Cleanlinesss throughout the ages

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Here is a serious question: if the Romans spent much time bathing in luxury, why did kings and queens centuries later not clean themselves at all? What on earth made them so disgusting?
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Thu, Jul. 19, 2007

Roman Bath Complex Uncovered
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ROME - A large 2nd-century bath complex believed to be part of a wealthy Roman's luxurious residence has been partially dug up, archaeologists said Thursday.
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The exceptionally well-preserved two-story complex, which extends for at least five acres, includes ornate hot rooms, vaults, changing rooms, marble latrines and an underground room where slaves lit the fire to warm the baths.
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Statues and water cascades decorated the interiors, American archaeologist Darius A. Arya, the excavation's head, said during a tour offered to The Associated Press on Thursday. Only pedestals and fragments have been recovered.
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Arya spoke as students and experts were brushing off dirt and dust from ancient marbles, mosaic floors and a rudimentary heating system, made of pipes that channeled hot air throughout the complex.
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"The Romans had more leisure time than other people, and it's here in the baths that they typically spent their time," Arya said. "Because you could eat well, you could get a massage, you could have sex, you could gossip, you could play your games, you could talk about politics , you could spend the whole day here."
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However, he added, "to have a bath complex of this size, this scale, it's very unusual."
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The complex was believed to be part of a multi-story villa that belonged to the Roman-era equivalent of a billionaire, a man called Quintus Servilius Pudens who was a friend of Emperor Hadrian, Arya said. It was unclear whether the baths were open to the public or reserved for the owner's distinguished guests.
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"These people lived a magnificent existence and were able to provide entertainment" to others, said Arya, also a professor at the American Institute for Roman Culture.
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Excavations at the Villa delle Vignacce park lasted a total of 10 weeks and will continue, he said. It has not yet been decided whether it will be open to the public.
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Ancient Romans put a great deal of emphasis on bathing, turning the art of the soak into a ritual. Meeting at communal bath houses, they went through a series of rooms of alternating temperatures at a leisurely pace, dipping themselves in hot and cold baths. Bathing was a social event as well as a way to purify the body and relax.
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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ANCIENT_BATH_GENT-?SITE=WIFON&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
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Versailles not only has no bathrooms, it has no toilets. The royal family could use chamber pots (and Louis XIV famously expected his ministers of state to report to him while he was using one) but the nobles had to piss in the corners, and the smell was a regular source of complaint. This really does represent a change. Medieval castles and early Renaissance chateaux had toilets of a sort: at the crudest, some sort of latrine setup, but often nearby streams were diverted to provide a sort of flushing of the receptacle, and I've even read about one seadise castle that let high tides in to flush the tubes. But Versailles (and the other royal castles modeled on it, and the great private houses modeled on them) was deliberately built without. That's because the king ?- excuse me, The King ?- was intended to be seen as something better than human, and the palace was intended to be a backdrop for the royal glory. It's all very much part of the baroque, absolutist mindset.
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In the 17th century, British migrants bathed less frequently than either African or Indian people.
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Importance to the colonial encounter? Probably greater than you think. The Powhatan were grossed out at first contact with the English ?- they referred to them by the word "Tassentass" (translated roughly as "stinky dog-faced people"). The personal grooming of the English men (who favored beards and somewhat cropped hair) was at odds with that of the Powhatan, whose men plucked out beard hair and took pride in long well-tended and decorated hair).
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What was it with that dirty, degenerate, Early Modern European period? How could they have fallen so far below the cleanliness standards set by their medieval ancestors?
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Really, it makes you wonder, when Elizabeth I claimed to have bathed twice in her lifetime, and James I never at all (although he kept his fingertips smooth by rubbing them with a silk cloth). And Isabella la Catolica reportedly also never bathed; what had been normal behavior for her forbears was suddenly (to her) a sign of ?'Moorish' degeneracy. OTOH, Marguerite de Valois complained bitterly that Henri IV didn't bathe often enough, so someone clearly had some standards.
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http://mybeautifulwickedness.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/how-did-early-americans-bathe-themselves/

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interesting topic.

I'll admit I'm a bit taken with physical cleanliness, and have wondered how people in other ages could stand not bathing/showering at least once daily.

Could, and I'm debating saying this....have something to due with the growing Christian population?

The denial, sins of the flesh, self mortification, etc?

stinky dog faced people. Laughing

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When the Roman Empire collapsed, so too did their lead piping. (BTW it's rumoured that one of the causes of the collapse was general lead poisoning leading to infertility.) No pipes made baths extemely inconvenient, and labour intensive. Lack of a general education level and the diversion of all engineering to warfare compounded the problem.

That said, however, and excepting certain cultural mores at certain times in certain places, I've read that what we know as the "sponge bath" was much more common than suspected. But not full body immersion. No doubt that personal hygiene generally was not what it was during Roman times or our own, but that doesn't mean that all the people were filthy all the time.

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It is easier for wealthy people to be clean. Romans had slaves, kings had servants. What bothers me no end is the conquerer/vanquished comparison.
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The Whites who enslaved the Natives were filthy compared to the locals who received the newcomers at their shores.

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Generally spoken: it's the different understanding of "cleanliness", a cultural problem.

(Back to that later.)

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So, what . . . the rest of the world didn't exist? Amerindians, Japanese, Chinese, Polynesians, Africans, Indians . . . does it only count if Europeans do or don't do something?

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Chai wrote:

interesting topic.

I'll admit I'm a bit taken with physical cleanliness, and have wondered how people in other ages could stand not bathing/showering at least once daily.

Yes. And they even could live without radio, tv, computer, cars, microwave, had no running water ...

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Googling for clean people: the Japanese seem to be way ahead.
Admirable chaps, those Japanese.

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Though the following link refers to Germany (and one place there only), it can be generalised:

History of bathing

I've somewhere a "culture history" where it is described why e.g. the use of powder and parfum was thought to be a sign of cleanliness ...

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Personally, I think we are the ones in the modern media driven world who have the wrong perspective on cleanliness.... the body self cleans to a degree, hair does at least, and I hate the fact that everything has to be sterilised, deodorised, sanitised, bleached etc etc.. there are the obvious dangers I know, but I refuse to be made to feel dirty if I don't feel the need to disinfect everything and have 2 showers a day! lol

I had a friend who was a clean freak and would worry about specks of dust and fluff on her carpet... freaked me out!

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Public baths were so common among the Russians that, beginning with Alexei Mikhailovitch (the second Romanov Tsar), western and central European diplomats accredited to Moscow, and later to St. Petersburg when Petr Alexeevitch was Emperor, commonly reported on the "perverse" behavior of Russians in bathing on an at least weekly basis, and sometime more frequently among the aristocratic classes. The diplomats were scandalized by that behavior.

For some Amerindians, bathing meant immersing oneself in the sea, or a lake or river, for others it meant sitting in a sweat lodge. For many, and perhaps most, it also meant following the bath by rolling in sand or dust to "dry off." Even what one means by bathing in all of its ritualistic implications is not a constant by which one can compare cultures.

To speak of European bathing habits, as though the Europeans were members of a monolithic culture; to speak of Amerindian bathing habits, as though they were the members of a monolithic culture--both are, in the most charitable construction, naïve ways of looking at this topic.

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It is always foolish to attempt to paint history with such a broad brush. It took me all of five seconds to find the following information, because i knew it was out there:

Quote:

The Apostle Andrew wrote in 1113: "Wondrous to relate, I saw the land of the Slavs, and while I was among them, I noticed their wooden bath-houses. They warm themselves to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with tallow, take young reeds and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. They then drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day and actually inflict such voluntary torture upon themselves. They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment."

Going to bania is a very old Russian custom. From medieval limes it was popularly seen as a national institution, and not to bathe in one at least three times a week was practically taken as a proof of foreign origins.

Most villagers in Russia had a bathhouse, usually some way off from the rest of the houses in the village, where possible near water. The bathhouse had its own resident sprite, the bannik, the most hostile of the Russian domestic goblins, and was not a place to visit alone. The bannik was envisaged as a naked dwarf or a little old man. The proper time for people to use it was the five or seven hours before the midday . Only three or two bathing sessions were safe, after that it was Devil's turn and no peasant would go in after the third session or after the sundown. A site of former bathhouse was considered to be unclean, even evil and new houses were not built there.

Every noble household had its own steam house. In towns and villages there was invariably a communal bath, where men and women sat steaming themselves, beating one another, rolling around together in the snow. Because of its reputation as a place for sex and wild behavior, Peter the Great attempted to stamp out the bania as a relic of medieval Russia and encouraged the building of Western bathrooms in the palaces and mansions of St. Petersburg . But, despite heavy taxes on it, noblemen continued to prefer the Russian bath and, by the end of the eighteenth century, nearly every palace in St. Petersburg had one.

Going to the bathhouse often was, and is regarded as a way of getting rid of illnesses - it was called the "people's first doctor'"(vodka was the second, raw garlic the third). There were all types of magical beliefs associated with it in folklore. To go to bania was to give both your body and your soul a good cleaning, and it was the custom to perform this purge as a part of important rituals. Bathhouse was the place for the ritual pre-marriage bathe and for the delivery of babies. It was warm and clean and private, and in a series of bathing rituals that lasted forty days, it purified the mother from the bleeding of the birth which, according to the Church and the popular belief that held to the idea of Christ's bloodless birth, symbolized the fallen stale of womanhood. The records about the seventeenth-century Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich mention that when tsarina (his wife) went into labor, she was taken off to the bathhouse, where she remained with only her midwife and female attendants until her child was born.

The bania's role in prenuptial rituals was also to ensure the woman's purity: the bride was washed in the bania by her maids on the eve of her wedding. It was a custom in some places for the bride and the groom to go to the bath house before their wedding night. These were not just peasant rituals. They were shared by the provincial nobility and even by the court in the final decades of the seventeenth century. This intermingling of pagan bathing rites with Christian rituals was equally pronounced as Epiphany and Shrovetide ('Clean Monday'), when ablution and devotion were the order of the day. On these holy days it was customary for the Russian family, or whatever social class, to clean the house, washing all the floors, clearing out the cupboards, purging the establishment of any rotten or unholy foods, and then, when this was done, to visit the bath house and clean the body, too.

(The original article from which this passage was taken links to The Russian Bania: History of the Great Russian Bath, where you can read more on bathing among the Russians.)

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Another wonderful ritual.
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The deepest significance of the sauna
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The sauna is part of the Finnish identity and a national institution which still blossoms in the 21st century. A comparison of the sauna with the bathing houses and customs of other nations provides a perspective for viewing our own traditions and understanding the ways and nature of other cultures. By learning from others, we learn to know ourselves better. Despite their differences, the native American sweat lodge, inipi, Japanese furo, and Finnish sauna have many things in common, particularly on the spiritual level. Sweating in a sauna, a sweat lodge or a furo bath is not primarily a physical act of cleansing, but a ritual that relaxes the body and soothes the mind. ?'Re-creation' best describes what the refreshed mind experiences after bathing in the steam.
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http://virtual.finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=26074

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This is how the thread started:
Here is a serious question: if the Romans spent much time bathing in luxury, why did kings and queens centuries later not clean themselves at all? What on earth made them so disgusting?
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Chai is the only one who addressed the question of this thread.
I tend to agree with her. Christian control freaks frowned upon nudity and might have demanded purity instead of cleanliness.
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All Christians knew that they were born fully clothed, being naked was perhaps unnatural in those days.
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In any case, I find it very weird that Romans had great pleasure in their sophisticated baths and centuries later French kings and English queens did not bathe at all and smelled.

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Actually, it's been qite a few centuries later, in the earlier Middle Ages those ideas weren't common at all.

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I find it hilarious to think that Noinipo believes that he can get an unassailably correct answer to his question.

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This thread was started to let us show our disbelief about something that happened long ago.
Some very powerful people who lived in extreme luxury found it unnecessary to clean themselves.
I find that strange and hard to believe. It looks like there is no explanation for that behaviour. End of story.

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Not necessarily long ago. We know from the book written by the personal physician of chairman Mao that the great helmsman of the Chinese people did not bathe. The closest he came to it was having himself rubbed with damp towels. According to the doctor, Mao claimed that he washed himself in his women, i.e. he cleansed himself by having sex (without ejaculating, for that would lead to loss of yang).

The Private Life of Chairman Mao, The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician by Dr. Li Zhisui

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There is some info in this link that may explain, similar to what Chai said.

http://www.hairboutique.com/tips/tip1041.htm

Apparently people put white powder in their wigs not for lice in their hair to destroy them.

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Cleanliness was magnified in Egypt where royalty and the priests shaved their bodies every other day for purity. It was a spiritual pre-requisite and for many generations it became a celebration of cleanliness/godliness.

The Greeks, although were Helenistic, and mental giants, the were the original western society with hedonistic social order. The hedonistic priorities in the poor separated the culture distinctly.

Rome combined the two, with government officials becoming "little gods" and building their palaces with elaborate baths. It had a regal sense because of their multi-cultural influx.

Through the generations commoners became larger in numbers with the religious sect becoming clandestine and the aggression of the 10-14 centuries, all of Europe became poor. Except of course the few royal houses.

When the 15 century brought naval riches and less war, more of the social order became affluent, and bathing once again became a signal or sign of the wealthy.

The influence of many plagues in Europe and the United Kingdoms also made the bathing more of a health issue, rather than a regal purity.

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Cleanlinesss throughout the ages

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