The Roman Army
Visits to the public baths and the amphitheatre were important features of Roman life. The public baths were like today's leisure centres – you went to get clean, meet up with friends, eat, exercise and play board games. Although they were an important part of daily life, we do not know how often Roman Londoners went to the baths. We do know that there were several large public baths in London. The largest was on the northern bank of the Thames, in what is now Upper Thames Street, so that dirty water could go straight into the Thames. Over time, however, richer people wanted to have their own bath-houses attached to their houses rather than having to go to the public baths. Whatever the size of the bath-house, the rooms were laid out in a similar way as the bather undressed in a cold room and then moved to warmer rooms.
On religious holidays, Londoners went to the temple of the god, whose feast day it was, to celebrate. There they made animal sacrifices and offered gifts of money, trinkets or figurines of their favourite gods. Their offerings matched how much they could afford to pay. They asked the gods to help them make decisions, be lucky in love perhaps by leaving cheap clay statuettes of Venus, to heal injuries or even to cause harm to someone by putting a curse (defixio) on them.Each house had a family shrine where the family would have prayed daily and left offerings of food and drink to the household gods in order to keep the house and family safe. They also left food and drink when somebody died as part of the funeral ceremony. The remains of the funeral feast were buried so that the dead person had food for their journey to the Underworld. The dead were buried in cemeteries outside the city wall.
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