Letters

as to be fanned by a constant and quick succession of air. Bacchius, in his account de thermis veterum (on the baths of the ancients), describes this as the frigidarium, because it was a "place blown through by the winds from large windows." However, the true frigidarium, although several writers have treated it confusedly, was the cold bathing chamber. The vessel or place in which they bathed was called frigida lavatio (cold wash), and by Pliny, in the seventeenth epistle of his second book, a baptisterium (plunge bath).

The antiquity of warm baths is evident from several passages of the ancients; they are mentioned among the earliest customs of the Egyptians. Plato, in his description of the Atlantic island, tells us that the inhabitants there had public and private baths, finished and adorned most exactly. Homer often mentions loetra therma (warm bathing), and he makes Ulysses give it a place alongside music, dress, and the most charming entertainments of life.

Always dear to us are the feast, the lyre, and the dance,
Changes of clothes, warm baths, and beds. Homer, Odyssey, Book 8, line 248.

To dress, to dance, to sing, our sole delight,
The feast or bath by day, and love by night. Translated by Pope, Odyssey, Book 8, line 285.

Pindar mentions the "warm baths of the nymphs," and Pisander observes that Minerva prepared a bath for Hercules to refresh him after his labor.

Although these accounts are fabulous and uncertain, they prove the antiquity and use of warm baths, which the Syrians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, and at last the Romans, successively received from each other. The Persians, in particular, who were industrious in improving all the arts of luxury, adorned their baths and made them more