The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [11]
Roman men adopted the Greek habit of bathing after work, which meant about two or three in the afternoon, corresponding to the eighth or ninth hour in the Roman time scheme. (The Roman workday began early in the morning, certainly by six o’clock, and was effectively over by mid-afternoon.) In the Republic, when the sexes were more reliably segregated for bathing than they were in the Empire, women would have either separate bath chambers or separate hours, usually in the morning. Slaves and servants, too, often bathed in the morning so they would be available to escort their masters to the bathhouse in the afternoon. The typical price for men was the smallest copper coin, called the quadrans, a quarter of a cent. Women might pay twice that amount, but children, soldiers and sometimes slaves were admitted free of charge.
Close to the Stabian Baths was Pompeii’s biggest brothel. The combination of warm water, nudity and relaxation meant that baths and brothels tended to be near neighbours; sometimes prostitutes offered their services on the second floor of a bath. In another Pompeiian bathhouse, the Suburban Baths, the link between bathhouses and sex is literally painted on the wall. In the intimate, ochre-coloured changing room of these first-century A.D. baths, the wooden compartments where bathers left their clothes are long gone. But on the wall above where they stood are eight unblushingly bawdy frescoes—a woman, brandishing a fish, about to be penetrated by a man; women giving and receiving oral sex; a threesome (two men and a woman) locked in close conjunction; and other similarly frisky scenes. They may be advertising services available nearby, or perhaps they were simply meant to contribute to the baths’ pleasure-loving, sensuous atmosphere. The frescoes, dashed off with charm and style, are disarmingly direct—and utterly unlike our idea of suitable decoration for a commercial building used by men, women and probably children.
THE STORY OF SOAP, PART I
A mixture of animal fats and ashes sounds neither clean nor pleasant, but that is how soap was made for most of human history. Clay cylinders dating from about 2800 B.C., discovered during excavations in Babylon, contain a soapy substance, and the writing on the cylinders confirms that fat and ashes were boiled together to produce it. What actually got washed with soap is less clear. The Egyptians, whose soap contained milder, vegetable oils as well as animal fats, used it for washing their bodies. The Greeks and Romans did not: they preferred coating themselves with sand and oil and scraping it off with a strigil. Although soap, probably made with olive oil, was a regular part of the Turkish bath, or hamam, that aspect of washing did not travel to Europe when the bath returned in the Middle Ages. Europeans were still boiling animal fats and ashes together to make a soap that was used to wash clothes and floors but was too harsh for bodies. Toilet soap, made from olive oil, was manufactured in small batches in pioneering soap businesses in Marseilles, Italy and Spain (where the soap made in Castile was so prized that eventually all fine white soap made with olive oil was called Castile soap), but it was a luxury and beyond the budgets of most people in the Middle Ages. They made do with plain water, to which they