From dlupher@ups.edu Thu Feb 28 16:41:32 2002 Received: from mailscan3.cac.washington.edu (mailscan3.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.15]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with SMTP id g210fTnJ061986 for ; Thu, 28 Feb 2002 16:41:29 -0800 Received: FROM mxu3.u.washington.edu BY mailscan3.cac.washington.edu ; Thu Feb 28 16:41:29 2002 -0800 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with ESMTP id g210fSre011204 for ; Thu, 28 Feb 2002 16:41:29 -0800 Received: from [207.207.116.56] (wyatt1dhcp56.ups.edu [207.207.116.56]) by mail.ups.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g210fSB31367 for ; Thu, 28 Feb 2002 16:41:28 -0800 (PST) X-Sender: dlupher@mail.ups.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <001901c1c0b1$bd88fb60$6601a8c0@Ginnyhome> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 16:41:28 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: ancient feminine hygiene I have no answer to Ginny Lindzey's intriguing query about what ancient women used for "feminine hygiene." In fact, the only sure reference I can think of to ancient "sanitary napkins" is not all *that* ancient. I'm thinking of the famous story told by Damascius (and reported, I believe, in the Suda) of Hypatia of Alexandria. Here is how the story is related in Maria Djielska's "Hypatia of Alexandria" (trans. F. Lyra, Harvard, 1995, p. 50): According to Damascius' report, one of Hypatia's regular students fell in love with her. Unable to control his feelings, the young man confessed his love. Hypatia resolved to punish him, and she found an effective method of chasing him away. As a symbol of the body's physicality she showed him her sanitary napkin, remonstrating: "This is what you really love, my young man, but you do not love beauty for its own sake." Alan Cameron, relating the same incident, simlilary renders the Greek as "a sanitary napkin," though his version of Hypatia's words is a bit different (perhaps because it didn't have to travel from Greek to Polish to English?): "This is what you are in love with, young man, nothing that is beautiful." ("Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius," U. of Cal. Press, 1993, 42). Could someone with a better library than I post the Greek rendered by Cameron and Djielska (or, rather, her translator) as "sanitary napkin"? August Mommsen ("Feste der Stadt Athen in Altertum," 1898, 343ff; cited in N. Demand, "Birth, Death and Motherhood in Classical Greece," JHUP, 1994. 90) apparently argued that the word "rakos" ("rag") in inscriptions at Brauron referred "to cloths used as sanitary napkins in menarche" (Demand's wording). For the dearth of information on this subject, see Lesley Ann Dean-Jones, "Women's Bodies in Classical Greek Science" (Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 226ff ("In spite of this importance of menstrual blood in the scientific definition of women there is a dearth of menstrual allusion in the Greek classical canon, even in those texts which centre upon the difference between men and women....Even the genres of Greek literature that deal quite openly with the most intimate areas of human experience are silent on the subject of menstruation. Defecation, urination, copulation: the anatomical parts and physiological secretions involved in these processes: Aristophanes makes fun of them all. He makes, however, not a single reference to menstruation or menstrual blood." David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .