Hot Dates.

Here at the Roman Baths visitors and staff have been enjoying a hot stuffed date beside the Great Bath to celebrate New Years Day on January 1st. The eating of dates was a Roman tradition to celebrate the coming of a new year.

Rosa and Flavia enjoying their hot dates

In 45BC Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar, creating a new month, January. January is named after and was originally dedicated to the two-faced Roman god, Janus. Janus looked both backwards to the old year and forwards to the New Year ahead. The first of January became a day of celebration, gifts and vows. It also became a day where you could only say good things.

Part of the day’s celebrations was to eat hot, stuffed and peppered dates. The recipe that we used to prepare our dates comes from the Roman cook Apicius. Apicius has left us the most comprehensive guide to Roman cuisine. He lived during the 1st Century AD but his recipes were not collated into one book until the late 4th Century AD. This has led some people to believe that the cookbook attributed Apicius is in fact written by more than one person but under the same name.

Some of the recipes in his cookbook include, Milk-Fed Snails, Stuffed Hare, Hot Lamb Stew and Julian Pottage, which required, among other things, two cooked brains! The recipe for our stuffed dates can be found below.


Hot Dates Ingredients –


6 dates per person

Shelled and finely sliced almonds

3 tablespoons honey



To Prepare –

Stone the dates and stuff with the nuts. Heat the honey in a frying pan and fry the dates briskly then serve.

Hot Dates

For a more authentic Roman experience, add a little pepper to the almonds and roll the dates in a pinch of salt before frying in the honey.

Enjoy and Felix Anno Novo!


Laura

So why do people come to the Roman Baths? - Guest Blogger - Part 2

Let's return to the question of people’s continued fascination with the baths. (For Part 1 please see the preceding post from Thursday, September 9th.)

The baths of a hundred years ago are barely recognizable today, which may seem an odd thing to say about a seemingly unchanging ancient monument. Indeed there is only really one part of the site that still looks the same, and that is the Great Bath itself. Much of what visitors see today on the rest of the site has been uncovered in the last hundred years; the East Baths in the 1920s, the West Baths in the 1970s and the Temple Precinct in the 1980s. The astonishing finds from the hot Spring were only excavated in 1980.

Finds from the Spring excavated in 1979/80.

It’s not just the baths that have changed. The interpretation of some of the key objects on the site has also changed. The great stone head on the Temple pediment, and indeed the iconography of the whole of that pediment, has been re-interpreted several times. Perhaps that’s part of the public fascination with this site; the fact that the evidence can sustain more than one interpretation, that there is scope for imagination and debate in the meaning of what you see. In 1935 that fascination led Dr Franzero, the Italian Ambassador, in writing a book on Roman Britain (which he dedicated to Benito Mussolini) to describe the pediment as ‘the most peculiar and the most complete specimen of Romano-British art’.

The Temple Pediment as it appears today.

There is no doubt that the setting of the Great Bath is something that has to be seen. It should be on everyone’s list of those things you do before you die. But today it makes far more sense than it did to those visitors a hundred years ago. You can now see more of the baths and Temple complex of which it formed a part, and through guided tours, audio tours in eight languages, costumed interpreters, a fantastic museum collection, models, film projections and even a sign language tour, you can gain an insight into the lives and minds of the people who built and maintained it. We’ve set out some ideas to start you thinking as you go around the site interspersed with observations, comments and explanations from Bill Bryson, Alice Roberts and our own staff. I’m sure you will have ideas of your own, and one thing we can be pretty sure about is that some of the best ideas about this site are still to come.

So my theory is that the rise in visitor numbers we have seen at the Roman Baths in the last few years is down to the fact that people can now understand it better, and because it’s such a great place they tell other people about it. In the language of the professional marketeers they have come ‘through word of mouth’…… tell your friends, or better still bring them with you.


Stephen Clews

Roman Baths & Pump Room Manager

So why do people come to the Roman Baths? - Guest Blogger - Part 1

This year more people are visiting the Roman Baths; visitor numbers like this haven’t been seen since the end of the 20th century.

In the world of museums and attractions there are plenty of pundits who can proffer an explanation for a change in visiting patterns and you can take your pick from macro-economic circumstances, cultural trends and ‘local factors’ or some proportional permutation of them. Personally I’d like to think it’s something to do with the investment we have made in the last four years in conservation, better access and improved interpretation at the site, but in this strange world where science and speculation meet, any reason can have some weight and some reasons must be right. If only we knew which ones!

Since its discovery in the 1870s visitors, or at least the prospect of visitors, have been the reason why the Roman Baths were uncovered, developed and indeed continue to exist. Visitor's interest and the money they bring have sustained the site now for well over a century. Without visitors the site would have little purpose and it would have no money for conservation and maintenance either. It would become a forgotten and ruinous ruin.

The Great Bath in the 1890's

So what has sustained the interest of visitors for so long? We don’t really know why people visited a hundred years ago. Nearly all our evidence is circumstantial. The baths then were another new attraction in Britain’s leading spa city. Many people were here to enjoy a spa holiday or take a medical treatment. We know that the discovery of the baths had roused national interest and indeed it’s uncovering and care had generated some controversy too. Although the population was smaller, there were probably more people then with some classical education, having learnt Latin or Greek at school, than there are today.

So many people in Britain had heard of the Roman Baths and some of those visitors may have come to Bath specifically to see the Roman Baths; but back in that age of the train when motor cars were curios longer distance travel was still not particularly easy and those visitors were probably in a minority.

I think I’ll leave the matter here for now. This is a mystery that cannot be solved in one post. Check back on Monday (following post) for Part 2 and feel free to give suggestions about why the Victorians may have visited the site in the comments.


Stephen Clews

Roman Baths & Pump Room Manager