The Baths of Perseus
To complete our tour we leave the city through the Porta Laurentina. On the other side of the modern road and the railway Rome - Lido di Ostia are the remains, surrounded by a fence, of the Christian Basilica of the Pianabella, discovered in 1976. It was used from the end of the fourth until the ninth century. Many people were buried inside. Unfortunately we do not know to whom the church was dedicated.
In the 1930's a building was excavated nearby, the Villa or Baths of Perseus (Heinzelmann 1998, 219-220). Most of the rooms seem to belong to a bath. Unfortunately the building was never published, and the ruins are now hidden by a small forest. Building phases have been dated to the early second and the fourth century AD. To the west seem to have been shops. It was named after a statue of Perseus from the late first or early second century AD, reported in the Italian press on October 18, 1934. With his right hand Perseus holds the head of Medusa, that has a calm expression. Perseus was the one who had decapitated her. From the building also comes a large polychrome mosaic from the second half of the fourth century (reported Arch. Anz. 51 (1936), 460), that can today be seen in the garden of the Block of the Paintings (I,IV). Depicted are the months April and March above a female bust.
The mosaic from the Baths of Perseus.
Photo: Wikimedia, Sailko.May we deduce from the statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa that the baths were used by people who had just attended a funeral or visited a tomb? People who had taken part in a funeral had to purify themselves at home on the same day through the suffitio, which included being sprinkled with water (Toynbee 1971, 50-54). Augustinus wrote that, after the burial of his mother, "it appeared to me also a good thing to go and bathe, I having heard that the bath [balneum] took its name from the Greek balaneion, because it drives trouble from the mind" (Confessiones 9,12,32). It has been suggested that his words were inspired by a Greek inscription, found in the Baths of the Forum, mentioning a loutron alexiponon, "baths that drive away sorrow".
The statue of Perseus and Medusa in the museum of Ostia.
Photo: Wikimedia, Sailko.It is furthermore conceivable that there is a funerary reference in the Baths of the Lighthouse, to the north of the Field of the Magna Mater. The baths were named after the depiction of the lighthouse of Claudius in Portus, on a mosaic floor. The lighthouse is seen on a famous mosaic in the Isola Sacra necropolis, and several times on funerary reliefs. It was a symbol of the afterlife as a safe haven.
The mosaic with the lighthouse in the Baths of the Lighthouse.
Photo: Parco Archeologico di Ostia Antica.
