Greek Baths and Bathing Culture: New Discoveries and Approaches eds. by Sandra K. Lucore and Monika Trümperby (review)

This book comprises the more fully developed papers presented at a conference of the same title, which was the first to exclusively devote itself to Greek baths and was held at the American Academy in Rome in 2010. Four additional contributions on baths, which were in the process of being identified or excavated at the time of the conference, round out the volume.

This collection is fairly specialized and aims at scholars and the advanced student of baths, as it presupposes knowledge on the development of bath houses as well as the pertinent research questions. As this is the first collection of papers exclusively on Greek baths, it will soon become a seminal work in this (up to now) fairly small research field, especially in view of the catalog of all excavated Greek baths at the end of the volume.

As it is impossible to do justice to all contributions within the confines of this review, the reviewer has picked several which piqued her interest. The contributions not discussed here are the field reports on Greek bath houses, as their content can be readily guessed from their titles and summarizing the important points would often necessitate reiterating lengthy architectural descriptions. They can be grouped according to geographical region, with five situated in the western Mediterranean (at Velia, Caulonia, Locri Epizefiri, Morgantina and Monte Iato), two in Greece (Thessaloniki, Lemnos), and one in Egypt (the Fayum).

In the introduction, Monika Trümper starts out explaining the history of research on Greek baths. She observes that with one exception they were only studied as "forerunners" of Roman baths, instead of being seen as a worthwhile research subject in and of themselves (1). Trümper proceeds by identifying a number of important research questions that need to be addressed to advance studies, remarking that—as is so often the case—the comprehensive publication of baths excavated according to modern methods is key. She divides the research on Greek baths into three main areas, based on different groups of sources. The first of these are the written sources, among which the Egyptian papyri form an especially important group. Despite their importance, they have never been studied comprehensively. The depictions of bathing on vases are the second and best studied type of source of the three. The third type, the archaeological study of the baths themselves, suffers from false identifications, old excavations, and inadequate publications, with most Greek bath buildings only known from short preliminary reports.

The contributions in the volume under review also fall within those three categories and will be discussed here in that order, though appearing in a different order in the book. The written sources are represented by Rebecca Fleming's contribution, which charts the appearance of baths and bathing in the writings of Greek medicine. She concludes that curative bathing already has a fixed place in the writings of the Hippocratic corpus and retains it in later Greek sources. The main change takes place in the wider bathing culture, which seems to grow larger and, most importantly, moves from baths taken in ad-hoc domestic surroundings to public installations, with both the bath houses and the bathing rituals getting more complex in the course of the Hellenistic period (29–30). Contrary to earlier research, in her opinion Greek medicine was not driving this change in bathing culture, but just accommodated it.

Adrian Stähli deals with depictions of (mainly) women bathing and/or washing themselves, as portrayed on vases. He disproves the idea that these are real-life representations because, among other reasons, they are complemented by depictions of male bathers. He suggests instead that the depicted young and beautiful men and women are to be understood as displaying the qualities that make them attractive to the male gaze (13). Fittingly, most of the depictions are on vessel types...