The Greeks and Greek Civilization Jacob Christoph Burckhard What did the Ancient Greeks look like? What were their attitudes towards Physical Beauty? Excerpt below from pages 127-9 of his great book The Greeks and Greek Civilization Translated by S. G. C. Middlemore, 1878 Read the full text of his famous The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in The Athenaeum Library of Philosophy HERE:

Jacob Christoph Burckhard was born as the son of a pastor in Basel 25.5.1818 in Basel; and died 8.8.1897. His family was one of the most distinguished in the city - eleven ancestors had served its Bürgermeister. Also the family of Burckhardt's mother, Susanne Maria (née Schorendorf), had lived in Basel for generations. Following the wishes of his father, in 1836 Burckhardt started to study theology the University of Basel. After becoming under the influence of the German theologian and biblical critic, W. M. L. de Wette, Burckhardt abandoned his theological studies, and entered University of Berlin in the early 1840s. He studied history and the history of art under Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), whose methods of historical study he adopted. Before publishing his first major work, DIE ZEIT CONSTANTINS DES GROSSEN (1853), Burckhardt revised and edited the Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei (1847) and the Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte by his teacher Franz Kugler (1848).

The Greeks and Greek Civilization'
What did the Ancient Greeks look like? What were their attitudes towards Physical Beauty?

Excerpt below from pages 127-9 Translated by S. G. C. Middlemore, 1878

What did the ancient Greeks look like? What were their attitudes towards physical beauty?

"We might expect that it would be representational art that would tell us most about the physique of the Greeks. But this hope can be only partly fulfilled; art does not show an average, but the exceptional, selected and arranged on ideal principles; it is proof only of what was considered admirable and splendid, and of how people would have liked to look. Even so, art provides strong evidence that the Greeks were beautiful. A nation of ugly people would not have been able to produce this beauty merely by longing for it, and what passed for beauty must often have been seen in reality. Apart from the grave-finds, which will help to establish a norm of skeletal structure, we must rely chiefly on literary testimony, and since the Greeks' opinion of their own beauty can hardly count as evidence, we are forced to wait for outsiders to give their views. A document of this kind does exist, though it is of late date (the beginning of the fifth century A. D.); it is an important passage of the Physiognomica of Adamantius Judaeus and was discovered by 0. Muller. Here a baptized Jew is speaking of the Hellenes as a race already considered remarkable. Apart from some general observations he says they were 'just sufficiently (autarkos) tall, sturdy, pale-complexioned, with well- formed hands and feet, a medium-sized head, strong neck, fine brown softly-waving hair, square-faced (prosopon tetragonon), that is not oval but with fairly strong cheekbones), the lips delicate, the nose straight, the eyes lustrous and expressive, (opthalmous hugrous, charpous, gorgous): they have the most beautiful eyes of any people in the world'

This very interesting statement is the only one of its kind; all others only provide partial information. Either they report that within the nation certain tribes, the lonians for instance, were considered specially hand-some, or they list elements of beauty, that is the individual features of an ideal canon, and those as exceptional, not as average and typical, or else they relate these elements to changes in time, noting a decline in beauty, as for instance when Cicero observes that when he stayed in Athens there were hardly any beautiful youths there. Aristotle's views on beauty are important. In a quite unexpected place, the Politics(5.7) he asserts, with the same logic he applies to the state, that various types are equally valid: for the nose, as well as the most beautiful straight shape, one somewhat incurving, and the eagle type, can also be beautiful, if the divergence is not too pronounced. In his opinion beauty is also in part acquired, so that one can speak of a double beauty, in that, for instance, the competitors at the pentathlon are built for speed as well as strength; and beauty differs from one time of life to another - the old man may possess it as well as the youth and the man in his prime. Obviously, independent of theory, beauty has always been admired in a variety of forms.

Not only were the Greeks most strongly affected by beauty, but they universally and frankly expressed their conviction of its value, in sharp contrast to the moderns, who do their best to see it from the ethical viewpoint as a very fragile gift. In the first place no shyness hindered people from openly praying for beauty. An example is the Spartan child, later the wife of Demaratus, who because of her ugliness was daily carried by her nurse to the temple of Helen at Therapne; there the nurse stood before the statue of the most beautiful of women and implored that the child's ugliness might be taken away. One day a female figure appeared, stroked the child's head and promised that she should be the most beautiful of all Spartan women, and she at once became so. It was also possible for beauty to be rewarded with semi-divine honours after death; indeed beauty in itself made enemies think of a man as a demigod, and to believe that they should do penance for having killed him. Thus the Segestans (who were only half Greek) built a heroon and brought offerings to Philip of Croton, an Olympic victor and the finest-looking Hellene of his time, after he fell in battle fighting them and the Carthaginians (about 510). Or it might happen that a warrior charging down on the enemy in all his youthful beauty would be spared because they recognized something superhuman in him. In such cases national prejudice was set aside, as we learn from the fact that the Persian general Masistius, killed in skirmishing before the battle of Plataea, was carried about the field because all the Greeks wanted to see his beautiful corpse. Even Xerxes himself was acknowledged by reason of his beauty as worthiest among all his myriads of men to be the leader. To our own thinking it is particularly striking that a person can praise his own beauty without diffidence; in Xenophon's Symposium (4.10 f.) Critobulus says plainly and in detail how much value he places on it, and adds that he would not exchange it for the power of the Persian king. The first wish made for sons who are to rule is that their appearance should match their destiny; the essential is that physique should have its own claim to high rank."