The Shower

[Eleatic Guest]

...also had to be invented first!

http://www.inventions.org/culture/ancient/showers.html

Do we have perhaps extant showerheads from archaeological excavations? Any literature on showers in antiquity?

[Eleatic Guest]

....hello?

Nobody interested in the history of showering? Are you all bathing fanatics or what? 8)

[marsvigilia]

Sweat, oil, scrape.
Who needs a shower?
Some dandy Greek?

[richsc]

With the Greeks settling through southern Italy and Sicily, and with all those water towers in Pompeii, makes me wonder if such facilities have been found anywhere, or misinterpreted. One thing you would be looking for is overhead pipes. I don't remember reading about that in any Pompeii literature.

[Historicula]

Would a "pipe" as such really be necessary though in this system? The Article seems to imply that the "showers" function in much the same way as a fountain.

[L C Cinna]

Hmm well I haven't heard of anything like this in a Roman house yet. Maybe it still needs to be discovered or never will. I somehow doubt that the Romans saw any need for something like this, although they certainly had the technical things needed, with the water pressure provided by the Roman pipe systems you wouldn't even need a pump but they had their baths everywhere with all the different pools and stuff so maybe this is a thing which actually went out of use once the Romans had built their baths everywhere. I mean why use a shower if you have those baths close to the gymnasion?

just a guess

[Tarbicus]

As the bathhouse also served as centres for socialising and doing business in Roman society, surely they would be the primary, if not only, means of cleaning? We're all too used to getting up in the morning and jumping into the shower.

The Greeks, I dunno, but the showers seem to be restricted to the gymnasium so far.

But I personally wouldn't hold out any hope for showers in Roman households.