The most curious of these instruments was the strigilla or scraper, bent like a sickle and hollowed in a sort of channel.  With this the slave curried the bather’s body.  The poor people of that country who bathed in the time of the Romans—­they have not kept up the custom—­and who had no strigillarii at their service, rubbed themselves against the wall.  One day the Emperor Hadrian seeing one of his veterans thus engaged, gave him money and slaves to strigillate him.  A few days afterward, the Emperor, going to the baths, saw a throng of paupers who, whenever they caught sight of him, began to rub vigorously against the wall.  He merely said:  “Rub yourselves against each other!”

There were other apartments adjoining those that I have designated, and very similar to them, only simpler and not so well furnished.  These modest baths served for the slaves, think some, and for the women, according to others.  The latter opinion I think, lacks gallantry.  In front of this edifice, at the principal entrance of the baths, opened a tennis-court, surrounded with columns and flanked by a crypt and a saloon.  Many inscriptions covered the walls, among others the announcement of a show with a hunt, awnings, and sprinklings of perfumed water.  It was there that the Pompeians assembled to hear the news concerning the public shows and the rumors of the day.  There they could read the dispatches from Rome.  This is no anachronism, good reader, for newspapers were known to the ancients—­see Leclerc’s book—­and they were called the diurnes or daily doings of the Roman people; diurnals and journals are two words belonging to the same family.  Those ancient newspapers were as good in their way as our own.  They told about actors who were hissed; about funeral ceremonies; of a rain of milk and blood that fell during the consulate of M. Acilius and C. Porcius; of a sea-serpent—­but no, the sea-serpent is modern.  Odd facts like the following could be read in them.  This took place twenty eight years after Jesus Christ, and must have come to the Pompeians assembled in the baths:  “When Titus Sabinus was condemned, with his slaves, for having been the friend of Germanicus, the dog of the former could not be got away from the spot, but accompanied the prisoner to the place of execution, uttering the most doleful howls in the presence of a crowd of people.  Some one threw him a piece of bread and he carried it to his master’s lips, and when the corpse was tossed into the Tiber, the dog dashed after it, and strove to keep it on the surface, so that people came from all directions to admire the animal’s devotion.”

We are nowhere informed that the Roman journals were subjected to government stamp and security for good behavior, but they were no more free than those of France.  Here is an anecdote reported by Dion on that subject: