The baths' name puzzled people even in antiquity. Two candidates existed, and ancient writers could not settle the dispute. Some believed the name derived from Zeus, the king of the gods — an appropriately grand origin for so prominent a public building. Others traced it to Zeuxis, the celebrated Greek painter of the fifth century BC, famous for creating images so realistic that birds were said to peck at his painted grapes. Neither explanation carried the day. The ambiguity was already old when the baths were at their busiest, and it has outlasted the baths themselves. What the name pointed to — divine authority or artistic mastery — feels fitting either way. This was a place where art and daily life were so thoroughly combined that you bathed in the presence of the ancient world's most revered minds.

The original baths were built by the emperor Septimius Severus in the second to early third century, but it was Constantine I who enlarged and decorated them on a grand scale. Over eighty statues filled the complex — Homer and Hesiod representing poetry, Plato and Aristotle for philosophy, Demosthenes and Aeschines for oratory, Julius Caesar and Virgil bridging the Greek and Roman traditions. Whether these works were newly commissioned or, as scholars suspect, gathered from temples and public spaces across Greece and the eastern empire cannot be confirmed with certainty. The effect would have been extraordinary either way: a museum-quality collection of classical culture, freely accessible to slaves and senators, monks and merchants alike. An Egyptian poet named Christodorus, writing around 500 AD, composed a hexameter poem of over 400 lines describing the statues — and when archaeologists partially excavated the site in 1927–1928, they found two statue bases whose inscriptions matched figures named in Christodorus' poem.

The social world of the Zeuxippus baths was not entirely democratic. Men and women bathed separately — either in different sections of the complex or at different times of day. Attendants enforced the rules, monitored opening and closing hours, and kept order among the crowds. Even so, the baths drew a remarkably wide cross-section of Constantinople's population. Ancient sources mention that monks and members of the clergy visited despite their superiors' objections to the baths as places of worldly temptation. The city offered other bathhouses, but the Zeuxippus baths held particular prestige because of both their location and their extraordinary decor. To come here was not just to wash, but to place yourself inside a curated vision of civilized antiquity.

In January 532, the Nika revolt shook Constantinople to its foundations. The uprising — sparked by chariot racing rivalries and political grievances, fueled by days of street fighting — burned much of the city center. The Baths of Zeuxippus were destroyed. They were rebuilt, but never quite recovered their former prestige. Military pressures on the Byzantine Empire during the early seventh century gradually shifted public life away from grand communal bathing. The last record of the baths functioning as baths dates to 713. After that, the building was converted: part of it became a prison called the Noumera, another part a silk workshop. Almost a millennium after the Nika revolt, in 1556, the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan built the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı on the same ground. The bones of the ancient baths lay beneath, waiting for the archaeologists who would arrive in 1927.

Today the site sits in the Sultanahmet district, buried under centuries of construction. No standing walls identify where Homer once gazed at bathers from his marble pedestal. What survives is textual: Christodorus' poem, the accounts of ancient historians, the fragments of pottery and glazed earthenware that the 1927–1928 excavation recovered, and those two inscribed statue bases confirming that the literary sources described something real. The Baths of Zeuxippus lasted roughly 600 years in active use, weathered a catastrophic revolt, and were repurposed again and again before fading into the city's substructure. Few public buildings in any city have had so long and so varied a life.