In Rome, “when there was at first much less freedom in this matter than in Greece, the bath became common to both sexes, and though each had its basin and hot room apart, they could see each other, meet, speak, form intrigues, arrange meetings, and multiply adulteries.  At first, the baths were so dark that men and women could wash side by side, without recognizing each other except by the voice; but soon the light of day was allowed to enter from every side.  ‘In the bath of Scipio,’ said Seneca, ’there were narrow ventholes, rather than windows, hardly admitting enough light to outrage modesty; but nowadays, baths are called caves if they do not receive the sun’s rays through large windows.’ ...  Hadrian severely prohibited this mingling of men and women, and ordained separate lavaera for the sexes.  Marcus Aurelius and Alexander Severus renewed this edict, but in the interval, Heliogabalus had authorized the sexes to meet in the baths.” (Dufour, Histoire de la Prostitution, vol. ii, Ch.  XVIII; cf.  Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Art.  Balneae.)

In Rome, according to ancient custom, actors were compelled to wear drawers (subligaculum) on the stage, in order to safeguard the modesty of Roman matrons.  Respectable women, it seems, also always wore some sort of subligaculum, even sometimes when bathing.  The name was also applied to a leathern girdle laced behind, which they were occasionally made to wear as a girdle of chastity. (Dufour, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 150.) Greek women also wore a cloth round the loins when taking the bath, as did the men who bathed there; and a woman is represented bathing and wearing a sort of thin combinations reaching to the middle of the thigh.  (Smith’s Dictionary, loc. cit.) At a later period, St. Augustine refers to the compestria, the drawers or apron worn by young men who stripped for exercise in the campus. (De Civitate Dei, Bk.  XIV, Ch.  XVII.)

Lecky (History of Morals, vol. ii, p. 318), brings together instances of women, in both Pagan and early Christian times, who showed their modesty by drawing their garments around them, even at the moment that they were being brutally killed.  Plutarch, in his essay on the “Virtues of Women,”—­moralizing on the well-known story of the young women of Milesia, among whom an epidemic of suicide was only brought to an end by the decree that in future women who hanged themselves should be carried naked through the market-places,—­observes:  “They, who had no dread of the most terrible things in the world, death and pain, could not abide the imagination of dishonor, and exposure to shame, even after death.”

In the second century the physician Aretaeus, writing at Rome, remarks:  “In many cases, owing to involuntary restraint from modesty