A bath house at Thessaloniki from the first century BC. Twenty-five sitz-bathtubs encircle a central base, where a cauldron held hot water. Some bath houses had hot-water taps and heated floors. Photo by Monika Truemper; ©2007 Endeavors. Click to enlarge.
Bathing Beauties
The Greeks had their share of good clean living.
by Margarite Nathe
Monika Truemper spent her summer on the sunny Greek isle of Delos — but not so she could soak up some rays. She was there to clean the ancient latrines.
“It was sometimes disgusting,” she says.
The archaeologist scrubbed her way through some one hundred ancient Greek lavatories dating from the second century BC, clearing away plants and debris that had built up since the sites were first excavated decades ago.
As she examined the architecture of the structures, drew floor plans, and took photos, she found that the ancient Greeks weren’t exactly shy. Public privies on Delos could seat twenty to thirty people at once, all along a wooden bench situated over a deep drainage trench. Water was scarce, she says, but they sometimes used buckets of it to flush the toilets.
Other archaeologists dream of studying the spectacular ancient Greek sites, Truemper says — the grand temples and theatres. “I’m more interested in their daily life,” she says. Toilets and bath houses, for instance.
It was the ancient Greeks, Truemper says, who turned bathing into more than just a way to clean the grime off your feet and hands.
During the Hellenistic Period — around the third century BC — public and private bathing facilities began popping up all over the Greek world, even right next to rivers and the sea. The Greeks bathed mainly to clean themselves, Truemper says, and later for relaxation. But they also used the bath houses as remedies for ailments, as part of religious ceremonies, for massage, and sometimes for erotic encounters. “Greek culture was obsessed with the body, especially with beautiful, young bodies,” Truemper says. “It was important to keep the body clean, to oil and perfume it, and to groom it.”
And while they were at it, they even rigged the bath houses so that they could wash in luxuriously warm water.
In hot water
Some think that the Romans were the first culture to bathe for pleasure. And while the Romans did improve upon a lot of the Greeks’ inventions, Truemper says, “many of what we usually consider to be Roman features, such as bathing communally and for relaxation, were actually already present in Greek bathing culture. And then the Romans made it perfect.”
Before the third century BC, most bathers in the Greek world — which spread across southern Italy to Egypt to Turkey — used what is called a sitz-bathtub, Truemper says. “They had to sit crouched and all they could do was shower themselves with either cold or hot water. This was not a very comfortable, relaxing bath. It’s more of a cleansing bath.”
But as early as the third century BC, Truemper says, people began experimenting with different bathing forms, “and they were relaxing. You had hot water tubs where you could actually take an immersion bath. Some were individual, and some were communal, which means that you had a large pool that you could use with other people. This was a completely new concept.”
Part of a gymnasium that featured a sauna. Photo by Monika Truemper; click to enlarge.
It wasn’t long before the Greeks started to relish a bathing form still popular today — the sauna. “This was specifically communal because it was costly to run,” Truemper says. The largest of the saunas, which could fit thirty to forty people, were in the gymnasia; these were for men only, and a highly exclusive privilege.
The ancient Greeks — who never enjoyed the same abundance of water as the ancient Romans did — used sophisticated rain-catching systems to channel as much fresh water as possible into underground reservoirs. Water supply, waste-water disposal, and heating were the biggest challenges of keeping the baths running, Truemper says. There may have been periods during which there was no water to spare, and so the baths were shut down. When there was plenty of rain, though, the ancient Greeks heated small amounts of water and mixed it in with cold water to make hot baths. They also developed pipe and tap systems as early as the sixth century BC in some cities. Some of the technical features, Truemper has found, were quite posh — for example, by the third century BC, they were using heated bathtubs.
“They had a kind of double floor,” she says. “There was a channel underneath the bottom of the bathtub, and outside the room was a furnace room. The heat of the fire was then directed into the channel under the bathtub. Or water could be heated in boilers over the fire and then led into the bathtub.”
Braziers filled with hot coals heated the saunas, and in more refined systems, wood fueled under-floor heating.
But we don’t know much about how the ancient Greeks managed to keep all that water clean.
“There was no link yet between hygiene and the transmission of diseases,” Truemper says. “They didn’t know that bacteria and viruses were transmitted in baths and latrines, and were responsible for illnesses. Even the Romans had no idea.” Most likely, though, bathers were required to wash their hands and feet before slipping into communal pools. “Some sources tell us that the water in Roman baths was often dirty,” she says, so it may have been the same for the ancient Greeks.
Down the drain
There are only three sources we have for learning about the ancient Greek baths, Truemper says. One is literary references, which are few and far between. Another is from images on a certain group of vases, which were made only in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, and show both men and women in different bathing situations. “Most of those images show fictional scenes,” she says, “and cannot be taken as faithful depictions of reality.”
But the best way to study ancient Greek bathing culture is from the actual, physical architectural remains, Truemper says. And while there are more than enough of those to go around, getting access to them is not always as easy as it seems.
There are so many architectural remains in Greece today that archaeologists can hardly keep up with the rate of excavation. Bath building excavators, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often never even published their excavations, and so the ruins are sometimes gone before researchers have time to examine them. “By the time I get there, it doesn’t exist anymore,” Truemper says. “It’s a parking lot.”
For now, though, Truemper has plenty of work to do. “I still have forty buildings or so to study,” she says. And she’s looking forward to attending a conference in Netherlands in 2007, pertaining exclusively to latrines in the ancient world.
“In Delos,” she says, “latrines were astonishingly popular.”
Monika Truemper is an assistant professor of classical archaeology in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has received funding for her research from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and from UNC’s University Research Council and Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost.
