The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [12]
The Romans considered cleanliness a social virtue. (Up to a point, so did the Greeks, as Theophrastus makes clear, but the Romans were more preoccupied with grooming, and they raised the bar when it came to hygienic standards.) The Latin word for “washed” or “bathed” is lautus, which became by extension the adjective for a refined, grand or elegant person. And more and more, as the daily bath was knitted tightly into their schedules, cleanliness—achieved their way—became a Roman virtue. Modern-day Japanese people report that what they miss most when living abroad is not familiar food or language or people: it is the Japanese bath, with its particular protocol of pre-washing before a communal soaking in extraordinarily hot water. Similarly, the Roman bath became one of the defining marks of Roman-ness, one of the central ways they separated themselves from outsiders, and one of the first civilities with which they welcomed conquered peoples into the far-flung Roman family. When Agricola became governor of cold, foggy Britain in A.D. 76, he knew what the shaggy and unkempt natives needed. He introduced them, in short order, to public buildings, togas, Latin and baths. It was the essential shortcut to Romanization.
FIRST-CENTURY A.D. GRAFFITI
“Two companions were here and, since they had a thoroughly terrible attendant called Epaphroditus, threw him out on the street not a moment too soon. They then spent 105½ sesterces most agreeably while they fucked.”
—At the Suburban Baths, Herculaneum, in a room off the vestibule (possibly a brothel)
As in Greece, some of the baths of the Roman Republic were private enterprises and some were owned by the city. The unassuming Republican bath was a beloved institution but no marvel. The Imperial bath, a grandiose pleasure palace built and maintained by the government, left even jaded Romans slack-jawed with awe. The great age of Imperial baths began around 25 B.C., when Agrippa, the designated successor of Augustus, opened the baths that bore his name. Set in gardens that included an artificial lake and a canal, the Baths of Agrippa were notable for their size (the buildings measured at their largest 120 metres by 100 metres) and their splendour. When Agrippa died in 12 B.C., he left the baths to the people of Rome. All this—scale, grandeur and the bequest to the Romans—was new, and it set the standard for the Imperial baths to come. Agrippa’s were the first thermae, as the dazzling, multi-functional Imperial baths came to be called, to distinguish them from a balneum, a plainer, more workaday bathhouse.
At the same time as the thermae grew more and more extravagant, the satirist Juvenal coined the phrase “bread and circuses” to describe the government’s attempts to buy the people’s favour with cheap food and mindless entertainment. Vastly more expensive than bread and circuses—they required not only building but costly maintenance—the thermae were like them on some levels but, to the Roman mind, far more substantial. Becoming lautus, or bathed, was essential to a person’s self-respect, as well as his health.
BATHROOM BARITONE
“Then he sat back as though exhausted, and enticed by the acoustics of the bath, he opened his drunken mouth as wide as the ceiling, and began to murder the songs of Menecrates—or so those who could catch the words said.”
—Petronius, Satyricon
An emperor would usually build his thermae at the start of a dynasty or after a civil war to signal his magnanimity and his ability to provide the best of Roman lives for his people. Nero built ambitious thermae, famous for their very hot water, around A.D. 60. Impressive as they were, it was only in 109, when the Baths of Trajan were built, that successive emperors began to pull out all the stops. In the Baths of Trajan, the central bath block was surrounded by a perimeter of buildings that included club rooms, libraries, lecture halls and exercise rooms. It was a virtual village, the most complete bath domain Rome had seen.
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