The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [16]
The poet Martial was a few generations younger than Seneca, born in about A.D. 40, and less inclined to berate his era for self-indulgence. He’s an unflaggingly racy guide to the baths, with his own satirical hobbyhorses—chiefly social climbing and sex, the latter of which often involves descriptions of the physical attributes of his fellow bathers. As they did for Theophrastus four centuries earlier, the baths afforded Martial excellent views of people’s foibles and peccadilloes. His portrait of Aper is typically etched in acid. Before he inherited money, Aper decried the drinking of wine in the baths. A bow-legged slave carried his towel there and a “a one-eyed old crone” guarded his clothes in the changing room. Now that he’s rich, the formerly abstemious man leaves the baths drunk every night. And the homely servants are a thing of the past: Aper insists on handsome slaves and delicately chased gold cups.
Above all, the bath for Martial is a place to meet people, cadge a dinner invitation or offer one, and judge others as they do the same things. Poor pathetic Selius, one of Martial’s targets, would do anything rather than dine at home. He darts from fashionable shops to the temple of Isis to no fewer than seven baths, all the while angling for a dinner invitation. Another man is equally assiduous in his invitation-seeking efforts:
A MINORITY VIEW
“What is bathing when you think of it—oil, sweat, filth, greasy water, everything revolting.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I defy you to escape him at the baths.
He’ll help you arrange your towels;
While you’re combing your hair, scanty as it may be,
He’ll remark how much you resemble Achilles;
He’ll pour your wine and accept the dregs;
He’ll admire your build and spindly legs,
He’ll wipe the perspiration from your face,
Until you finally say, “Okay, let’s go to my place.”
Because the baths took up so much of a Roman’s day, vignettes from the bathhouse appear again and again in Martial’s poems—anecdotes of ladies bathing with their male slaves, of drunken bathing parties, of persistent worries about the cleanliness of the bathwater, of the dinner one Aemilius made at the baths, including lettuce, eggs and lizard-fish. When the poet gripes about a too-demanding friend, one of his offences is to expect an exhausted Martial to accompany him to the Baths of Agrippa at the tenth hour, or later, even though Martial regularly bathes earlier, at the Baths of Titus. In one of Martial’s funniest protests, addressed to his friend Ligurinus, who is “too much of a poet,” we meet a man who can’t stop reading his work to his friends—while they’re running, while they’re walking, while they’re using the latrine or sitting in the dining room. “I fly to the warm baths,” Martial sighs, “you buzz in my ear; I make for the swimming bath: I am not allowed to swim.”
The intimate, revealing work of caring for one’s body is made to order for Martial’s satirical purposes. Take poor Thais, who smells dreadful and tries to cover her “reek” with other odours. Stripped, she enters the bath “green with depilatory, or is hidden behind a plaster of chalk and vinegar, or is covered with three or four layers of sticky bean-flour [to remove wrinkles].” It’s to be hoped that Thais stays out of plunge and swimming baths when she is so bedaubed, but in any case, when it comes to her unfortunate odour, it is all fruitless: “Thais, do what she will, smells of Thais.”
The baths are also a fine place to assess the other patrons’ physical attributes. A well-endowed man is cause for comment:
It’s easy to tell
by the roar of applause
in which of the baths
Maron is bathing.
To some extent, nudity was optional when men and women bathed together in Martial’s day, but he complains when a woman is clothed. When he compliments Galla on her hands and legs, she promises him, “Naked I shall please you more.” Still, she resists bathing with him, and he asks, “Surely you are not afraid, Galla, that I shall not please you?” Similarly, Saufeia says she wants to have a liaison