Note 33 — Chapter VIII
Reading edition
Whenever our writers touch on these matters, they fall into inevitable confusion.
“In the baths of the East, the bodies are cleansed by small bags of camels’ hair woven rough, or with a handful of the fine fibres of the Mekha palm-tree combed soft, and filled with fragrant saponaceous earths, which are rubbed on the skin, till the whole body is covered with froth. Similar means were employed in the baths of Greece, and the whole was afterwards cleansed off the skin by gold or silver strigils.”—Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, J. A. St. John, vol. ii. p. 89.