The attendants, in later and more corrupt times at least, were men, whose sole clothing consisted of a leathern apron about the loins, while the ladies, who undressed in the Apodyterion, went through the various processes of the bath in the same primitive clothing. It was, however, customary for them to enter the water together in crowds,[336] so that they kept each other in countenance. Here the matrons who had sons to marry studied the form and character of the young ladies who frequented the baths; and as all the defects both of person and features were necessarily revealed, it was next to impossible for any lady, not sufficiently opulent to keep up a bathing establishment in her own house, to retain for any length of time an undeserved celebrity for beauty. In the baths of the East, the bodies of the bathers are cleansed by small bags of camel-hair, woven rough, and passed over the hand of the attendant; or with a handful of the fine fibres of the Mekka palm-tree combed soft, and filled with fragrant and saponaceous earths, which are rubbed on the skin till the whole body is covered with froth. Similar means were employed in the baths of Greece, and the whole was afterwards cleansed off the skin by gold or silver stlengides, or blunt scrapers somewhat curved towards the point.[337] ----- Footnote 336: Victor. ad Aristot. Ethic. p. 214. There was a set of vicious fellows, called τρίβαλλοι, who passed their lives disorderly in the baths.—Etym. Mag. 765. 55. Aristophanes bestows the name on certain barbarian divinities.—Aves. 1528. Footnote 337: Xenoph. Anab. i. 2. 10. See one of these stlengides in Zoëga, Bassi Rilievi, tav. 29. ----- The architectural arrangements of these baths,[338] if we may draw any analogy from similar establishments in a later age, were nearly as follows:—Entering the building by a lofty and spacious portico, you found yourself in a large hall, paved with marble and adorned with columns, from which, through a side-door, you passed into the Apodyterion, or undressing-room; next, into a chamber where was the cold water in basins of porphyry or green jasper; immediately contiguous lay the Tepidarium, to which succeeded the Sudarium, a vaulted apartment furnished with basins of warm water, and where the heat was excessive; from this, moving forward, you successively traversed saloons of various degrees of temperature and dimensions, until you found yourself in the dressing-room, whither your garments had been carried by your domestic, or the attendants on the baths.[339] These establishments were likewise provided with water-closets,[340] placed in a retired part of the building, and furnished with wooden seats, basin and water-pipe, as in modern times. ----- Footnote 338: Cf. Etymol. Mag. 384. 10. Poll. vii. 166, and Plut. Alexand. § 20, where he describes the luxurious baths of Darius. Footnote 339: Lucian. Hippias. § 5, sqq. Footnote 340: