Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity by Fikret Yegl Review by: Richard Brilliant The American Historical Review,

Vol. 98, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 1214-1215 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2166638 . Accessed: 03/12/2012 03:02
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Reviews of Books
ceutical characteristics named in the sources to identify lysergic acid, a product of fungi, probably as found on Elewsinecoracanaor finger millet. Finally, Greene analyzes Plato's use of myth, especially in Phaedruswhen myth is rhetorically told in our terms of "physiologicalpsychology." To explain his views on the soul's transmigration, Plato employs optical and psychological imagery to reveal inward truth. The author achieves his purpose: we learn that the ancients' wisdom can better be understood by modern science.
JOHN M. RIDDLE

geographically from the caves of southern Spain and France to ancient India. I am torn because of a conflict between duty to the profession and consideration for the reader. There is the duty to summarize the conclusions but, in revealing those detections, the reader of this review would be robbed of the extraordinary pleasure of being led by Greene's clever logic in reconstructing the facts. A murder mystery reviewer should not reveal the killer. This scientist-author assembles the facts of each case, reviews the findings of others, reveals the details left unexplained, and reassembles the data into a logical explanation based on understanding of science and a respect for the law and order of scholarship. I am tempted to suggest that one who intends to read this book should read no more of this review. The first essay, on prehistory, is a caution that in our search for beginnings we reconstruct achievements on the basis of preserved findings. Greene argues that the soft artifacts that were lost would give us a picture of discoveries far more remote in time than present scholarship's claims of "firsts."The next essay is less iconoclastic because it explains better the accepted wisdom that the Egyptians were poor abstract mathematicians. By showing that fractions were the product of scribal devices for craft and construction activities, the author surmises that the craftbased, practical arts "forestalled mathematical invention" (p. 44). The third and fourth essays are related. Hesiod's descriptions of battles between Zeus and the Titans and Typhoeus show how volcanic activity might be described as sequences of events, sounds, and effects. Hesiod is sufficiently accurate in locating specific volcanoes and eruptions that his work could have been employed in antiquity as places for travelers and colonists to avoid. Greene counsels classicists "never to accept textual emendations of such passages made on purely philological grounds" (p. 72). Similarly, the stories of the Cyclopes, sometimes described as oneeyed giants, are descriptions of volcanic activities by those who did not see "humans as 'we' and nature as 'it"' (p. 86). The historic or legendary Thales's alleged assistance to Croesus's army is shown to be the act of an engineer. According to the incredible story, the army "crossed the river" by having the river bed diverted from the front to the army's rear. Greene identifies the river as the Haly. In the general location of the river crossing, the Haly meanders in ox-bows that enabled a clever observer to cut a silted, restricted channel thus changing the river's course with relatively little effort. No longer is the story incredible. The sixth puzzle provides an identification of the elusive soma, the herbal brew of some plant that is described in Vedic and Avestan works, and possibly in some Western rituals. Recently R. Gordon Wasson proposed that a mushroom was the ancient's soma, but Greene points to finger millet. Rather than using a botanical approach, Greene employs the pharma-

North CarolinaState University

FIKRET YEGUL. Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: MIT Press or The Architectural History Foundation, New York. 1992. Pp. ix, 501. $65.00.

The famous, if cynical, slogan, "bread and the circus," defines some of the palliatives freely given to the Roman people to keep them quiet. The slogan, however, omits an equally important item, the baths and the public bathing associated with them, that entered no less deeply into the fabric of Roman urban life and probably had a greater physical presence in the Roman city than any other institutionalized activity. Public bathing was a popular cultural institution, a major constituent of the Roman concept of humanitas, the esteemed quality that distinguished civilized men from savages and made life much more than merely bearable. Public bathing appealed to all levels of society and to both sexes. Because this activity was housed and serviced in large structures, the Roman baths provided opportunities for commercial exploitation by private entrepreneurs in the entertainment business, for the relatively free mixing of social classes, for politically useful expressions of largess on the part of important or would-be important public figures, including the emperor, and for original developments in Roman architecture and engineering. Public bathing took place either in private facilities, called balnea, which were operated for profit, or in owned and maintained by pubpublic baths, thermae, lic organizations, ranging from the municipality and its officers to the imperial treasury. Whether or not the facility was private or public, Roman bathing was a public activity, involving large numbers of persons who were getting wet, swimming, sweating, exercising, and, above all, socializing with friends. All these activities were contained within the precinct walls of the bath establishment, some of them like the Baths of Caracalla in Rome of vast extent, and were, thus, bodily removed from the affairs and cares of daily life. Despite the acknowledged importance of the Roman baths in the history of ancient architecture and the magnificence of their standing ruins, little work of a synthetic nature has been done on them since Daniel Krencker's magisterial study of the imperial

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

OCTOBER

1993

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Ancient
baths at Trier (Die TriererKaiserthermen [1929]), although piecemeal studies of their typology and construction and of individual buildings abound. With the exception of K. Dunbabin's and J. DeLaine's articles in the late 1980s, little has been done on the institution of public bathing in the Roman world despite its centrality to the exercise of leisure (otium), its close association with the theater, arena, and circus as the principal loci for the pursuit of leisure by the urban masses, and its great demand on the financial and water resources of the state. But now two major studies have appeared. The first, by Inge Nielsen (Thermae et Balnea: TheArchitecture and Cultural History of Roman Public Baths [1990]), developed the institutional complexity of the social forces involved in the creation, support, and use of the baths. The second study, and the subject of this review, is by Fikret Yegul, an experienced Roman architectural historian and field archaeologist. He attempts to integrate the cultural components of bathing into the architecture of the Roman baths and to analyze that architecture typologically and historically throughout the empire. In this ambitious and timely undertaking he largely succeeds, providing the historical and physical development of the institution from its Greek origins to its triumphant prominence in the Roman and early Byzantine world. The architectural ontology of the bath is fully revealed and so too its subsequent evolution, with special attention given to the relation between bathing practices and the particular buildings that housed them, as manifested in Rome, North Africa, and Asia Minor. Yegiil's abundant illustrations and informative architectural drawings, many original to this volume, themselves constitute an impressive body of evidence; his careful analysis of the practical elements of construction, of regional variation in building techniques, and of the heating and water systems of the baths make a distinct contribution, fully grounded on a thorough knowledge of the monuments and of the recent excavations. The book contains numerous references to pertinent ancient texts and inscriptions, nicely complementing the fragmentary remnants of the rich decorations in stucco, mosaic, colored stones, and statuary that once adorned the Roman baths. What is missing, perhaps, is the intensity of the Romans' delight in spectacle as a staple of their public lives, even when mixed with water and steam.

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however, is now enjoying such a renaissance that hundreds of articles on its different facets have appeared, many of them in single-topic volumes such as this. By now the meager evidence has been pressed to the limit and beyond, and redundancy and overinterpretation are rife. This collection edited by Amy Richlin, while not free of these defects, nevertheless shows that imaginative scholarship can still yield fresh insights. Masterminded by Richlin, the author of an excellent study of obscenity in Latin literature (The Gardenof Priapus[1983]), it bears in part the stamp of her incisive thought and robust style. The title of the volume alludes to Susan Kappeler's Pornographyof Representation (1986). Able contributions by Robert F. Sutton, Jr., and H. A. Shapiro, exploring the iconography of heterosexual and homosexual courtship in Attic vase painting, largely tread ground they and others have already staked out. Sutton's observation, however, that "in the second half of the fifth century, female eroticism not only becomes respectable, but is portrayed as a means of personal happiness and social stability on vessels intended largely for feminine eyes" (p. 33), is significant enough to warrant restatement, inasmuch as the literary sources of the period give us no inkling of such a development. Two essays deal with female figures on the Athenian stage. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitch argues that Greek tragedy, while featuring incongruously emancipated heroines, nevertheless serves the politics of repression, a not very persuasive argument. Bella Zweig tackles a thorny problem, namely that of the strange, nonspeaking female, and nude or seminude characters that make brief appearances in Old Comedy. She concludes, rightly, I believe, that they are essentially pornographic, that is, emblematic of the degradation of women in Attic society. Holt N. Parker uncovers the vestiges of ancient sex manuals, all of them lost, but reflected in literature, most notably in Ovid's Ars Amatoria, a poem that Parker considers both a sample and a parody of the genre. Poignant is his observation that ancient authors invariably attribute such manuals to female authors, a practice which Parker views as a kind of "sexual slander." In an appendix Parker provides a useful catalogue of the little-known sources for such manuals. The weakest part of the collection are two studies, by Helen E. Elsom and Holly Montague, of gender RICHARD BRILLIANT Columbia University issues in the difficult-to-document so-called Greek romances. These erotikoi as they are called hypotheseis, in Greek, are the first manifestation of prose fiction in AMY RICHLIN, editor. Pornography and Representation the Western tradition and have come down to us in a in Greeceand Rome. New York: Oxford University vacuum, since we know nothing about their authors Press. 1992. Pp. xxiii, 317. Cloth $45.00, paper and their readership. Elsom considers them "master$18.95. pieces of literary subtlety for an educated (male) elite" (p. 212); Montague more aptly likens them to "HarSince Sarah Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores,Wives, and lequins" (p. 231), mass-market love and adventure Slaves (1975), no overview of the history of women in stories. Ignoring the most salient aspect of these the classical societies has been published. The subject, novels, namely the relative independence and cour-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

OCTOBER

1993

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