I was revisiting Clive Stannard, “The Purse-hoard from the Republican Bathhouse at Regio VIII 5.36 in Pompeii”, Numismatic Chronicle 179 (2019) today to make a nice visual for my upcoming talk in Warsaw.
For images of where the hoard was found see Pompeii in Pictures.
I wanted to be sure I was also accurate in describing the cost of entering the bath. A quick and dirty search got me to this encyclopedic entry with citations.
Which got me to Cicero’s Pro Caelio 62 (56 BCE):
nisi forte mulier potens quadrantaria illa permutatione familiaris facta erat balneatori
Good enough but none of the translations seemed very good, so I went looking for a commentary
Austin 1960 is available on archives.org (!) hooray! This is quality translation and scholarship.
unless, as we might guess, that formidable lady, in paying the usual quadrans for admission, had turned the bath-keeper into a co-conspirator
[my adaptation of Austin]
A quadrans, likely a semis for women.
But now you (and I) know WHY we think this is the case.
It complements Stannard’s hoard nicely.
