Two classically allusive bath-houses, with alchemical postscript

 

A sizeable chunk of the Greek Anthology's ninth and largest book is given over to epigrams from bath-houses. They are all anonymous, which makes it hard to pin them down to particular times and places or to decide which ones are inscriptional and which literary games. Many such epigrams were definitely inscribed for real: Stephan Busch's Versus Balnearum (1999) amasses whole and fragmentary examples.

 I've not yet dived deep into Busch's material but on first glance I note various epigrams written in Greek to praise the Roman sponsors of public baths in the wealthy, Greek-speaking Eastern provinces. These then are classic thermae in the grand Roman style. Or sometimes not so grand; my next post will be about thermae that were allegedly all the more lovely for their small compass.

The bath-house poems of Book 9 give little local detail, but the world they conjure is Christian late antiquity, often in the Greek East but not necessarily exclusively so. The Maria of the second of the poems below was the wife of the Emperor Honorius (thank you, Paton) and daughter of his star general Stilicho, who thereby became his emperor's father-in-law. Honorius was son of Theodosius I and ruled 393-423. It was he who relocated the western imperial capital from Milan to Ravenna. That city would seem a likely enough setting for Maria to exercise her patronage in funding public amenity (her baths seem otherwise unattested, so let us pick whatever story we like).

As Katherine Dunbabin notes, excessive beauty risks incurring phthonos (jealousy) and the evil eye, making the poem for the Bath of Maria apotropaic. The "god of Envy" is Mōmus, a figure closely aligned with Phthonos. He is of course a pagan figure, as is the Aphrodite of 9.607. The late antique and Byzantine elite were classically educated and enjoyed striking pagan poses even as they devoutly worshipped Christ.

9.607

This water is of quality so fine
It birthed our Aphrodite Cythera;
Or else that Cytheraean entered here,
And bathed, and lent the bath her purity.

9.613

On the Bath of Maria

The god of Envy saw Maria’s Bath
And wept at seeing it: ‘I cannot stay;
As with its patron, I must go my way.’

I learned something wonderfully random while writing this post. In the middle ages, long after Honorius' Maria was dead and gone, 'Bath of Maria' became a technical term that had little to do with ancient thermae. Named for a legendary Egyptian lady alchemist, the balneum Mariae was a water-filled vessel in which magical potions might be gently warmed. We know it now in French and from watching Masterchef: it is the modern bain-marie.