Greeks

Greeks In ancient Greek culture, the body was the object of display and the subject of debate. For example, athletic competition was a central part of the life of the Greek city, and young men were expected to train in the public space of the gymnasium: but, while poets praised victorious athletes, medical writers warned of the dangers of body-building, claiming that excessive development of the body was unnatural. The ideal of a glorious death (the kalos thanatos) was for a young man in his prime to die for his city in another form of competitive display of the body, namely war.

From the sixth century bc onwards, medical and philosophical writers debated the constituents of the body, often drawing parallels with the wider cosmos. Some saw the body as dominated by one element, such as air or fire, but the need to explain different illnesses, combined with observation of body fluids meant that, by the fourth century, most people thought that the body was composed of several different substances needing to be kept in balance in order to ensure health. These could be bile and phlegm; bile, phlegm, water, and blood; or, in the version which was to become Galen's theory of the ‘four humours’, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood. All of these alternative versions of the interior of the body meant that one was expected to take responsibility for one's own health through individual control of regimen: diet, exercise, environment, and appetites. As for bodily organs: the heart, the liver, or the brain were seen as dominant. The female body was seen as inherently unstable; the womb was thought to be able to move around the body, while homologies existed between the top and the bottom of the body so that lips, a mouth, and a neck were present at both ends. This is reflected in our Latinate medical terminology, since ‘cervix’ means ‘neck’ and labia are ‘lips’, but was taken rather further in the ancient world; for example, it was thought that one could detect from a deepening of her voice whether a girl had lost her virginity.

The body was seen as something which needed to be controlled: just as posture and gestures were used consciously to convey meaning, particularly in the public context of the oratory so important to Athenian democracy, so one's body needed to avoid revealing unintentional messages which could be read by hostile others. Physiognomy was a recognized science, claiming to interpret all human activity.

The images of the body which are found in Greek art include open display of human sexuality; costumes worn in Greek plays included exaggerated sexual organs, enormous models of the penis were carried in religious processions, and vase paintings include sexually explicit scenes of intercourse with multiple partners. The images which have had most impact on our perception of ‘Greek art’ are, however, the statues. In constructions of the classical Greek past, in particular in the Victorian period, people have chosen to see these images as pure, white, and serene, part of ‘the glory that was Greece’ — but all stone statues would originally have been painted in bright colours, the eyes inlaid with glass or coloured stone, and metal hair, jewellery, and weapons added. Only faint traces of paint and the holes for the attachment of metal pieces now remain, but even these are sufficient to sully the vision of purity. In the mid fifth century bc, statues start to indicate more emotion, but it is not until the Hellenistic period that sculptors depict pain and grief in their subjects. This was also the period when old age, drunkenness, and deformity were shown, and sculpted bodies were represented with swelling muscles and with attempts to capture violent motion. We are far from the idealized serenity of the classical body, and it is significant that Hellenistic art has subsequently been labelled by art historians as ‘debased’.

Although the male body is usually shown naked in Greek art, to demonstrate musculature and strength, the female body is usually clothed, although the diaphanous drapery may reveal as much as it conceals. Exceptions, such as statues of the goddess Aphrodite, often involve the creation of some sort of narrative to account for their nudity; hence Aphrodite is often shown preparing for, or completing, her bath. Nudity usually indicated vulnerability, but could be used in initiation rituals to represent the removal of one social identity before the assumption of a new one.

In its reception of the classical tradition, Western civilization has chosen to identify two competing attitudes to the body in ancient Greece, identifying each of these with a different Greek god and labelling them the ‘Dionysiac’ and the ‘Apollonian’ approach.

Dionysos was the son of the mortal Semele and Zeus, the main god of the Greek pantheon. Twice-born, he was taken from his dying mother and placed in Zeus' thigh as an incubator. Although he appears to have been a thoroughly Greek god, known in ancient Mycenae, the Greeks told stories of his ‘foreign’ origin as part of their perception of him as representing the ‘Other’. He transgressed many boundaries designated as being socially important: at his festivals, for example, men and boys dressed in women's clothes, while he himself could be represented as an effeminate youth. His violent behaviour was associated with his discovery of the process of making wine, while myths told how his followers — in particular the women, known as maenads — engaged in ritual murder and cannibalism. Dionyosis is also associated with the theatre, where masks covering the identity of the person not only permitted individuals to take on another persona, but also allowed men to act the roles of women. Myths of Dionysos stress his fluidity and powers of transformation.

Nietzsche, widely followed by nineteenth-century scholars, opposed ‘Dionysianism’ to ‘Apollonianism’, claiming that Greek tragedy was the result of Apollo controlling Dionysos. To reach this binary opposition, he stressed the otherness and irrationality of Dionysos, contrasting these with the apparently rational characteristics associated with the god Apollo. Apollo, another son of Zeus, but with a different mortal mother, Leto, has been seen as the most Greek of Greek gods, because of his connection with qualities which scholars have preferred to associate with the Greeks in their role as our cultural ancestors. Apollo is associated with healing — although he also fires the arrows which bring plague — purification, prophetic knowledge, poetry and the music of the lyre, education, and the sun. He is represented with a bow, and is linked to the laurel tree, the leaves of which were used by his priestess at the oracle of Delphi. The calm, orderly image of Apollo has historically been opposed to the rampant disorder of Dionysos. However, the opposition is our own construct, buttressed by the Greeks' own deliberately erroneous insistence that Dionysos was a foreign import. In fact both deities are equally ‘Greek’, Dionysos representing an attempt to control the darker side of Greek culture.

Helen King

Bibliography

Cartledge, P. (1995). The Greeks. Oxford University Press.

See also art and the body; sculpture; Venus.