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

BATHING

discipline on the part of sailors to visit the baths (Demosthenes, Adv. Polycl., 35); and it is in agreement with this that Aristophanes (Clouds, 991, 1045) warns young men against them, since “ they make a man slack and effeminate’, that in earlier times they were not allowed inside the city walls, and that Plato in his ideal state (Laws, vi, 761) approves of them only for old and sickly people—harsh judgments undoubtedly according to our modern ideas, but easily explainable by the nature of the southern climate. ‘That opinion on this point altered in the course of time, and that after the Peloponnesian war warm baths became an everyday custom, is clear from numerous passages in ancient written works.

Besides the regular opportunities for bathing, there were also sweat-baths and vapour-baths, which are already mentioned by Herodotus (iv, 75) as a matter of course. However, a detailed description of the ancient baths with their different cells, rooms, halls, etc., does not come within the scope of the present work. That people bathed perfectly naked, without our silly bathing-drawers, needs no special mention. If several notices (see BeckerGoll, Charicles, iii, p. 109) seem to point to the fact (by no means certain) that in the public baths men and women were kept separate, this is not to be explained by the hypocritical prudery of our own days but from the fact (already frequently mentioned) that the Greeks excluded the “ fair sex” from public life, and that boys and young men, who represented it, completely satisfied their need for companionship. Besides, women bathed in their baths completely naked, as is shown by numerous vase-paintings; only quite isolated instances are found amongst them in which girls are wearing an extremely exiguous shift as thin asa spider’s web. In time, however, the custom developed of both sexes bathing together ; yet, apart from the lexicographer. Pollux (who lived in the reign of the

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