Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

THE HuMAN FIGURE

In the bath he was attended to by one or more girls, who poured lukewarm water over him and “ anointed him with oil”: that is, they massaged him vigorously with hands moistened with oil in order to make his skin supple. Later it was preferred to have a boy to wait upon one in the bath (Odyssey, vi, 224; X, 358; girl-attendants, Odyssey, Vili, 454; boy-attendants, Lucian, Lexiphanes, 2).

The better families in the earlier times had their private baths, besides which there were nearly everywhere public ones (Sypdoua: cf. Xen., Resp. Atheniensium, ii, 10); and, in the rare cases where these did not exist, the baths of the gymmasia and palestre were at the disposal of the public, as, according to Pausanias (x, 36, 9), at Anticyra in Phocis. We cannot say with certainty whether the public baths in old times were separated according to the sexes, as one might conjecture from a passage in Hesiod (Works and Days, 753); since the expression “ women’s bath” (yuvaixetoy Aourpév), Which is forbidden to men by the poet, may refer both to a “ women’s bath ” and “a bath after the manner of women”, by which, if the latter be correct, a bath of warmer temperature and more agreeable to women may be meant. It would agree with this conception that the Spartans at least, of whose ruder customs we have already spoken, forbade the use of warm baths as effeminacy, and kept to their cold baths in the Eurotas.1 According to a fragment of Hetmippus (Ath. i, 18), warm bathing was forbidden to the well-born youth just as much as drunkenness ; and it appears that when baths are spoken of in ancient writings as a rule warm baths are meant. Plutarch expressly informs us that Phocion had never been seen in the public baths (Phocion, 4), and Demosthenes considers it as a great lack of

1 On the cold baths of the Spartans (Wuxpodovretv), cf. Scholiast on Thucydides, ii, 36; Plutarch, Alcibiades, 23.

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