften its action.[440] When this operation was over, about
the ninth hour, which in mid-winter would begin about half-past one,
he was ready for the dinner which followed immediately.[441] This we
may take as the ordinary winter dinner-hour in the country; in summer
it would be an hour or so later. In an amusing story given as a
rhetorical illustration in the work known as _Rhetorica ad Herennium_,
iv. 63, the guests (doomed never to get their dinner that day except
in an inn) are invited for the tenth hour. But in the city it must
have often happened that