The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [15]
GROOMING ADVICE FOR WOMEN
I was about to warn you against rank goatish armpits And bristling hair on your legs, But I’m not instructing hillbilly girls from the Caucasus…
—Ovid, Art of Love
A bathhouse in the first century A.D. appealed to all the senses—the smell of the oils and perfumes as well as of the bathers before and after their baths; the feel of the waters, the strigil, the massage, the towels; the taste of the wine, oysters, anchovies, eggs and other foods that were for sale; the sight of the architecture, with its arches, domes and endless spaces lined with marble and works of art, as well as of the humans, either nude or decked out to impress the crowds. As for the noise, Seneca’s famous account of the bathhouse hubbub brings its cacophony to life.
I live over a public bathhouse. Now imagine to yourself every type of sound which can make you sick of your ears: when hearty types are exercising by swinging dumbbells around—either working hard at it or pretending to—I hear their grunts, and then a sharp hissing whenever they let out the breath they’ve been holding. Or again, my attention is caught by someone who is content to relax under an ordinary massage and I hear the smack of a hand whacking his shoulders, the sound changing as the hand comes down flat or curved. If on top of all that there is a game-scorer beginning to call out the score, I’ve had it! Then there’s the brawler, the thief caught in the act, the man who likes the sound of his voice in the bath, the folk who leap into the pool with an enormous splash. Besides those whose voices are, if nothing else, natural, think of the depilator constantly uttering his shrill and piercing cry to advertise his services: he is never silent except when plucking someone’s armpits and forcing him to yell instead. Then there are the various cries of the drink-seller; there’s the sausage seller and the pastry-cook and all the eating-house pedlars, each marketing his wares with his own distinctive cry.
The scene at Seneca’s balneum sounds like a vivid human comedy but not necessarily a decadent one. Still, the anxieties about effeminacy and softness that dogged the Greeks worried the Romans too. Writers in the Empire often looked back nostalgically to the Republic, when manly men would have scorned a hot bath that stole hours out of every day. Seneca visited the seaside villa of Scipio Africanus, the general who had defeated Hannibal and the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War, some 250 years earlier. The letter in which he describes the war hero’s bath contrasts Scipio’s hardy habits with the self-indulgent preciousness of his own time.
The baths of Seneca’s Rome glistened with vaulted glass roofs, silver faucets and marble finishes imported from Egypt and Africa. Scipio, who was dirty from the plowing and other farm work he did when not at war, cleaned himself in a narrow, dark bath, designed to conserve heat. “Who is there nowadays who could bear to bathe in such a place?” Seneca asks.
Some people nowadays condemn Scipio as being extremely uncouth because he did not let the daylight into his hot water tub through wide windows, because he did not boil himself in a well-lit room, and because he didn’t linger in the hot tub until he was stewed. “What an unfortunate man!” they say. “He didn’t know how to live well. He bathed in water which was unfiltered, which in fact was often murky and, after a heavy rain, was almost muddy.” But it didn’t matter much to Scipio whether he bathed in murky water, because he came to the baths to wash off sweat, not oily perfumes!
Even more unsavoury to Seneca’s contemporaries, Scipio didn’t take a daily bath. In his time, people washed their arms and legs, which got dirty from farm labour, every day, and their whole bodies only once a week. “Of course,” Seneca continues, “someone will at this point say, ‘Sure, but they were very smelly men.’ And what do you think they smelled of? Of the