Purity Sought through Baptism.
The pagan conception that water produced spiritual purity was expressed in many ways. Juvenal describes the custom of Roman women who sought to expiate their sins, committed in licentious revelries, as follows:
“She will break the ice and plunge into the river in the depth of winter, or dip three times in the Tiber at early dawn, and bathe her timid head in its very eddies, and thence emerging, will crawl on bending knees, naked and shivering, over the whole field of the haughty kings [the Campus Martius]. If white Io command, she will go to the extremity of Egypt, and bring back water fetched from scorching Meroe, to sprinkle on the temple of Isis, that rears itself hard by the sheep-fold. For she believes that the warning is given her by the voice of the goddess herself.”[69]