Bathing in Public in the Roman World

Men and women often bathed together. They came to socialize, to ogle and comment on various body parts, and to solicit sexual favors while partaking of erotic frescoes and lewd graffiti. They snacked on odd combinations like fish, eggs, and lettuce, sometimes drank until wildly inebriated, and often pandered shamelessly for dinner invitations.

Thievery was a common complaint so many paid to have their clothing guarded. Ironically, bathing was unsanitary; the customers lathered liberally with oil and then scraped off the resulting mess with metal instruments called strigils. Some of the baths used water recycled from the "public troughs". Those who entered the baths with a slight open wound might subsequently develop grangrene! In addition smoke from the heating furnaces could seep into the rooms spoiling the gaiety of the occupants.

It's all here-everything you want to know about the ancient bathing experience including 24 pages of b&w photos and bath plans. Breeze through the 220 or so pages of readable text and then scan the footnotes for other enlightening tidbits. Great stuff, but steer clear of this book if you do not enjoy a highly-detailed, scholarly presentation.


Fascinating and scholarly   June 21, 2000
 22 out of 23 found this review helpful

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! It's full of anecdotes from people of the time (particularly memorable was the complaint about how noisy the baths were from the calls of the sausage vendor to the man in love with his own singing voice...) as well as archaelogical finds.

It *is* a scholarly book. I expected it to be full of footnotes and appendices -- and it is. But I found the text engaging and the facts fascinating -- and the subject thoroughly covered. I come away from the book with a clear idea of the who the bathers were, how they bathed, what else they did in the baths and the importance of bathing in their society. Other books I;ve looked at on this subject focus mainly on architecture and aquaducts, but this book answers the questions about ancient baths that I'm interested in -- the people-related questions, and does so with intelligence and a dose of dry humor.


Could Have Used A Good (Editor's) Scrubbing !   December 21, 1999
 28 out of 37 found this review helpful

This book makes me remember why I chose not to go to graduate school! Every page is filled to the brim with footnotes and the appendixes, index and bibliography, etc. are as long as the book is itself! The author hems and haws so much and is so hesitant to commit himself to a definitive statement that I wanted to grab him by his lapels and give him a good shaking! The middle section of this already brief book (220 pages of actual reading material....but don't forget those footnotes that sometimes take up 1/2 a page) is mind numbingly boring and almost enough to totally ruin the book. This section deals with who actually decided to build or repair the baths and is full of statistics that I'm sure make Mr. Fagan's colleagues happy but will not endear him to the public. You might be asking yourself at this point, "So why is this vituperative joker giving this book 3 stars?". Good question! The answer is because the first and last thirds of the book are quite interesting and well-written! You learn who went to the baths and why. You get a lot of fascinating material concerning the social aspects of bathing. Some people would go to the baths and spend all of their time trying to wangle a dinner invitation out of somebody. Vendors would set up stalls outside of the baths selling light snacks to the bathers. Some people would go the baths looking for sex or just hoping to get a good look at some nude men or women. People would bathe because they thought it was good for their health, but when Mr. Fagan explains that in some baths the sick could bathe with the healthy and that people would commonly oil themselves up and then scrape off dirt and oil into the communal bathwater, you wonder just how healthy the whole thing could have been! So, overall I found this book worth reading although next time around I hope a good editor gets ahold of Mr. Fagan.