A Look at the Baths: Commentary on Martial’s Epigrams
by Ian Frederick Moulton
A scene from an ancient poem: A wealthy woman named Laecania comes to the public baths with a slave who — unlike other male bathers — wears a black leather “strap” around his loins. Why?
A Latin commentary published in fifteenth century Italy explains: The strap tied around the slave’s genitals is designed to keep him from getting an erection, so that he will be sexually available if Laecania wants to have sex with him later. The commentary goes on to explain that the poet and his slave do not cover their genitals in the baths. It also informs readers that circumcision is a particularly Jewish custom; that the women’s bathing rooms are sometimes separate from men’s; and that in ancient Rome young male singers often had their penises infibulated — their foreskins were sewn shut and then sealed with a metal clasp to discourage sexual activity. It was believed that abstaining from sexual activity would delay the deepening of their voices.
All this detailed information on ancient sexual practices comes from a commentary by Domizio Calderini and Giorgio Merula on Martial’s epigram 7.35. Such in-depth commentary was common in most editions of Martial’s epigrams published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since Martial’s witty, satirical poems deal with a wide range of sexual activity — including male and female homoeroticism, oral sex, anal sex, and masturbation — commentary on Martial provides a valuable source for early modern discourse on illicit sexual practices.
Martial’s poems describe and explore a pre-Christian sexual morality and economy that is in many ways alien to the early modern world. They speak in detail of sexual practices seldom openly described in early modern literary culture. And they were very popular in the elite intellectual culture of early modern Europe. Over 20 unexpurgated editions of Martial appeared prior to 1500. In the sixteenth century and after, Martial’s poems were frequently published throughout Western Europe, in Venice, Lyon, Basel, Paris, London, and elsewhere. Ben Jonson owned at least three different editions.
The early modern period was marked by a sustained effort to create a usable past. In a traditional culture that was deeply suspicious of change, innovation was frequently understood as a rediscovery of the lost heritage of Classical antiquity. Republican city-states looked to Roman history; writers experimenting with new vernacular forms imitated Latin genres; artists justified their innovative practices by citing classical models. Everything new was imagined to be old.
The key word here is “imagined.” The sixteenth century was in fact a time of enormous transformation in knowledge, technology, and religious belief, as well as economic relations and social structures. Looking to the past provided comfort in the face of an uncertain future, and offered a way to theorize innovation as a return to first principles. The Classical past had enormous cultural authority, but it also provided a model for ways of thinking outside the paradigms of a Christian world view.
The assumption that old ways were best was particularly fraught when it came to sexuality. In the early modern period Roman ideas about sexual relations were transmitted primarily through the works of canonical Latin writers. Ancient Roman ways of thinking about sexual activity — as described in authoritative texts written by elite Roman men like Martial — differed enormously from early modern norms. Roman texts privileged sexual relations between adult men and adolescent boys that were often seen as sinful in early modern Europe. Humanist commentary on Martial’s epigrams provided detailed description of such practices. Topics that might seem scandalous in other contexts thus became part of a discourse of elite knowledge, rooted in authoritative textual scholarship.
By bringing ancient Roman sexual mores into contact with the Christian world of early modern Europe, commentaries on Martial are a limit case of the humanist project of building a new intellectual world on Classical foundations. Roman sexuality may have been rediscovered, but it was not reborn. Commentaries could describe ancient practices, but not revive them. Take, for example, the Roman baths, the site where Laecania’s slave and his “strap” make their public appearance. The baths were a feature of everyday Roman life utterly alien to early modern people.
Romans visited baths regularly. Bathing was believed to be healthy and hygienic (though the baths were probably breeding grounds for harmful bacteria, especially in the heated pools). The huge public thermae were architectural showpieces, among the grandest of Roman public structures, equipped with gymnasiums and libraries. But there were also many smaller privately owned balnea, some respectable, others fairly seedy, usually located on the ground floor of apartment buildings. Both balnea and thermae provided hot and cold baths for bathing, but beyond their utilitarian function, they were places of social gathering. All levels of Roman society mixed at the baths, rich and poor, free and slave. People went to meet friends, to see and be seen, clothed and unclothed.
The nudity of the bathers may have produced a leveling effect, but baths were also a place of public display. Wealthy patrons arrived wearing luxurious clothes, and even when disrobed, they wore ostentatious jewelry and were surrounded by retinues of slaves and clients. As a space of communal gathering and public nudity, Roman baths were both highly social and potentially sexual.
In the second century AD, Clement of Alexandria warned that the mixing of male and female bathers at the baths was an invitation to promiscuity — he even worried that slaves would become sexually aroused when bathing their owners. On the other hand, in late antiquity St. John Chrysostom contended that nudity in the baths was in no way shameful, suggesting that the baths were seen as a primarily social space, where ubiquitous nudity was commonplace and not seen as particularly provocative.
When the Western Roman Empire fell and the aqueducts failed, the public baths failed with them. In early modern Europe, bathing was often seen as a health hazard, and public nudity was unheard of. For early modern readers, the Roman baths were an utterly foreign and alien space that nonetheless was a central feature of their imagined classical heritage.
Martial represents the baths as a site of voyeurism, where men’s bodies in particular were on public display for the visual pleasure of both women and men. In epigram 9:35 he describes how everyone in the baths applauds when a particularly well-endowed man makes his appearance. Epigram 1.96 mocks a man who seems hyper-masculine and yet looks “with hungry eyes” at the genitals of other men at the baths. In epigram 12.83 Martial mocks a man who laughs at people’s hernias in the baths — until he looks down and sees he has one himself. St. John Chrysostom argued against beating slaves because the bruises will be visible when the slaves go to the baths, and they will provide shameful public evidence of the master’s cruelty.
The baths also offered the opportunity of seeing which men were circumcised. In ancient Rome circumcision was strongly associated with the Jews, and the practice was generally disparaged. A circumcised penis was seen as disfigured and shameful, though it paradoxically also suggested sexual potency. In epigram 7.82 Martial describes a man who pretends to be infibulated by wearing a huge clasp on the end of his penis. But the clasp falls off and reveals his shameful secret: “He was circumcised.” Early modern commentary on the poem assumes that the man is Jewish, and that he is hiding his circumcised penis in order to avoid paying the extra taxes imposed on Jews — an interesting possibility, though little in the original text suggests it.
While the baths may be a familiar site to readers of Martial’s poetry, basic questions about how they functioned remain unanswered even today. It is unclear, for example, whether men and women usually bathed together or separately. Some baths had separate facilities for men and women. The men’s baths tended to be more spacious and elegant, though Pliny the Elder criticized the opulence of women’s baths “paved with silver.” But Pliny also suggests that women often bathed with men, and Martial assumes in several poems that this was the case. Indeed, he scolds Laecania for bringing herself and her slave into the common baths, and tells her to wash herself privately, in the women’s area.
Like early modern readers of Martial, we contemporary scholars of early modern culture are also in search of a usable past — a set of texts and images and attitudes from a past culture that can help us better understand our present and future. At times this search has taken the form of idealizing the past as a time of superior cultural achievement, but more useful is the notion that, like the Roman baths, the past is both intimate and alien. We often do not understand it, and yet it is part of us because, like it or not, it is a place we came from. We cannot go back, but thinking of it may help us decide where we want to go.
Ian Frederick Moulton is President’s Professor of English and Cultural History in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. He has published widely on the representation of gender and sexuality in early modern European literature. His books include Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000) and Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance (Palgrave, 2014).
