Many things that we do nowadays where already being done by our ancestors in the Roman Empire. Think of using baths, or saunas, the Romans even had sewers like we do nowadays. A lot of sporting was done in this era, something liked a lot by the Greeks.
These things would all be done in huge bath house complexes, not only in Rome, but everywhere throughout the Roman Empire. One important aspect of these bath houses that I haven’t touched upon yet though, is the massage. Something that the modern man loves a lot, was already being done a lot in Roman times.
Status to uphold
When you sees someone nowadays in UK massage chairs, or perhaps a massaging chair at the airport you aren’t likely to think much of it. Just a regular thing to do in our society. In a Roman bath house this would’ve been quite different though. If you saw someone getting a massage, that meant he was pretty rich.
The Roman elite was always busy upholding their status. A good way to do this, which is also used a lot nowadays, is through clothing. In a bath house, this presents us with a problem: everyone is naked in there, so you will need to find other ways to get your status up high.
Regular beatings
In order to show how rich they were, the Roman elite would let themselves be massaged for a couple of hours. In such a massage the person in question would be hit until they werered. If they got red, it would be visible they just got a massage (and audible with such hard hits).
Other Roman ideas about massage
The hitting during the massage was not only to redden someone for their status, but the idea was also that one would be able to remove evil spirits from someone’s body in that way. Also the massaging would always be done towards the heart. The Romans believed that your blood would stand still inside your veins and that you would have to move it manually in a massage, which helped the circulation probably, but not in the way they themselves thought.
