The Antonine Baths in Carthage, Tunisia

Carthage was raised to the ground in 146 BC, flattened and its population sold into slavery by the Roman conquerors, who were bent on preventing the rival city from ever threatening Roman power in the Western Mediterranean again. For Carthage had given the expanding Rome, then only really controlling the Italian peninsula, a run for her money in three successive Punic Wars.

But one hundred years later enough time had passed for Julius Caesar to refound the city as Roman Carthage, and it went on to become the provincial capital of Roman North Africa and one of the largest cities in the western half of the Roman Empire. And as such, it had built for it some impressive civic buildings such as the Antonine Baths, the ruins of which still survive.

I visited this site in 2007 and was impressed by the scale. Take a look at the photograph below, then realise that most of what you see, the thick stone walls and arched passageways, is just the ground floor, the service area. The main public structure of the baths rose tens of meters above this. Normally these service areas would be underground, but this site was too close to the sea to dig deep.

One of the columns which supported the roof has been restored to give an idea of scale. It is 15 meters tall. And that in turn supported massive vaulting arches which some claim rose another 15 meters further still!

Figure 1: view from just outside the site showing the surviving service floor walls and the sole upright pillar of the main structure

Construction of the baths began under the Emperor Hadrian in AD 146 and was completed under his successor Antoninus Pius in AD 162, hence the naming of the complex. And it was indeed a complex, not a simple set of Roman baths. As well as the normal cold, warm and hot rooms there were outdoor pools and a sun terrace, as well as broad steps leading down to the sea. The scale was astonishing: the main pavilion had a floor area of about 18 000 square meters and the total complex about 35 000 square meters.

Figure 2: frieze from the top of a wall and an inscribed lintel

Of course a baths complex on this scale needed a large supply of water. The Antonine Baths were fed from nearby cisterns in the hills which were in turn fed with water carried from springs in the Zaghouan Mountains over the 57-mile Zaghouan aqueduct, itself a marvel of Roman engineering.

The Antonine Baths should be on the itinerary of any history-minded visitor to Tunis, and are very close to the Carthaginian Tophet sanctuary, both falling within the area designated as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site – the archaeological site of Carthage – one of the seven such UNESCO-designated sites in Tunisia.

This is one of my series of articles about ancient sites I visited in Tunisia. If you enjoyed this, please visit the others:

Dougga Roman Town

El Jem Roman Amphitheatre

The Tophet of Carthage

Thuburbo Majus Roman Town