following the advice of his favourite councillor Alfonso Carillo, departed from the traditional policy of Transylvania in its best days (when friendly relations with the Porte were maintained as a matter of course, in order to counterpoise the ever hostile influence of the house of Habsburg), and joined the league of Christian princes against the Turk. The obvious danger of such a course caused no small anxiety in the principality, and the diet of Torda even went so far as to demand a fresh coronation oath from Sigismund, and, on his refusal to render it, threatened him with deposition. Ultimately Báthory got the better of his opponents, and executed all whom he got into his hands (1595). Nevertheless, if anybody could have successfully carried out an anti-Turkish policy, it was certainly Báthory. He had inherited the military genius of his uncle, and his victories astonished contemporary Europe. In 1595 he subdued Walachia and annihilated the army of Sinan Pasha at Giurgevo (October 28th). The turning-point of his career was his separation from his wife, the archduchess Christina of Austria, in 1599, an event followed by his own abdication the same year, in order that he might take orders. It was on this occasion that he offered the throne of Transylvania to the emperor Rudolph II., in exchange for the duchy of Oppeln. In 1600, however, at the head of an army of Poles and Cossacks, he attempted to recover his throne, but was routed by Michael, voivode of Moldavia, at Suceava. In February 1601 the diet of Klausenburg reinstated him, but again he was driven out by Michael, never to return. He died at Prague in 1613. Báthory’s indisputable genius must have been warped by a strain of madness. His incalculableness, his savage cruelty (like most of the princes of his house he was a fanatical Catholic and persecutor) and his perpetual restlessness point plainly enough to a disordered mind.
See Ignaz Acsády, History of the Hungarian State (Hung.) vol. ii., (Budapest, 1904). (R. N. B.)
BATHOS (Gr. βάθος), properly depth, the bottom or lowest part of anything. The current usage for an anticlimax, a descent “from the sublime to the ridiculous,” from the elevated to the commonplace in literature or speech, is due to Pope’s satire on Bathos (Miscellanies, 1727–1728), “the art of sinking in poetry.” The title was a travesty of Longinus’s essay, On the Sublime, Περὶ ὔψους.
BATHS. In the ordinary acceptation of the word a bath is the immersion of the body in a medium different from the ordinary one of atmospheric air, which medium is usually common water in some form. In another sense it includes the different media that may be used, and the various arrangements by which they are applied.
Ancient Baths.—Bathing, as serving both for cleanliness and for pleasure, has been almost instinctively practised by nearly every people. The most ancient records mention bathing in the rivers Nile and Ganges. From an early period the Jews bathed in running water, used both hot and cold baths, and employed oils and ointments. So also did the Greeks; their earliest and commonest form of bathing was swimming in rivers, and bathing in them was practised by both sexes. Warm baths were, according to Homer, used after fatigue or exercise. The Athenians appear for a long time to have had only private baths, but afterwards they had public ones: the latter seem to have originated among the Lacedaemonians, who invented the hot-air bath, at least the form of it called after them the laconicum. Although the baths of the Greeks were not so luxurious as those of some other nations, yet effeminate people were accused among them of using warm baths in excess; and the bath servants appear to have been rogues and thieves, as in later and larger establishments. The Persians must have had handsomely equipped baths, for Alexander the Great admired the luxury of the bath of Darius.
But the baths of the Greeks, and probably of all Eastern nations, were on a small scale as compared with those which eventually sprang up among the Romans. In early times the Romans used after exercise to throw themselves into the Tiber. Next, when ample supplies of water were brought into the city, large piscinae, or cold swimming baths, were constructed, the earliest of which appear to have been the piscina publica (312 B.C.), near the Circus Maximus, supplied by the Appian aqueduct, the lavacrum of Agrippina, and a bath at the end of the Clivus Capitolinus. Next, small public as well as private baths were built; and with the empire more luxurious forms of bathing were introduced, and warm became far more popular than cold baths.
Public baths (balneae) were first built in Rome after Clodius brought in the supply of water from Praeneste, After that date baths began to be common both in Rome and in other Italian cities; and private baths, which gradually came into use, were attached to the villas of the wealthy citizens. Maecenas was one of the first who built public baths at his own expense. After his time each emperor, as he wished to ingratiate himself with the people, lavished the revenues of the state in the construction of enormous buildings, which not only contained suites of bathing apartments, but included gymnasia, and sometimes even theatres and libraries. Such enormous establishments went by the name of thermae. The principal thermae were those of Agrippa 21 B.C., of Nero 65 A.D., of Titus 81, of Domitian 95, of Commodus 185, of Caracalla 217, and still later those of Diocletian 302, and of Constantine. The technical skill displayed by the Romans in rendering their walls and the sides of reservoirs impervious to moisture, in conveying and heating water, and in constructing flues for the conveyance of hot air through the walls, was of the highest order.
The Roman baths contained swimming baths, warm baths, baths of hot air, and vapour baths. The chief rooms (which in the largest baths appear to have been mostly distinct, whereas in smaller baths one chamber was made to do duty for more than a single purpose) were the following:—(1) The apodyterium or spoliatorium, where the bathers undressed; (2) the alipterium or unctuarium, where oils and ointments were kept (although the bathers often brought their own pomades), and where the aliptae anointed the bathers; (3) the frigidarium, or cool room, cella frigida, in which usually was the cold bath, the piscina or baptisterium; (4) the tepidarium, a room moderately heated, in which the bathers rested for a time, but which was not meant for bathing; (5) the calidarium or heating room, over the hypocaustum or furnace; this in its commonest arrangement had at one end a warm bath, the alveus or calida lavatio; at the other end in a sort of alcove was (6) the sudatorium or laconicum, which usually had a labrum or large vessel containing water, with which bathers sprinkled themselves to help in rubbing off the perspiration. In the largest baths the laconicum was probably a separate chamber, a circular domical room with recesses in the sides, and a large opening in the top; but there is no well-preserved specimen, unless that at Pisa may be so regarded. In the drawing of baths from the thermae of Titus (fig. 1), the laconicum is represented as a small cupola rising in a corner of the calidarium. It is known that the temperature of the laconicum was regulated by drawing up or down a metallic plate or clypeus. Some think that this clypeus was directly over the flames of the hypocaustum, and that when it was withdrawn, the flames must have sprung into the laconicum. Others, and apparently they have Vitruvius on their side, think that the clypeus was drawn up or down only from the aperture in the roof, and that it regulated the temperature simply by giving more or less free exit to the hot air. If the laconicum was only one end of the calidarium, it is difficult to see how that end of the room was kept so much hotter than the rest of it; on the other hand, to have had flames actually issuing from the laconicum must have caused smoke and soot, and have been very unpleasant. The most usual order in which the rooms were employed seems to have been the following, but there does not appear to have been any absolute uniformity of practice then, any more than in modern Egyptian and Turkish baths. Celsus recommends the bather first to sweat a little in the tepidarium with his clothes on, to be anointed there, and then to pass into the calidarium; after he has sweated freely there he is not to descend into the solium or cold bath, but to have plenty of water poured over him from his head,—first warm, then tepid, and then
