III. EXTERNALS

The citizens of Athens, in the fifth century, are men of medium height, vigorous, bearded, and not all as handsome as Pheidias’ horsemen. The ladies of the vases are graceful, and those of the stelae have a dignified loveliness, and those molded by the sculptors are supremely beautiful; but the actual ladies of Athens, limited in their mental development by an almost Oriental seclusion, are at best as pretty as their Near Eastern sisters, but no more. The Greeks admire beauty even beyond other nations, but they do not always embody it. Greek women, like others, find their figures a little short of perfection. They lengthen them with high cork soles on their shoes, pad out deficiencies with wadding, compress abundances with lacing, and support the breasts with a cloth brassiere.*²⁰

The hair of the Greeks is usually dark; blondes are exceptional, and much admired; many women, and some men, dye their hair to make it blonde, or to conceal the grayness of age.²² Both sexes use oils to help the growth of the hair and to protect it against the sun; the women, and again some men, add perfumes to the oil.²³ Both sexes, in the sixth century, wear the hair long, usually bound in braids around or behind the head. In the fifth century the women vary their coiffure by knotting the hair low on the nape of the neck, or letting it fall over the shoulders, or around the neck and upon the breast. The ladies like to bind their hair with gay ribbons, and to adorn these with a jewel on the forehead.²⁴ After Marathon the men begin to cut their hair; after Alexander they will shave their mustaches and beards with sickle-shaped razors of iron. No Greek ever wears a mustache without a beard. The beard is neatly trimmed, usually to a point. The barber not only cuts the hair and shaves or trims the beard, but he manicures his customer and otherwise polishes him up for presentation; when he has finished he offers him a mirror in the most modern style.²⁵The barber has his shop, which is a center for the “wineless symposia” (as Theophrastus calls them) of the local gossips and gadflies; but he often works outside it under the sky. He is garrulous by profession; and when one of his kind asks King Archelaus of Macedon how he would like to have his hair cut the king answers, “In silence.”²⁶ The women also shave here and there, using razors or depilatories of arsenic and lime.

Perfumes—made from flowers, with a base of oil—are numbered in the hundreds; Socrates complains that men make so much use of them.²⁷ Every lady of class has an armory of mirrors, pins, hairpins, safety pins, tweezers, combs, scent bottles, and pots for rouge and creams. Cheeks and lips are painted with sticks of minium or alkanet root; eyebrows are penciled with lampblack or pulverized antimony; eyelids are shaded with antimony or kohl; eyelashes are darkened, and then set with a mixture of egg white and gum ammoniac. Creams and washes are used for removing wrinkles, freckles, and spots; disagreeable applications are kept on the face for hours in the patient lust to seem, if one cannot be, beautiful. Oil of mastic is employed to prevent perspiration, and specific perfumed unguents are applied to various parts of the body; a proper lady uses palm oil on the face and breast, marjoram on the eyebrows and hair, essence of thyme on the throat and knees, mint on the arms, myrrh on the legs and feet.²⁸ Against this seductive armament men protest to as much effect as in other ages. A character in Athenian comedy reproves a lady in cosmetic detail: “If you go out in summer, two streaks of black run from your eyes; perspiration makes a red furrow from your cheeks to your neck; and when your hair touches your face it is blanched by the white lead.”²⁹ Women remain the same, because men do.

Water is limited, and cleanliness seeks substitutes. The well to do bathe once or twice daily, using a soap made of olive oil mixed with an alkali into a paste; then they are anointed with fragrant essences. Comfortable homes have a paved bathroom in which stands a large marble basin, usually filled by hand; sometimes water is brought by pipes and channels into the house and through the wall of the bathroom, where it spouts from a metal nozzle in the shape of an animal’s head, and falls upon the floor of a small shower-bath enclosure, whence it runs out into the garden.³⁰Most people, unable to spare water for a bath, rub themselves with oil, and then scrape it off with a crescent-shaped strigil, as in Lysippus’ Apoxyomenos. The Greek is not fastidiously clean; his hygiene is not so much a matter of indoor toilette as of abstemious diet and an active outdoor life. He seldom sits in closed homes, theaters, churches, or halls, rarely works in closed factories or shops; his drama, his worship, even his government, proceed under the sun; and his simple clothing, which lets the air reach every part of his body, can be thrown aside with one swing of the arm for a bout of wrestling or a bath of sunshine.

Greek dress consists essentially of two squares of cloth, loosely draped about the body, and seldom tailored to fit the individual; it varies in minor detail from city to city, but remains constant for generations. The chief garment at Athens is for men the chiton, or tunic, for women the peplos, or robe, both made of wool. If the weather requires it these may be covered with a mantle (himation) or cloak (chlamys), suspended like them from the shoulders, and falling freely in those natural folds that so please us in Greek statuary. In the fifth century clothing is usually white; women, rich men, and gay youths, however, go in for color, even for purple and dark red, and colored stripes and embroidered hems; and the women may bind a colored girdle about the waist. Hats are unpopular on the ground that they keep moisture from the hair and so make it prematurely gray;³¹the head is covered only in traveling, in battle, and at work under the hot sun; women may wear colored kerchiefs or bandeaux; workers sometimes wear a cap and nothing else.³² Shoes are sandals, high shoes, or boots; usually of leather, black for men, colored for women. The ladies of Thebes, says Dicaearchus, “wear low purple shoes laced so as to show the bare feet.”³³ Most children and workingmen dispense with shoes altogether; and no one bothers with stockings.³⁴

Both sexes announce or disguise their incomes with jewelry. Men wear at least one ring; Aristotle wears several.³⁵ The walking sticks of the men may have knobs of silver or gold. Women wear bracelets, necklaces, diadems, earrings, brooches and chains, jeweled clasps and buckles, and sometimes jeweled bands about the ankles or the upper arms. Here, as in most mercantile cultures, luxury runs into excess among those to whom wealth is a novelty. Sparta regulates the headdress of its ladies, and Athens forbids women to take more than three dresses on a journey.³⁶ Women smile at these restrictions, and, without lawyers, get around them; they know that to most men and to some women dress makes the woman; and their behavior in this matter reveals a wisdom gathered through a thousand centuries.