The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [17]
The old strictures against men and women bathing together in the nude seem to have retained some latent force, even if they were often not honoured. Martial writes teasingly to a matron that, up to this point, his book has been written for her. But now, he warns her, he’s writing for himself: “A gymnasium, warm baths, a running ground are in this part of the book; depart, we are stripping; forbear to look on naked men.” Then he says, mischievously, that he knows he’s piqued her interest.
Martial’s voice is usually cynical and ironical. But his famous definition of the good life is sincere. He needs, he writes, “a taverner, and a butcher and a bath, a barber, and a draught-board and pieces, and a few books—but to be chosen by me—a single comrade not too unlettered, and a tall boy and not early bearded, and a girl dear to my boy—warrant these to me, Rufus, even at Butunti, and keep to yourself Nero’s warm baths.”
The needs of the body come first—the means to drink, eat, bathe (at a balneum) and be barbered. Then, social and mental life—a game, books and a compatible friend. With these and a servant boy and girl, he is content, even in Butunti, an obscure town in Calabria. The two words Martial uses for “bath” are significant: Nero’s grandiose thermae count for nothing, compared with his necessary and beloved balneum, a humble, non-Imperial, neighbourhood bathhouse. Martial’s unpretentious balneum was in a tradition that stretches back to the Greeks’ simple bathhouses, while the thermae were bravura demonstrations of the Romans’ mechanical skill and taste for luxury. Luckily for Martial, he died around A.D. 103 without realizing that the days of both kinds of bath were numbered.
A larger, even more unimaginable future event was the end of the mighty Roman Empire, as well as the appearance of an obscure Galilean preacher who became the founder of a world religion. The decline of the baths was due more directly to the fall of Rome than to the rise of Christianity, but there is no denying that the three events—one apparently mundane, but close to the heart of Roman civilization, and two with vast, long-term consequences—were intertwined.
BATHED IN CHRIST
200–1000
An Arab gardener in A Thousand and One Nights accounted quite simply for the dirtiness of the Christians: “They never wash, for, at their birth, ugly men in black garments pour water over their heads, and this ablution, accompanied by strange gestures, frees them from all obligation of washing for the rest of their lives.” Of course, the Arab’s claim that baptism absolved Christians from further cleansing was partly a joke, but it suggests how Christians were seen by medieval Muslims.
Outsiders to the Christian tradition have frequently been puzzled by what they see as its indifference to cleanliness. When the twentieth-century English writer Reginald Reynolds was in India, an observant Hindu once asked him about the Christian teaching on personal hygiene. Reynolds answered that there was no such thing. The Hindu protested that that was impossible:
“He who has bathed in Christ has no need of a second bath.”
—St. Jerome
For every religion has a code for the closet, how cleansing is to be performed, when and in what manner the hands shall be washed, also concerning baths and the cleaning of teeth. Nevertheless, I told him … we have none such. How so, then, says he, have you no teachings at all in these matters? To which I replied that our priests taught theology, but left hygiene to the individual conscience.
The Hindu’s surprise was justified, for Christianity’s unconcern with cleanliness is unusual among world religions. There is no single, obvious reason for that omission. The first Christians were Jews, people who were expected to be clean for reasons of health as well as out of respect for others. But their laws were much more specific about ritual purity