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By Root 721 0

the button. The story turned out to be more complicated than I had imagined. The aristocrats were dirty, according to the audiotape, because of an undulating chain of events that began in the eleventh century. When the Crusaders returned from the East, they brought with them the news of Turkish baths, and for a few centuries medieval people enjoyed warm water, communal baths and plentiful opportunities for sexual hijinks. Although ecclesiastical disapproval and the threat of syphilis cast a shadow over the bathhouses, it was the devastating plagues of the fourteenth century that closed their doors in most of Europe. The French historian Jules Michelet called the years that followed “a thousand years without a bath”—in fact, four hundred years without a bath would be more accurate. At least until the mid-eighteenth century, Europeans from the lowliest peasant to the king shunned water. Instead, they convinced themselves that linen had admirable cleansing properties, and they “washed” by changing their shirts.

For me, the medieval interlude of cleanliness and its end were startling and absorbing news. Personal cleanliness, even during the relatively few centuries detailed in the museum’s audiotape, suddenly had ups and downs I had never suspected, and it connected to far more than soap and water. I needed to know more about all the tentacles—social, intellectual, scientific, political and technological—that found their way in and out of a condition we call “clean.” Following those twists and turns led me from Homer’s Greece to the American Civil War, from Hippocrates to the germ theory, and through a handful of revolutions—French, Industrial and the sexual one of the 1960s and ’70s. Cleanliness played a part in all of them.

The evolution of “clean” is also a history of the body: our attitudes to cleanliness reveal much, occasionally too much, about our most intimate selves. Benjamin Franklin said that to understand the people of a country, he needed only to visit its graveyards. While there’s truth in that, I suggest a smaller and likelier place. Show me a people’s bathhouses and bathrooms, and I will show you what they desire, what they ignore, sometimes what they fear—and a significant part of who they are.

THE SOCIAL BATH

GREEKS AND ROMANS

Odysseus, his wife, Penelope, and their son, Telemachus, were a notably well-washed family, and the reasons would have been obvious to the first audience of The Odyssey. Greeks in the eighth century B.C. had to wash before praying and offering sacrifices to the gods, and Penelope frequently prays for the return of her wandering husband and son. A Greek would also bathe before setting out on a journey, and when he arrived at the house of strangers or friends, etiquette demanded that he first be offered water to wash his hands, and then a bath. This is a book full of departures and arrivals, as Odysseus struggles for a decade to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, and Telemachus searches for his father. Their journeys are the warp and weft of this great adventure story.

Washing in Greece, fifth century B.C. The young woman is about to pour water into the labrum, or washstand.

When Odysseus visits the palace of King Alcinoos, the king orders his queen, Arete, to draw a bath for their guest. Homer describes it in the deliberate, formulaic terms reserved for important customs: “Accordingly Arete directed her women to set a large tripod over the fire at once. They put a copper over the blazing fire, poured in the water and put the firewood underneath. While the fire was shooting up all round the belly of the copper, and the water was growing warm … the housewife told him his bath was ready.”

Let not your hands be unwashed when you pour a libation

Of flaming wine to Zeus or the other immortal gods.

—Hesiod, Works and Days

Then the housekeeper bathes Odysseus, probably in a tub of brass or polished stone, rubbing his clean body with oil when he steps out of the tub. Here it is the head servant who washes the stranger, but when the guest was particularly distinguished,