Beauty Standards in Ancient Greece

Beauty Standards in Ancient Greece

In ancient Greece the rules of beauty were all important. Things were good for men who were buff and glossy. And for women, fullerfigured redheads were in favor.

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.

Those with leisure time could spend up to eight hours a day in the gym. They would have been seriously ripped-thin-waisted, oiled from his“glistening lovelocks” down to his ideally slim toes.

Being a good-looking man was fundamentally good news. Being a handsome woman, by definition, spelt trouble. 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 kalonkakon—“the beautiful-evil thing.” She was evil because she was beautiful, and beautiful because she was evil.

Beauty contests—kallisteia—were a regular fixture in the training grounds of the Olympics at Elis and on the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos,where women were judged as they walked to and fro. Triumphant men had ribbons tied around winning features—a particularly pulchritudinous calf-muscle or bicep.

My favorite has to be the contest in honor of Aphrodite Kallipugos—Aphrodite of the beautiful buttocks. The story goes that when deliberating on where to found a temple to the goddess in Sicily it was decided an exemplar of human beauty should make the choice. Two amply-portioned farmer’s daughters battled it out. The best endowed was given the honor of choosing the site for Aphrodite’s shrine. Fat-bottomed girls clearly had a hotline to the goddess of love.

So wide hips and white arms, sometimes blanched by the application of white-lead make-up,were all good for the Greeks. Redheads could also take comfort. Though they were spurned as witches across the later medieval world—and still are in some countries even today—they had prehistoric power, as shown in one of the most sublime pieces of art from all of antiquity.

The Bronze Age wall-paintings on the Greek island of Thera (modern-day Santorini), preserved when the island-volcano erupted 1600BC, show a gaggle of beauties. Just one young woman is allowed to approach the goddess—after restoration it became clear this exquisite creature is uniquethanks to a mane of deep red

古希腊人的审美标准

古希腊时期，男性以身材健硕、肤色光滑为帅，女性以体态丰腴、头发红润为美。

多年来，人们一直以为古希腊雕塑是一种完美主义的幻想。但现在我们认为，从公元前五世纪到公元前三世纪，许多精美的雕像其实来源于生活。

那些有空闲时间的希腊小伙们每天都可以在健身房待上八个小时。锻炼让他们体态轻盈、腰杆纤细，从前额卷发到纤纤脚趾都散发光泽。

男性英俊是件好事，女性美丽则被认为会招致祸端。古希腊著名诗人赫西奥德将宙斯创造的第一位女性称作“潘多拉”，意即“美丽的邪恶事物”。她因美丽而邪恶，因邪恶而美丽。

在伊莱斯的奥林匹克训练场以及特内多斯和莱斯博斯的岛屿上会定期举行选美比赛，参赛女性在场上走秀接受评判；洋洋得意的男性吸引人们把缎带系在他们身体最美的部位，比如十分健壮的小腿及或者二头肌上。

我最喜欢的赛事是为了纪念爱与美之神阿佛洛狄忒而举办的“阿佛洛狄忒美丽臀部”。传说在考虑西西里众神庙位置时，大家决定由最美丽的人来做决定。最后两个继承丰厚遗产的农夫的女儿一决高下，胜者将被赋予决定爱神神殿位置的殊荣。显然，下身丰满的女孩得到爱神的眷顾。

古希腊人喜欢肥臀和玉臂，即使有时这些是用美白化妆品的效果。红发也受人青睐，虽然红发在中世纪后期乃至今日的一些国家被认作是女巫的标志，但在一件古希腊最具盛名的艺术作品中，红发女子却被认为拥有神秘的洪荒之力。

希腊锡拉岛（今日的圣托里尼）上，大批青铜时期的壁画中美女云集。这些女性中，只有一名年轻女子获许接近女神。壁画修复后，人们发现这名女子的特殊之处，在于她有着深红的头发。

古希腊语Xanthos的意思是“金色”或“褐黄色”，常用来形容史诗文学中的英雄人物。金发美女特洛伊海伦在《伊利亚特》第三册里第一次出现时，长者的声音抑扬顿挫，像蝉鸣般吟道，“啊，绝世美人啊。”“女神一般，美得令人心生恐惧”，意思是这种美丽让男性神魂颠倒。

有趣的是，人们认为海伦的妖艳不是源于她的外貌，而是源于她让男人产生的想法和行为。文学作品中的海伦不但将男人引上床，还将他们引向死亡。她的美貌具有大规模杀伤性。

古希腊人认为，万物存在皆有其意义。美貌也有其特殊意义。

美丽是精神和肉体的结合，既关乎个人品质，也关乎上天恩赐。哲学家苏格拉底抨击过所有古希腊的审美标准，而他本人步态招摇、目光斜视、鼻头肥大、后背多毛、大肚便便。苏格拉底对话的内容，实际上是在发掘在这个看似色鬼的躯壳下所蕴藏的闪光人格。但是，苏格拉底和他的门生柏拉图在打一场硬仗。仅在古希腊坟墓中发现的镜子数量就说明外表的确很重要。

恐怕古希腊人都是外貌协会的吧。♦

（译/辛美慧 韩袁钧）

Xanthos—“golden” or tawny—is a standard epithet used to describe heroes in epic literature.When we first meet Helen 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.

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. 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.

Beauty was a psycho-physical parcel that had as much to do with character and divine favor as chest size. The philosopher Socrates famously confounded all ideas of how a beautiful Greek should look, with his swaggering gait, swiveling 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.

The Ancient Greeks were, I’m afraid, faceist. ♦