The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [10]
The Greeks appreciated water, but the Romans adored it. In their gymnasiums, the Greeks bathed as a necessary conclusion to exercise. The Romans reversed the priorities: they exercised because it made their baths even more enjoyable. “Hedonist” and “sybarite” come to us from the Greek—perhaps because the Greeks so distrusted those types—but the terms were better suited to the Romans, who inspired and enjoyed the over-the-top luxuries of the great Imperial baths.
But first, the characteristic Roman bath—heated and communal, as opposed to cold and individual—had to be born. It probably evolved in the region of Campania, in southern Italy on the Tyrrhenian Sea, sometime in the third century B.C. The area was a lively meeting place for Greek, Etruscan, Italian and Roman influences, and it was here that the Greek bath mingled with local and imported traditions. By the second century B.C., the Roman bath had become an ordinary, expected part of everyday life. As Roman customs insinuated themselves into the Hellenistic world, the Roman-style bath triumphed even in Greece. By the first century B.C., gymnasiums, the symbols of stoic Greek athleticism, were adding hot water.
“Baths, wine, and sex ruin our bodies, but they are the essence of life—baths, wine, and sex.”
—Epitaph on the tomb of Titus Claudius Secundus, first century A.D
The oldest more-or-less intact Roman baths are the Stabian Baths at Pompeii, dating from around 140 B.C. Pompeii had a population of 20,000 when Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, so the Stabian’s small-windowed, cave-like changing room must have been crowded during peak hours. Here the bather stored his street clothes in one of the cubicles, to be guarded either by a personal slave or a member of the bathhouse staff. (Even so, theft was common.) Outside the changing room is the exercise yard, a big grassy space ringed on three sides by a portico. In this space, which was not for women, male bathers, oiled and usually naked, would work up a light sweat playing ball, wrestling or running.
After his exercise, the bather would proceed to a moderately warm room, where he continued to perspire. Usually in the warm room, he would scrape off the accumulated oil, dirt and perspiration with his strigil. An attendant or fellow bather would strigil his back. In the next chamber, the hot room, he might plunge into a pool of hot water or might just sprinkle water on himself from a basin on a pedestal. Finally came a room with a shockingly cold plunge pool. That could be followed by another oiling, a massage and a final scraping with the strigil. Oils and perfumes are frequently mentioned as accessories to the bath, but not soap. In any case, a thorough scraping of oiled and sweaty skin with a strigil and a rinse with hot water probably removed as much dirt as would soap and warm water.
Rather than using soap and a washcloth, the Greeks and Romans scraped oil and sweat off their bodies with a metal implement called a strigil. The small canister held oil.
“Swiftly, safely, sweetly” was the motto of Asclepiades of Bithynia, who popularized Greek medicine in Rome in the first century B.C. and who preferred bathing his patients to bleeding them—hence his motto. He was a great advocate of cold baths in particular and was known as “the Cold Bather.”
With its waters of contrasting temperatures, the Roman bath has more than a passing likeness to another social bath, the Finnish sauna, where the sauna takers alternately sweat and cool down with hot air, cold water and, in season, snow. The Roman bath and the hamam, or Turkish bath, have an even closer family resemblance since, as we shall see, the hamam descends directly from its Roman parent.
A basic Roman bathhouse needed