e, along with the slippers, the
apron, and the purse, composed the baggage that one took with him to the
baths.

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 cro