After the prandium, if a man were at home and at leisure, followed the siesta (meridiatio).  This is the universal habit in all southern climates, especially in summer, and indeed, if the mind and body are active from an early hour, a little repose is useful, if not necessary, after mid-day.  Busy men however like Cicero could not always afford it in the city, and we find him noting near the end of his life, when Caesar’s absolutism had diminished the amount of his work both in senate and law-courts, that he had taken to the siesta which he formerly dispensed with.[434] Even the sturdy Varro in his old age declared that in summer he could not possibly do without his nap in the middle of the day.[435] On the other hand, in the famous letter in which Cicero describes his entertainment of Caesar in mid-winter 45 B.C., nothing is said of a siesta; the Dictator worked till after mid-day, then walked on the shore, and returned, not for a nap but for a bath.[436]

Caesar, as he was Cicero’s guest, must have taken his bath in the villa, probably that at Cumae (see above, p. 257).  Most well-appointed private houses had by this time a bath-room or set of bath-rooms, providing every accommodation, according to the season and the taste of the bather.  This was indeed a modern improvement; in the old days the Romans only washed their arms and legs daily, and took a bath every market-day, i.e. every ninth day.  This is told us in an amusing letter of Seneca’s, who also gives a description of the bath in the villa of the elder Scipio at Liternum, which consisted of a single room without a window, and was supplied with water which was often thick after rain.[437] “Nesciit vivere,” says Seneca, in ironical allusion to the luxury of his own day.  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