small, heated room in the thermae where steambaths were taken. It usually was round in plan and domed.

This was a superheated sweat bath. A brazier would be set in the middle of the round laconicum and bathers would undergo an sauna-like experience (apparently in a dry heat). The laconicum is found more commonly in earlier baths, although examples are known in small facilities as late as the second century AD. In such facilities it was accessible directly from the tepidarium or the palaestra, offering the bathers an alternative and truncated bathing routine. At Pompeii and Herculaneum such a routine appears to have gone out of fashion, since the laconica of the Stabian Baths (Pompeii) and Forum Baths (Herculaneum) were later converted into frigidaria.

The dry hot-air room of a Roman bath complex.