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SIX - Civic Nudity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2009
Summary
[Lacedaemonians] were the first to strip naked and, having undressed in public, to anoint themselves with oil when training naked. In former times, even in the Olympic competition, the athletes competed wearing loinclothes over the genitals, and it is not many years since they have stopped wearing them; and there are still some among the barbarians today, especially the Asians, who set up prizes for boxing and wrestling, and they do this wearing loinclothes. And in many other ways one could demonstrate the conformity between the modes of life of the Hellenic past and the barbarian present.
(Thucydides 1.6.5)In an introduction dominated by the aggregation of wealth and power as the key principles of historical change, Thucydides' brief excursus into the sartorial stands out in high relief. Greekness did not fully distinguish itself from barbarism until the clothes came off. The Greeks' peculiar openness or lack of shame about the body seems to entail a coming-to-terms with sexual eros, although it is unclear whether nudity meant a sexual freedom hitherto unknown to barbarian peoples, and which most of them would have considered vice, or whether, as seems implied in self-congratulatory Greek art and literature, naked athletics was an arena in which Greeks demonstrated their self-control and the mastery of mind over body. Nor is it clear what nudity contributed to the full flourishing of the polis, that it should make an appearance not only in Thucydides' terse and elliptical reconstruction of the growth and progress of the Greek poleis, but also in Plato's theoretical account of the perfect polis, the Republic, in which complete justice requires that women as well as men strip naked and that the sexes exercise together.
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- Information
- Eros and PolisDesire and Community in Greek Political Theory, pp. 261 - 318Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002