History of Sanitation

42 HISTORY OF SANITATION relates a story of a consul’s wife who took a whim to bathe at Teano, a small provincial town of Campania, in the men’s baths, probably because in a small town the female department, like that at Pompeii, was more confined and less convenient than that assigned to the men, and an order was consequently given to the quaestor to turn the men out. But whether the men and women were allowed to use each other’s chambers indiscriminately, or that some of the public baths had only one common set of baths for both, the custom prevailed under the empire of men and women bathing indiscriminately together. This custom was forbidden by Hadrian, and Alexander Severus prohibited any baths common to both sexes from being opened in Rome. When the public baths were first instituted they were only for the lower orders, who alone bathed in public, the people of wealth, as well as those who formed the Eques- trian and Senatorial! orders, using private baths in their own houses. But this monopoly was not long enjoyed, for as early even as the time of Julius Cæsar, we find no less a personage than the mother of Augustus making use of the public establishments, which were probably at that time separated from the men’s, and, in process of time, even the emperors themselves bathed in public with the meanest of the people. Thus Hadrian often bathed in public among the herd, and even the virtuous Alexander Severus took his bath among the populace in the thermæ he had himself erected, as well as in those of his predeces- sors, and returned to the palace in his bathing dress; and the abandoned Gallienus amused himself by bathing in the midst of the young and old of both sexes, men, women and children. The baths were opened at sunrise and closed at sunset, but in the time of Alexander Severus, it would appear that they were kept open nearly all night, for he is stated to have furnished oil for his own thermæ, which previously were not opened before daybreak and were shut before sunset; and Juvenal includes in his catalogue of female