s (at least
one of them for women), while about a dozen houses contain
complete baths for private use. Even in a little farm house at
Boscoreale (two miles out of Pompeii) there was an elaborate
series of bathing rooms. It may be added that Pompeii was well
supplied with water. All houses but the poorest had flowing
jets, and some houses had as many as ten jets. (See Man's
_Pompeii_, Chapters XXVI-XXVIII.)

The Church succeeded to the domination of imperial Rome, and
adopted many of the methods of its predecessor. But there could
be no greater contrast than is presented by the attitude of
Paganism and of Christianity toward the bath.

As regards the tendencies of the public baths in imperial Rome,
some of the evidence is brought together in the section on this
subject in Rosenbaum's _Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume_.
As regards the attitude of the earliest Christian ascetics in
this matter I may refer the reader to an interesting passage in
Lecky's _History of European Morals_ (vol. ii, pp. 107-112), in
which are brought together a number of highly instructive
examples of the manner in which many of the most eminent of the
early saints deliberately cultivated personal filth.

In the middle ages, when the extreme excesses of the early
ascetics had died out, and monasticiam became regulated, monks
generally took two baths a year when in health; in illness they
could be taken as often as necessary. The rules of Cluny only
allowed three towels to the community: one for the novices, one
for the professed, and one for the lay brothers. At the end of
the seventeenth century Madame de Mazarin, having retired to a
convent of Visitandines, one day desired to wash her feet, but
the whole establishment was set in an uproar at such an idea, and
she received a direct refusal. In 1760 the Dominican Richard
wrote that in itself the bath is permissible, but it must be
taken solely for necessity, not for pleasure. The Church taught,
and this lesson is still inculcated in convent schools, that it
is wrong to expose the body even to one's own gaze, and it is not
surprising that many holy persons boasted that they had never
even washed their hands. (Most of these facts have been taken
from A. Franklin, _Les Soins de Toilette_, one of the _Vie Privee
d'Autrefois_ series, in which