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.