of Socrates and Demosthenes as a mark of luxury and effeminacy. Accordingly, Phocion was said to have never bathed in a public bath, and Socrates to have used it very seldom. After bathing both sexes anointed themselves, in order that the skin might not be left harsh and rough, especially after warm water. Oil (ἔλαιον) is the only ointment mentioned by Homer, but in later times precious unguents (μῦρα) were used for this purpose. The bath was usually taken before the principal meal of the day (δεῖπνον). The Lacedaemonians, who considered warm water as enervating, used two kinds of baths; namely, the cold daily bath in the Eurotas, and a dry sudorific bath in a chamber heated with warm air by means of a stove, and from them the chamber used by the Romans for a similar purpose was termed _Laconicum_. A sudorific or vapour bath (πυρία or πυριατήριον) is mentioned as early as the time of Herodotus. At what period the use of the warm bath was introduced among the Romans is not recorded; but we know that Scipio had a warm bath in his villa at Liternum, and the practice of heating an apartment with warm air by flues placed immediately under it, so as to produce a vapour bath, is stated to have been invented by Sergius Orata, who lived in the age of Crassus, before the Marsic war. By the time of Cicero the use of baths of warm water and hot air had become common, and in his time there were baths at Rome which were open to the public upon payment of a small fee. In the public baths at Rome the men and women used originally to bathe in separate sets of chambers; but under the empire it became the common custom for both sexes to bathe indiscriminately in the same bath. This practice was forbidden by Hadrian and M. Aurelius; and Alexander Severus prohibited any baths, common to both sexes, from being opened in Rome. The price of a bath was a quadrant, the smallest piece of coined money, from the age of Cicero downwards, which was paid to the keeper of the bath (_balneator_). Children below a certain age were admitted free. It was usual with the Romans to take the bath after exercise, and before the principal meal (_coena_) of the day; but the debauchees of the empire bathed also after eating as well as before, in order to promote digestion, and to acquire a new appetite for fresh delicacies. [Illustration: Roman Bath. (Fresco from the Thermae of Titus.)]