Listed 1 sub titles with search on: Information about the place for wider area of: "CHASSENON Town CHARENTE" .
CHASSENON (Town) CHARENTE
Cassinomagus (Chassenon) Charente, France.
This commune is crossed by the D 29 road. The present village replaced the Cassinomagus
of antiquity, which is mentioned in the Peutinger Table; it grew up beside the
great Gallo-Roman monuments that had remained intact, and especially outside what
we now know to have been a sacred area, although no texts or inscriptions have
come down to us giving precise information. It measured ca. 600 m E-W, ca. 350
m N-S. The wall around this sacred area is still standing to the N and S; the
latter section is 450 m long and 2 m high at certain points. Inside the wall were
those elements necessary in a rural sanctuary, probably Celtic in tradition:
1. To the W: a temple, known locally as Montelu. Only its cella seems to have
been excavated; we have a report dated 1844-48, and from a careful study of the
remains of the monument it appears to be scientific and accurate. The author points
out that "the plan of this curious building is an octagon forming a huge
gallery that is reached by four ramps placed at the four cardinal points. . .
. In the middle of the octagon is the cella; its wall is round inside and octagonal
outside".
2. To the NW: an amphitheater that was badly and incompletely excavated over a
century ago and which has unfortunately been used as a quarry. The 1844-48 archaeologist
noted that "the plan is elliptical" and that "the great diameter
of the arena is 60 m, the small one 40 in".
3. To the E: two small buildings, carelessly excavated in the past, possibly fana.
4. Equidistant (230 m) from the great temple (Montelu) and the two little fana (?), the baths, which remain nearly complete.
5. More or less in the middle, a huge esplanade or forum, probably a meeting-place for the pilgrims who came to take the waters.
Since 1958 work has gone forward on the baths, both to expose and to salvage them.
Some of the walls still stand 9 m above the bed of the aqueducts, of which there
is a whole network in the basements. They are double, public bath buildings, with
matching rooms on either side of a central axis. Among them are the functional
rooms, which are perfectly designed for their intended purposes; the furnaces,
for heating by the hypocaust system; the cold pool, with its floor and facings
of white marble; and part of the great swimming pool, several dozen meters long.
Vaulted and dark underground rooms occupy the greater part of the
lower floor. There are ca. 20 Roman vaults, still showing traces of the planks
upon which they were formed. Some of the vaults of these cellars held up the lower
floor of the hypocausts, and higher ones supported the floors of the cold rooms,
making it possible to pass on one level from the hot to the cold rooms. But the
underground rooms clearly had another function, one that was dictated by the circulation
of water, the principal element of the sanctuary. The passages linking the rooms
are not only narrow and sloping, which Vitruvius recommended as the best way to
decant water, but they are staggered so as to break the flow and force the impurities
in the water to settle to the maximum extent. Moreover, the layer of mud, 0.8
m thick on the average, that reached the level of the aqueducts in these underground
rooms confirms that water circulated in them.
The Musee de Rochechouart (Haute-Vienne) houses the finds made at
Chassenon at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th c.
J.-H. Moreau, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites,
Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Feb 2006 from
Perseus Project URL below, which contains bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
Receive our daily Newsletter with all the latest updates on the Greek Travel industry.
Subscribe now!