Bath-Tubs in Ancient Greece

Abstract

A survey of Greek baths can hardly begin without a mention of Agamemnon. The murder of the victorious King of Men in his bath is one of the facts that make history ring true. In her trance before the house of the Atreidai Kassandra sees the deed done. False Klytaimestra has scrubbed her husband clean (λουτροῖσι φαιδρύνασα), and enveloping him in some sort of a net she stabs him to death. He falls down in the watery vessel (ἐνύδρῳ τεύχει). ‘That’, says the prophetess, ‘is the tale of the murderous cauldron’ Anyone who reads the passage carefully must begin to wonder: was Agamemnon really immersed in a bath? Or was he just standing with his feet in the sort of shallow basin that we see in vase-paintings? If we turn to Professor Fraenkel's great edition of the Agamemnon we find that he has his doubts: ‘Aeschylus is likely’, he writes, ‘to have left to his audience the choice between thinking either of the vessels for washing and bathing with which they were familiar themselves or of what they imagined the ἀσάμινθοι of the Homeric poems to be like.’ Our first step, then, must be back to the Homeric bath.