Would you be beautiful in the ancient world?
In ancient Greece the rules of beauty were all important. Things were good for men who were buff and glossy. And for women, fuller-figured redheads were in favour – but they had to contend with an ominous undercurrent.
A full-lipped, cheek-chiselled man in Ancient Greece knew two things – that his beauty was a blessing (a gift of the gods no less) and that his perfect exterior hid an inner perfection. For the Greeks a beautiful body was considered direct evidence of a beautiful mind. They even had a word for it – kaloskagathos – which meant being gorgeous to look at, and hence being a good person.
Not very politically correct, but the horrible truth is that pretty Greek boys would have swaggered around convinced they were triply blessed – beautiful, brainy and god-beloved. So what made them fit? For years, classical Greek sculpture was believed to be a perfectionist fantasy – an impossible ideal, but we now think a number of the exquisite statues from the 5th to the 3rd Centuries BC were in fact cast from life – a real person was covered with plaster, and the mould created was then used to make the sculpture.
Those with leisure time could spend up to eight hours a day in the gym. An average Athenian or Spartan citizen would have been seriously ripped. A rather different story though when it comes to the female of the species. Hesiod – an 8th/7th Century BC author whose works were as close as the Greeks got to a bible – described the first created woman simply as kalon kakon – “the beautiful-evil thing”. She was evil because she was beautiful, and beautiful because she was evil. Being a good-looking man was fundamentally good news. Being a handsome woman, by definition, spelt trouble.
Interestingly the femme-fatale-ness of one blonde-bombshell – Helen of Troy – was considered to stem not from the way she looked, but how she made men feel and what she made men do. When we first meet her in book three of Homer’s Iliad , the old men sing, their voices rising and falling, like cicadas: “Oh what beauty!” they say. “Terrible beauty – beauty like that of a goddess” – meaning the kind of presence that drives men to distraction.
The literary Helen drew men both to her bed and to their deaths. Her beauty was a weapon of mass destruction. In the Greek mind everything had an intrinsic meaning; nothing was pointless. Beauty had a purpose; it was an active, independent reality, not a nebulous quality that only came into being once it was discerned.
Beauty was a psycho-physical parcel that had as much to do with character and divine favour as chest size. The philosopher Socrates famously confounded all ideas of how a beautiful Greek should look, with his swaggering gait, swivelling eyes, bulbous nose, hairy back and pot belly. Passages in the Socratic dialogues are dedicated to a radical exploration of how this satyr-like shell might in fact contain a luminous character. But Socrates and his pupil Plato were fighting an uphill battle. The sheer number of mirrors found in Greek graves show that beauty really counted for something. Looks mattered.
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Bettany Hughes is a classical historian, author of Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore