The Well-Washed Family Telemachus and his parents Odysseus and Penelope are the main characters in Homer’s great adventure story The Odyssey which was written around 700 BCE They are a very clean family for reasons that would have been obvious to Greeks in Homer’s lifetime Greeks had to wash before praying and offering sacrifices to the gods and in the story Penelope frequently begs the gods to return her husband and then her son Greeks always bathed before setting out on a journey and when they arrived at the house of strangers or friends they would first be offered water to wash their hands and then a bath The Odyssey is a story full of arrivals and departures as Telemachus searches for his father and Odysseus struggles to get home Homer loved describing the preparations for these baths heating water in a copper container set on a tripod over a fire and then pouring the hot water into a tub of brass or polished stone His characters always look much much better after a bath sometimes even resembling gods partly because The Odyssey is full of magic but also because travelers on the hot dusty roads of ancient Greece really did benefit from a good soak Washing the Greek Way By the fifth century BCE if you were a boy or girl who lived in a comfortable house in Athens with servants or slaves you could clean yourself in various ways Your house would probably have a washing room next to the kitchen It would house a washstand that looked like a big birdbath called a labrum Using a jug or a basin a servant would carry water from the tank that held 10 All the Dirt
Ta k i n g t h e P l u n ge i n Ancient India In the Bronze Age on the banks of the Indus River in what is now Pakistan and northwestern India a peaceful and prosperous civilization grew up Archaeologists call it the Indus Valley civilization Cleanliness was important to the Indus Valley people and most of their mud-brick houses had bathrooms and private wells Wastewater from the bathrooms went into covered underground drains Archaeologists can usually identify the bathroom in one of the surviving Indus Valley houses by the waste drains and the better-than-average quality of the brickwork In 1926 archaeologists excavating the Indus Valley city of Mohenjo-Daro discovered what may be the world’s oldest public bath Built around 3000 BCE the pool measures 12 meters 39 feet by 7 meters 23 feet and is at its deepest at 2 4 meters 8 feet about the size of a regular classroom Many religions include washing and bathing in their ceremonies of purification and renewal and scholars believe that this Great Bath as it is called was used for religious ceremonies the household’s water or from the nearest well He might fill the labrum with water or just pour it over you The washing room might also include a pottery hip bath big enough for you to sit in with legs straight out in front but not to lie down in which drained through a channel to the outside Keeping clean was harder for people without money or servants Poor people might use the nearest well for a daily wash and make an occasional visit to the public bath These baths were either free or had a very low admission price so that everyone could afford to go 11 Ancient Grime 3000 BCE to 306 CE
Just What the Doctor Ordered Doctors in ancient Greece didn’t have much to offer in the way of medicine or safe surgery so they often prescribed baths Hippocrates the great doctor from the fifth century BCE was a champion of baths He believed that a smart combination of cold and hot soaks could bring the body’s humors or liquids into a healthy balance Warm baths also helped the body by softening it allowing it to absorb nourishment and supposedly eased ailments from headaches to problems with peeing Cold showers were prescribed for people with joint problems Female ills were often treated with steam baths The Naked Place Once a middle or upper-class Greek boy became a teenager he had another place where he could wash the gymnasium This was an important meeting place for Athenian boys and men and its rooms bordered an outdoor exercise field with a running track nearby Greek males exercised in the nude gymnasium means the naked place first oiling their bodies and then covering them with a thin layer of dust or sand After wrestling or running or playing ball games they removed the oil and dust now mixed with sweat with a curved metal scraper called a strigil You could scrape your chest arms and legs yourself but you needed a friend or a servant to do your back The strigil had staying power the Greeks used it for centuries and the Romans took it up from them After a good scraping you got washed either standing at a labrum or using a tub or shower The shower was pretty low tech the showerer stood under a hole in a wall and a servant poured water through the hole 12 All the Dirt
Wimps versus Tough Guys You probably don’t think that bathing in warm water says much about you as a person For the Greeks it said a lot They worried that washing with warm water would make men and boys weak and fussy In his fifth-century BCE comedy The Clouds the playwright Aristophanes makes fun of the tug-of-war in Athens between the tough guys who washed in cold water and those who liked pampering One of his characters Strepsiades fondly remembers his grimy boyhood a time when no one bothered him about washing or keeping tidy Strepsiades admires men who never shave get their hair cut or wash at the baths whom he compares to his son who is always at the baths pouring my money down the plug-hole A character called Fair Argument harks back to the good old days when boys sang rousing soldier songs and would have been embarrassed to cover their bodies in oil Sit in my own dirty water No thanks Many people who shower think baths are gross because you’re sitting in dirty water and the ancient Egyptians agreed They were a very clean people especially the priests who shaved their own bodies every day to prevent lice Most middle and upper-class Egyptians washed themselves several times a day when they got up in the morning and before and after the main meals but they never sat in a tub A slave would douse them with warm water from a basin or a jug in the bathroom which had a drainage hole in the floor 13 Ancient Grime 3000 BCE to 306 CE
