The Decline of Rome - and the Origin of the Breastroke, by Charles Sprawson
Juvenal measured the decline of Rome by the state of one of its fountains. In one of his Satires an old man, reduced to poverty and distressed by the condition of the city, decides to leave Rome to spend his last years in the countryside. Juvenal walks with him as far as the gate in a final farewell. Outside the city walls the two friends turn off the Appian Way into a little field - Egeria's Glen - to talk in peace. Once it was a sacred spot, charming and enchanted, where the ancestral priest-king Numa met his lover, the goddess Egeria. Now, relates Juvenal, the little grove has been rented out to a settlement of gypsies, and the cave of the nymph, a deep romantic chasm shaded by a cedar tree, has been disfigured by lavish decoration. The grass and simple stone have been overlaid by marble, and the spring waters enclosed in a marble basin. It might look more decorative, but the native and numinous qualities of the place have been suffocated. The divinity of its spirit had disappeared, and in describing the artifice and extravagance of what had taken its place, the leasing of its sacred waters to rapacious foreigners, Juvenal proffers some clues to the causes of Rome's decline.
After Rome's fall water gradually lost its allure. Instead of something 'clear, light, of high value, desirable', its effects came to be regarded as detrimental to health, its influence devilish rather than divine. It began to be thought of as a breeding ground for rats, a source of plague and disease. The breaststroke evolved as it kept the body flat on the surface, and the long sweeping motions of the hands prevented anything obnoxious from entering the mouth. A few centuries after the Roman occupation an Anglo-Saxon poet lamented the desolation of the abandoned city of Bath, and looked back with longing to the stately palaces and the splendid baths where 'stood the courts of stone, with a gushing spring of boiling water in welling floods, and a wall enclosed in gleaming embrace the spot where the hot baths burst into air'. With the coming of Christianity the West began to lose its interest in the sea and the tradition that had spread gradually from Greece and the Aegean. All along the Mediterranean coast villages that had once looked on the sea turned their energies inland. A maritime civilisation turned into one devoted to land, and Islam took possession of the Mediterranean. Of the 400 steam baths built by the Moors among the fountains of Granada only one survived the first hundred years of Christianity.
The church filled the sea with fantastic and imaginary monsters. For Pliny the mermaid had been exciting proof of nature's wonderful diversity, and two captured by Alexander, 'as white as snow, their hair came down to their feet round their body, and they were taller than humans have custom to be', died sadly after being brought to the surface. But now the mermaid siren, whose song appeared to Plato as an irresistible celestial harmony, the music of the spheres, came to embody for the mediaeval church the lure of fleshly pleasures to be feared and avoided by the godly, so that even today the bathers of Naples can be observed crossing themselves before plunging into the water, in order to 'paralyse those malevolent genii of the deep'.
The status of the swimmer gradually declined. No longer was he a hero, capable like the Nordic Beowulf of exploits beyond human capability. Now he needed supernatural intervention to survive. Various miracles depicted men at the mercy of the sea or rivers, powerless to save themselves until they appealed to Christ for assistance. In religious fables the fate of the 'ungodly' was compared to that of the swimmer, adrift in the vastness of the sea, denied the means of reaching safety, and finally overcome by despair.
The clash between the Christian church and swimming first occurred quite early on when a Syrian religious cult known as 'Maiouma' (from mai, the Semitic word for water) became popular throughout most of the Roman world in the declining years of the Empire. It involved performances by naked women in round open-air pools, before large audiences in marble seats that rose up from the pool in the form of a Greek theatre. Their strange erotic tableaux were condemned by the clerics, as were the spectators 'drowned in an abyss of sin'. Swimming like sexual pleasure, came to be associated somehow with the devil, and was almost suppressed during the domination of Europe by Christianity. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that its popularity revived.
(from "Haunts of the Black Masseur", subtitled "The Swimmer as Hero", by Charles Sprawson, published in 1992 by Penguin Books)
