Nudity in Greek Athletics

Author(s): James A. Arieti

Source: The Classical World, Vol. 68, No. 7 (Apr. - May, 1975), pp. 431-436
Published by: Classical Association of the Atlantic States
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4348281
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APRIL - MAY 1975 THE CLASSICALWORLD 431

Nudity in Greek Athletics

During the 15th Olympic games in 720 B. C., when the loincloth flew from
Orsippus' waist, the Greeks cast aside their modesty.' It is not known
whether the cloth fell by chance, nor whether Orsippus with pure or
mischievous intent threw it aside, but he won two first prizes that day; he was
victor in the race, and the first to be crowned naked:

First of the Greeks in Olympia was he crowned while naked;

Before him, all contestants were girdled in the stadium.2
Never again would a male Greek athlete take up the cloth;3 henceforth he
would compete in a nakedness scorned by the barbarians, but gloried in by
the Greeks themselves.

Thucydides and Plato agree that the Greeks began to compete naked in
athletic contests at a particular moment in time. Both also express implicit
praise for the change in presenting situations wherein a worse set of earlier
customs is compared to a better later one.

Thucydides, when at the outset of his history he describes the conditions of

early Greece which were too primitive for a conflict on the scale of the
Peloponnesian War,4 says that the Lacedaemonians were the first to contend
naked, to strip themselves in public and anoint their bodies with oil. Until
recently, Thucydides continues, even in the Olympic contests, the athletes
wore loincloths, but the barbarians, especially in Asia, even in the present,
when prizes for boxing and wrestling are offered, wear girdles (diazomata).
The expression of Greek superiority in this matter is stated in the concluding
sentence of the passage: "and one might show many other points in which the
old Greek ways are like the barbarian ways of today" (1.6).
There is a rival claim by Acanthus of Sparta for the innovation of running naked, according
to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (7.72.3-4). Dionysius adds that before this time the Greeks
were ashamed to appear naked in games, and he cites various passages in Homer where
heroes "gird their loins" for sport (11.23.685; Od. 18.66-69, 74-75). According to Isidorus
(Etymologiarum 17.2), a certain (unnamed) runner was once surprised when his loincloth fell
down during a race. it was then decreed by the archon Hippomenes that all men would hence-
forth exercise naked.
2From an epitaph on Orsippus, attributed to Simonides (E. L. Hicks, A Manual of Greek
Historical Inscriptions [Oxford 1882] 1).

3E. Norman Gardiner, Athletics of the Ancient World (Oxford 1930) 191, suggests, on the
basis of a vase belonging to the end of the sixth century in which the athletes wear a white
loincloth, that an attempt may have been made to re-introduce the loincloth at this time.
But Gardiner is himself very uncertain on this point, raising it simply as a question, and there
is no real evidence that the loincloth was re-introduced.
4W. Jaeger, Paideia, I, tr. G. Highet (Oxford 1939) 384, observes that in the "archeological
section" Thucydides is concerned with improved technology and trade, "utterly neglecting"
the rich artistic heritage.
432 THE CLASSICALWORLD APRIL - MAY 1975

Socrates, arguing in Plato's Republic (452C) that the Greeks could adjust
to a new and better set of rules about women, one allowing them to become
guardians, says analogically that:
It is not long since it seemed shameful and laughable to the
Greeks, as it still does to the barbarians, for men to be seen
naked, and when first the Cretans and then the Lacedaemonians
began to engage in athletics, it was open to the sophisticates of
that time to make sport of these things . .. but when experience
showed it was better to strip and reveal all, then that which had
appeared laughable yielded to what appeared best to reason.

Herodotus, when he relates the story of Candaules and Gyges, the an-
tecedent of Croesus' misfortune, also remarks on the difference between the
Greeks and barbarians in the question of public nudity: "for among the
Lydians, as among the barbarians generally, to be seen naked, even for a
man, is considered a great shame" (1.10).5

The moment in history when the loincloth was removed is recorded; as the
major authors indicate, the Greeks' nakedness in athletic contests marked a
great difference between them and the barbarians; the Greeks considered
this difference an example of their superiority over the rest of the world.
These facts compel an examination of the motives for the nudity. The nudity
shocked and offended the Romans to the west, and never became the practice
of the Asians to the east.6 How is this public nakedness consistent with the
civilization of the Greek mind?
A few feeble ancient speculations on the causes of the athletic nudity sur-
vive. Pausanias (1.44.1-2 , when he describes the grave of Orsippus, affirms
his opinion that the athlete dropped the loincloth (periz6ma on purpose
(ekonti) because the athlete understood that a man might run more easily
naked. Hippomenes shared this opinion, according to Isidorus
(Etymologiarum 17.2), when he decreed that athletes should exercise naked.
But it can be confidently doubted whether absolute nudity is of any ad-

Euripides (Andromache 595-600) puts the Asians' disgust with public nudity in Priam's
speech decrying the custom of Spartan women who exercise in light attire: "Nor if one wished,
could there be a modest maid of Sparta, for the Spartan women go out from their homes
with young men with naked thighs and loosened robes, and they race and wrestle with them
things shameful to me."
6The Romans are more in the mainstream of the West: Ennius, quoted by Cicero (Tusc. Disp.
4.70), says that turpitude begins in public nakedness: flagitii principium est nudare inter civis
corpora. Cicero praises Ennius for this opinion. Tacitus relates the Roman condemnation of
Nero's imitation of the Greek contests, a condemnation based on the insipidity of sporting com-
bat compared to military combat and on the nakedness of the contestants (Annales 14.20.5-6).
Pliny, discussing the properties of olive oil (Natural History 15.19), attacks the Greeks, the
parents of all vices (Graeci vitiorum omnium genitores), for using it luxuriously in their
gymnasia. Cato, as reported by Plutarch (20.5-6), reviles the Greek practice of sons-in-law
bathing with their fathers-in-law. The Roman prohibition extended, like the Hebrew pro-
hibition (Gen. 9.22-25), to sons seeing their fathers naked (Cicero,De officiis 1.129).
APRIL - MAY 1975 THE CLASSICALWORLD 433

vantage in wrestling and boxing or in running. Indeed, as H. I. Marrou ob-

serves, "it may have its disadvantages!"7 It certainly has not been found of
value to modern athletes who, far from going naked, take special care to
protect the genital area.
While describing Mt. Typaeum in Elis (5.6.7-8), the mountain from which
women who were caught at the Olympic site were hurled, Pausanias pauses to
relate the story of Callipateira, whose father, brothers, and son were all vic-
tors in the games. One day, she was found in the trainers' area disguised as a
man. Although she was not killed as required by the law - out of respect for
her relatives - a law was passed that in the future all trainers should strip
naked before entering the arena.8 That the athletes themselves stripped to
avoid suspicion has never been suggested and, in any case, a loincloth, as had
previously been worn, would not have provided sufficient disguise for women
entering the games.
Anthropologists maintain that the principal raison d'etre for clothes is to
distinguish the various ranks of individuals in a society. They report, for
example, that Hawaiian nobles attached feathered capes to their dress in or-
der to show their high station. Now even if variations in the quality and or-
namentation of the tunics and cloaks of the spectators were noticeable, thus
showing a difference in rank, there could not have been sufficient differences
in the loincloths of the athletes to tell a noble from an ordinary citizen. The
suggestion, therefore, that the Greeks participated naked in order that there
be no question of rank, but only of athletic skill, would be unfounded.

Modern scholars have offered no explanation. They either exult in the op-
portunity this nudity afforded sculptors readily and accurately to study the
body or they exult in the healthy attitude of the Greeks towards nudity. Gar-
diner, for example, puts forth the first view:

It has been well said that without athletics Greek sculpture can-
not be conceived. The gymnasium was the Greek sculptor's
studio. There daily he could watch men and boys of every age
engaged in every form of sport, and there he acquired that con-
summate knowledge of the human body that is his chief glory ....
This custom of nudity, which was the Greek sculptor's op-
portunity, had no little effect on athletics. It is not merely that ex-
posure to the air and sun-bath are, as the doctors now tell us, the

7A History of Education in Antiquity, tr. George Lamb (New York 1964) 177.

8This story bears some resemblance to the recent hormonal examinations female athletes have
had to undergo to prove they are not men, as had been alleged of various East European
athletes. How one Polish person failed the sex test can be found in Newsweek (70) Sept. 25,
1967, p. 97. See also "Are Girl Athletes Really Girls?" in Life (61) Oct. 7, 1966, pp. 63-66.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1968 established a rule stating that female
athletes must agree to a medical examination to verify their sex (New York Times, May 9,
1968, p. 59:4).
434 THE CLASSICALWORLD APRIL - MAY 1975

very best of physic, but it served as a valuable incentive to the

youth of Greece to keep themselves in good condition.9

And Hans Licht writes that

the Greeks, the healthiest and most aesthetically perfect people

hitherto known to the world, soon felt a covering of the sexual
parts, while the body was otherwise uncovered, to be unnatural,
and recognized that such covering only had meaning if one had
ascribed a moral and inferior value to their functions. But just the
opposite was the case, so that far from being ashamed of these
organs, the Greeks rather regarded them with pious awe and
treated them with an almost religious reverence as the mystical
instruments of propagation, as the symbols of nature, life-
producing and fruitful.'0

There is no question that among athletes at the palaestrae and gymnasia

the nakedness was the source for a good deal of sexual arousal. Socrates,
visiting the palaestra of Taureas, sees inside Charmides' garment "and
becomes inflamed." He relates that he can no longer control himself, over-
come by a sort of "bestial appetite" (Charmides 155C-D). In the Symposium
(217B), Alcibiades confesses to what must have been a fairly common method
of homosexual seduction - the challenge to a wrestling match. That
Socrates failed to succumb to this attempt amazed Alcibiades." In the
Clouds, Better Argument goes into detail, rather lustily, on the practices of
the gymnasium to control sexual arousal:

And at the gymnastic teacher's, the boys had to sit with one thigh
forward, so as not to show anything tortuous to those outside.
And when a boy got up again he had to brush the sand over and
be careful not to leave an imprint of his youth for his lovers. And
no boy then would anoint himself with oil below the navel, so that
the dew and down bloomed on his genitals as on quinces (972-
978).

At Aeschines' Timarchus 12, the law is read stating that "the superin-
tendents of gymnasia shall allow no one who has reached the age of manhood
to enter the contests of Hermes together with the boys; if they do, they will be
punished under the penalties prescribed for the seduction of free-born
youths;" the scholiast, explaining the passage, writes that "in the inner part
of the house at schools and palaestrae there were columns and chapels, with

9Gardiner 57-58. One might wonder, following this argument, where Greek sculptors ever
learned of the female form.

'?SexualLife in Ancient Greece (London 1956) 88-89.

"Other passages in Plato where gymnastics and sexual activity are linked are Laws 636B and
Republic 458D.
APRIL - MAY 1975 THE CLASSICALWORLD 435

altars to the Muses, Hermes, and Heracles. There was also drinking water
there, but many boys, under the pretence of drinking, came in and practised
immorality.""2And Plutarch (Roman Questions 40.274D) says that the gym-
nasia and palaestrae in the Greek cities foster idleness, badly spent leisure,
paederasty, and the ruin of bodies.

But athletic festivals for the Greeks were much more than a national
pastime: they permitted the contestants to exercise aidos (Pindar, 01. 7.44).
The victors in the important Olympic and Pythian competitions brought
fame to their cities and glory to their families. The close connection of
religious festivals with athletic competition joined them in the minds of the
people. Successful athletes were honored nearly as much as the gods, so
much so that Xenophanes felt compelled to complain of the excessive honors
they received in comparison to poets, the true benefactors of the city. The
athlete made the citizens think they are happy, as Socrates says (Apology
36D), and Olympic victors were believed to be the happiest of men (Republic
465D). Athletics represented for the Greeks, in Jaeger's words, "The ideal
unity of physical and spiritual which (although it is irreparablylost to us) we
still admire in the masterpieces of Greek sculpture."1I3
That the mind ought to control the body was a pervasive Greek ideal, an
ideal as manifest in Achilles' decision not to kill Agamemnon as in the
civilized calm of the Lapiths battling the violently anguished Centaurs in the
metopes of the Parthenon. This self-control and decorum was to be expected
of those participating in athletic contests. They were to observe the calm
composure exemplified in athletic sculpture. Or, as Winckelmann says of the
expression in Greek sculpture, "As the depths of the sea remain always at
rest, however the surface may be agitated, so the expression in the figures of
the Greeks reveals in the midst of passion a great and steadfast soul."'4

Since the athletes were entirely stripped, stripped even of the loincloth the
barbarians continued to wear, if they yielded to whatever sexual arousal they
may have felt, it would have been blushingly apparent to all the spectators.
Indeed, they might have resembled the unreasoning satyrs, who exercise no
constraints on their passion, and are usually represented in a state of sexual
arousal.'5 As St. Augustine remarks,'6 the organs of generation exert a
movement of their own, apart from the human will, and require a strong

"2The scholiast is quoted in Licht, 453. Aeschines himself implies that immorality went on:
"On account of practices which were not proper the ancients established laws" (Timarchus
13).
13 Jaeger,207.
14Quoted by Lessing inLaocoon, tr. Ellen Frothingham (Boston 1898)1.
" Examples are very numerous. The bronze Equine satyr in the National Museum of Athens
is, perhaps, one of the most striking.
"De Civitate Dei 14.19D.
436 THE CLASSICALWORLD APRIL - MAY 1975

bridle of reason to control them. If the athlete went naked at the Olympic
games, his intellectual sophrosynP would be as much subject to public
scrutiny as his athletic arete. One victor at Olympia who, despite the various
temptations, was noted for his sexual scruples was Iccus of Tarentum. In the
Laws, the Athenian Stranger praises him: "Such was his zeal for victory, his
pride in his work, the fortitude and self-control of his character that, as they
say, he never once came near a woman, or a boy either, all the time he was in
training (840A)."17
The public nakedness, which does not, in the 1970's, shock us as it shocked
the Romans - though it does, perhaps, seem somewhat uncivilized for the
Greeks - enabled the athletes to show the complete control they exerted over
their bodies. Since they were the only people to compete naked, they could
well believe they were the only people capable of such self-control: here,
perhaps, was a clear superiority over the barbarians, who had to hide them-
selves both to avoid tempting others and to conceal their own lack of con-
trol.'8

When Orsippus threw away his loincloth in the 15th Olympics, he was
showing all the Greeks that he was an athlete strong in body and temperate
in mind. He set a pattern which became a point of honor to later generations
of Greeks, and was, if this theory has any strength, perfectly consistent with
the Olympic demeanor.
The Pennsylvania State University James A. Arieti

This was particularly praiseworthy, in the opinion of the Athenian, for according to him
physical exercise and gymnasia were chiefly responsible for sexual indulgence and homo-
sexuality (636B).
The contrast between the civilized Greek and the more primitive foreigner occurs in many
places. In art, one good example is the vase T. B. L. Webster describes in "Greek Vases in
the Stanford Museum," AJA 69 (1965) 64, of Heracles fighting Antaios. Webster refers there
to the famous drawing of "a neat Greek and an untidy foreigner" on the kalyx krater by
Euphronius (LouvreG 103, Beazley, AR V 14).
J. Lauer, Costume in Antiquity (New York 1964) 5-6, asserts that primitive peoples wore
clothes around their genitals to protect the organs of procreation from the "evil eye" and so
preserve their fertility. The absence of this fear among the Greeks, if in fact it ever exsisted
(which I tend to doubt), would be another mark of their superiority over the barbarians.