Cathedrals of the Flesh

by Alexia Brue

  It was too late to turn back. Now was the moment of awkward introductions. I barreled ahead, reminding myself that I was a confident New Yorker who'd dealt with much worse than morose professors. My arrival was welcomed with as much effusion as grisly academics muster for anyone who doesn't make tenure decisions. More accurately, Dr Christopher seemed to tolerate my presence, whereas, by comparison, Garrett Greene seemed warm and inquisitive. I was shown to my room and introduced to my roommate (I hadn't been expecting that). She was a heavyset girl named Janet who'd brought a thick stack of Nora Roberts novels and enough anti-everything medication to run a MASH unit for a month. Our shared room with two cots and a barely functioning bathroom was the size of Kemal's smaller deck. The library tour and modern Greek lesson were in an hour, followed by a family-style dinner. I was a freshman again.

  That night at dinner, Dr Greene, who insisted I call him Garrett, and I drank red wine, while the students sipped water and regarded the tzatziki and spanikopita (spinach pastry) suspiciously. On the page, Garrett was someone whose curriculum vitae would have intimidated me, but in person he was open, accommodating, and thoroughly unpretentious. Garrett had as much enthusiasm for tae kwon do (he was a red belt) as for the New Testament — his area was Paul the Apostle - and he had a knack for saying and doing the right thing at the right time. Throughout dinner he continuously refilled my glass, a profound gesture of understanding.

  Dr Christopher was another story entirely, a man less given to banter and the normal lubricant of social discourse than anyone I've ever met before or since. I tried to dismiss his temperament as an occupational hazard, remembering a description of an archaeologist written by Francis Henry Taylor: '[He bore] all the complexities and difficulties inherent in the true archaeologist - jealousy, infallibility coupled with a sense of persecution and a madness for his own subject . . . the very essence of the archaeological character and temper.'

  Dr Christopher's reputation preceded him. According to sources in the surprisingly lurid and gossipy world of academe, Dr Christopher was reputed to have a 'dig girl' each summer and to be charming and irascible. The hard-drinking, womanizing classics professor is practically a Jungian archetype, at least where I went to college, so I had a ready mental image of Dr Christopher. His reputation, however, was based on the pre-happily married man. He was not, I discovered, just your run-of-the-mill harmless asocial misanthrope.

  I suffered through the first bizarre dinner listening to Dr Christopher obsess about his cistern. It was clearly a pet project with which he'd been boring Garrett for years. Garrett nodded and responded appropriately: 'I thought you solved the sealant issue last year.' Dr Christopher wasn't quite a drone - he wasn't forthcoming enough - and he wasn't a bore because he was too elliptical. He was dismissive yet careful — without ever saying anything overtly cruel, he could shovel scorn in any direction. He was the kind of guy who emitted infinitesimally brief rays of charm only to retreat back into his tortoise shell of academic arrogance for hours.

  Luckily for me, there was Garrett, with whom I felt an instant camaraderie. After dinner, he invited me to accompany him to the Platea, the town square, for a beer. It was only 9:30. We walked down the hill, inhaling the heavy honeysuckle air, past a convenience store and a small church with a cross like a tall antenna. The Platea was almost triangular. Along the base were the shops — the cluttered laundry, the village grocery store, and a bread and baklava store. The main road, congested with tour buses during the day, was lined with restaurants and souvenir shops. The tourists stayed in hotels in the modem city of Korinth or farther down the Peloponnese. That night, like most nights, was quiet. After 5:00 P.M., only the locals and the rival packs of archaeologists remain. And the locals have a second siesta between 6:00 and 7:00, when the surprisingly sinister Greek version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is shown.

  Garrett and I sat outside at Nikos's Place. Nikos's was the favorite that summer; Themis, the owner of Themis's Place, had hit the ouzo hard, and his taverna had fallen to seed, or so went the local lore. And Nikos was Ancient Korinth's youngest, most charismatic taverna owner, and he spoke the best English, which made his place the taverna of the moment.

  We ordered two Mythos beers, a watered-down version of Heineken. In the six years since I'd graduated from college, the experience of sitting across from a professor had changed completely. I no longer worried about saying the right thing or asking the right questions. When Garrett noticed a horde of the students coming down the hill toward Nikos's, he said, 'Ugh. The kids. I hope they're not coming over to ask about tomorrow.' I was now considered adult company. Between the teetotaling Baptist students and our acerbic host, Garrett and I were set up to become the best of friends.

  'So what are we doing tomorrow?' I asked, using my adult dispensation to ask the annoying question.

  Garrett smiled. 'Christopher's going to give us an overall introduction to the Olympic site: the athletic stadium and track, the theater, and the Temple of Poseidon. And, of course, the bath. In the coming weeks we'll devote more specialized attention to each structure. And there'll be some housekeeping duties at the dig house.'

  'I can only imagine,' I said, thinking of Christopher's cistern. My mind rushed to the bath, which I imagined as a vast marble, labyrinthine structure with various chambers containing plunge pools, benches, mosaics, and columns. Finally I would see an example of the stunning bath architecture and brilliant engineering I had heard so much about. The imperial baths, after all, had been used as architectural laboratories to test wider and wider vaults and domes. Why anger the gods with faulty temple architecture when a few bathers can be sacrificed during a test run?

  'I've read so much about the Roman devotion to bathing, and still it's hard to wrap my head around the extent of the obsession.'

  Garrett nodded. 'Yes, it's difficult for us to imagine what an integrated role the baths played in the life of the average Roman. We live in such compartmentalized worlds by comparison. The baths were a daily pleasure, the setting in which they washed, exercised, socialized, relaxed, gazed upon art, politicked, scrounged-up dinner invitations, had sex . . .'

  'Had sex?' I asked. I'd read contradictory accounts about the level of overt sexuality in the baths.

  'Yes, there's a delicious body — or collection, I should say — of bath graffiti. For example, a duo from Herculaneum left many explicit clues at the Suburban Baths. Apelles and Dexter were their names, and they'd write subtle things like "Apelles and Dexter had lunch here most pleasantly and fucked at the same time." '

  'Hmm, a full-service balneum. Who did they "fuck"? Men or women?'

  'Good question. They left us a more specific line: "We, Apelles the Mouse and his brother Dexter, lovingly fucked two women twice." Also from the same room at the Suburban Baths, we find: "Two companions were here and, since they had a thoroughly terrible attendant called Epaphroditus, threw him out onto the street not a moment too soon. They then spent 1051/2 sesterces most agreeably while they fucked."'

  The distinction between bathhouse and bordello has always been murky. Eight erotic frescoes were discovered at another of Pompeii's neighborhood baths in 1986. Scholars can't agree on what the two-thousand-year-old porn aims to suggest. Depicted in exaggerated, and some argue comical, form are various sexual acts, including the only known rendering of cunnilingus from Roman times. Are the eight sexual scenarios a menu of services available upstairs? Or, as other scholars insist, were they meant to be funny and even to serve as a mnemonic device (e.g., it's easy to remember that you left your toga under the man with the engorged testicles)?

  Most baths, however, were wholesome places that often doubled as healing centers. Based on medical and nonmedical writers, we learn that the Romans considered visiting the baths indispensable to good health. Vitruvius explained that 'sulfur springs cure pains in the sinews, by warming up and burning out the corrupt humours of the body.' Galen, the ancient physician, prescribed sweat bathing to all his patients, most famously to E
mperor Augustus, who apparently recovered from a life-threatening illness after frequent visits to the baths. Placebo does come from the Latin word for 'I will please,' but placebo or not, sweating out illnesses in the baths proved efficacious for many and was probably an excellent antidote to all the lead they were consuming. Roman aqueducts contained lead piping, and wine was stored in lead vessels; the mental instability of later Romans (think Caligula) has often been blamed on lead poisoning.

  Prostitutes were not the only people pushing their wares. There's convincing evidence that medical masseurs, eye doctors, dentists, and possibly surgeons plied their trades at the baths. Lunch, a quickie, and a molar extraction could all be found under the same roof.

  Garrett explained that the baths were the great social leveler in Roman society. What went on behind the scenes at the Roman baths varied and depended on that bath's specific clientele, the neighborhood, and the proclivities of the emperor at the time. Early on, during the disciplined days of the Republic, the baths were single sex, or so the architecture and literature indicate. During the second century B.C., a social revolution was under way in Rome, and women enjoyed greater liberty.

  The gravitas and severitas of the Republic slowly yielded to the comparatively lighter, frolicsome mood of Augustus' empire. The first-century Stoic philosopher Seneca complained bitterly of this new laxity and effeteness. 'Yes, pretty dirty fellows they evidently were!' he said, referring to his idea of the 'good old days' when men were men. 'How they must have smelled! But they smelled of the camp, the farm, and heroism. Now that spick-and-span bathing establishments have been devised, men are really fouler than of yore.'

  Ultimately, the baths were the death of Seneca. At one point, Seneca had lodgings over a bath where he daily suffered the noise from below. He describes in one of his famous letters from Epistulae ad Lucilium, 'the hair remover, continually giving vent to his shrill and penetrating cry in order to advertise his presence, never silent unless it be while he is plucking someone's armpits and making the client yell for him!' At the end of his life, when ordered by the emperor to commit suicide, Seneca first cut his veins. When this did not kill him, he tried hemlock. Still alive, he was brought to a bath, where he finally suffocated on the steam.

  During the long, colorful period of Augustan succession, business at the baths boomed. Spa towns like Baiae near Naples boasted floating hotels on stilts, and baths were built with such care and grandeur that archaeologists later confused them with temples. Roman life was more permissive than ever, and men and women bathed together — indeed, during this period after the Republic until the time Christianity took hold, the female sex enjoyed a greater personal, sexual, and economic freedom than would be known again until the latter half of the twentieth century.

  Martial, the high-living wit of late-first-century Rome, wrote of coed bathing establishments as if they were a common part of life. He wrote to Galla, the object of his quest, 'When I compliment your face, when I admire your legs and hands, you are accustomed to say, Galla, "Naked I shall please you more," yet, you continually avoid taking a bath with me. Surely, you are not afraid, Galla, that I shall not please you?' Need we greater proof of coed bathing establishments? Whereas previously scholars assumed that prostitutes were the only women to frequent the baths, literary evidence of concerns about adultery and illegitimate children proves that married or marriageable women must also have frequented the baths. Augustus even banned coed bathing temporarily because of the number of illegitimate children sired at the baths who were abandoned on the Aventine Hill.

  Garrett explained all this while I sipped my Mythos and ignored the attention-seeking ploys of Nikos, the proprietor. It was amazing to have Garrett synthesize all this information, and I wondered if academics had differently wired brains.

  'How is it that we end up with a Roman bath here in Greek Isthmia?' I asked.

  'The Romans built baths as far as the Pax Romana extended. During the go-go days of the Roman Empire - say, the first and second centuries A.D. - the Romans had brought the Greeks to heel and conquered most of Asia and Africa. After the fall of the Greek city-state, Greece itself became a Roman province, though it always maintained its cultural superiority. But one area where the Romans excelled with just the slightest germ of Greek inspiration was in their enormous thermae complexes.'

  'And did all Romans get to bathe or just the wealthy?'

  'Everyone went, even the slaves. Not to bathe would be un-Roman, so barbarians, philosophers, and Christians were often considered fringe citizens. The imperial thermae were dubbed "people's palaces" or "pagan cathedrals." It was the one way that even the poor could share the empire's wealth. There's no equivalent in today's society.'

  God, Garrett was clever. He was a virtual encyclopedia and yet also capable of insightful commentary. And he never sounded bored with what he was saying, the way professors so often do. I could be happy with a man who possessed Garrett's knowledge, Kemal's physicality, and Charles's emotional depth, I thought, suddenly realizing the truth of the Russian saying 'A woman needs three men: one for her mind, one for her body, and one for her heart.'

  We stared at our empty beer glasses. 'Do you want to see the Odeon? It's just down the road,' said Garrett.

  'I'd love to.' We settled up with Nikos ('Don't leave - it's so early') and strolled down the dark, deserted street past shuttered souvenir shops. Shortly we came upon a barbed-wire fence with a hole just large enough to accommodate a human body, and we both climbed through into the Odeon. The theater, a semicircle with at least forty rows of steep seating, was a smaller and more intimate venue than a coliseum. Here the Romans staged mock naval battles (a favorite Roman entertainment) and the latest works of the playwrights Terence and Plautus. Garrett and I sat high in the nosebleed seats and stared down at the steppes of vine-covered farmland. From underneath the stage, a testament to marvelous acoustics, we heard dogs loudly nuzzling each other.

  'Why did the baths die out?' I asked. It seemed an appropriate question in the darkness.

  'In the case of the Isthmian bath, and the baths of Rome, for that matter, everything changed in the fifth century. The Roman Empire's influence, especially in the provinces, was waning. The Goths, Visigoths, and Vandals were attacking from the north and destroying the aqueduct system in the process. Paganism's end was at hand. Zeus and Hera and the entire Olympian family went into exile, and the Christian Church began demanding a lot more than hecatombs of cattle from its subjects. The church mandated a certain standard of behavior in which bathing nude each afternoon was not a part.'

  'The beginning of the Dark Ages,' I offered.

  'Exactly,' said Garrett, and he explained that in Isthmia, the Temple of Poseidon and the Roman bath both display unrepaired cracks, broken pipes, and fire damage from around this time. In fact, the abandonment of the temple and the bath occurred simultaneously in roughly 400 A.D. The bath-and-banquet lifestyle that the security of the Pax Romana allowed was a thing of the past.

  Conversation had at last exhausted itself. Tomorrow would be a long day on-site. We headed back up the hill, stopping to peer through the barbed wire protecting the other side of the Korinthian site. The moon bathed the forty-foot Corinthian columns in dim yellow light. We listened to the crickets hiding in the flowers and inhaled rich bouquets of honeysuckle.

  Early the next morning we set out for Isthmia, walking single file through tall grass and prickly scrubs, past groves of orange blossom and lemon trees. I was filled with the giddiness of anticipation. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but I was expecting a kind of clarity, a visual image of a bath, remnants of something for my imagination to riff with. While most people go to Rome to glimpse Roman baths, I'd ventured all the way to the Peloponnese, in search of something richer: a Roman bath with Greek roots.

  All my rosy expectations were shattered, however, as we made our way through an opening in the pockmarked fence and tramped down a long, gentle slope that led into the valley of the Isthmian ruins.<
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  Garrett pointed to a southern part of the valley. 'There it is.'

  'Where?' I asked, seeing only an empty valley with odd clumps of stone overlooking a ravine. 'There?'

  'Yes, there,' he said comfortingly.

  I could tell that he was used to dealing with students disappointed by the fragmentary remains of archaeology. But why hadn't he told me last night that this was all there was? I'd seen aqueducts in southern France and wandered into decaying coliseums and always been dazzled by the remains. But Isthmia's Olympic Village was nothing more than a field of rubble. My mind was spinning. Where were the marble riveted walls I'd read about? Where were the furnaces, the columns, and the plunge pools? In short, where was the bath? These couldn't even be called ruins; they were more like the ruins of ruins.

  Students in T-shirts and Tevas wandered around under a sun so scorching hot that we were like ants under a seventh grader's heat lamp. My throat felt as parched as the cracked ground, and I had no water to tide me over until lunchtime. I'd finally arrived at the much-anticipated bath and all I was thinking about was saliva generation. Around Dr Christopher's waist hung his trusty holster of water; every time he took a swig from his one-liter jug I got thirstier.

  I should say a few more words about Dr Christopher and the perils of asking him questions like 'Where is the bath?' I'd never met a real-life Jekyll-Hyde personality until now. His actions, allowing students rare access to his site and research facilities, displayed an altogether Jekyll-like good intention. His insuppressible Hyde side emerged in his disdain for those less intelligent than himself, which was just about everybody. What began as cute, witty stories and charming Socratic questions turned taunting and degrading when the students lacked his intuition or the confidence to venture an answer.