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."
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