Figure 1 Copy of Discobolus, by Myron (fifth century BCE), marble. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: Ancient Art and Architecture Collection Ltd/Bridgeman Images.
This is a colour photograph showing the statue of a young nude male preparing to throw a discus. The statue is shown against a dark background. It stands on a base and is supported by a piece of stone at the back, which projects upwards from the base to his knee.His lower body faces to the viewer’s right. His muscled upper body is twisted towards the viewer as he bends forward and turns to look down to the floor in front of his right foot. His expression is one of concentration.His weight rests firmly on his bent right leg and his foot turns outward. His left leg is bent behind him. His arched foot is vertical and his toes curl under as they meet the floor.His right arm extends high behind him. His forearm, palm and thumb press against the discus and he grips the far edge of it firmly with his fingers. His left arm hangs loosely, resting gently on the outside of his opposing right knee. The angle of his arms mirror each other and form an arc around his upper body.The left hand is damaged. The forefinger is missing.After studying this course, you should be able to:understand what makes the study of the ancient body important for our understanding of ancient societyunderstand the meaning and significance of key theoretical approaches to bodies (‘habitus’, ‘cultural scripts’)understand the central role of specific cultural circumstances in the way human societies view and treat the bodydisplay knowledge of some diverging ancient and modern approaches to the body.1 Why the body?In many ways, human history is a history of bodies. Bodies attend parliaments and move to different regions; it is in human brains that ideas are conceived and decisions are made; it is human limbs that embrace friends and fight enemies. Moreover, history is shaped by bodily experience: lives of important people have been cut short by illnesses; large groups of migrants have decided to stay in or leave regions based on their capacity to acquire food and cope with the climate; major political crises have resulted from the simple fact of sexual attraction between two key figures. These may seem obvious points to make, but starting from these considerations gives us a new approach to the past and a fascinating prism through which to explore ancient societies.
Figure 2 Relief depicting an oculist examining a patient, second century CE, stone. Museo della Civiltà Romana, Rome. Photo: Bridgeman Images.
This is a colour photograph showing a panel of sand-coloured stone carved in high relief. To the left is a seated male wearing a long garment. He sits facing right on a high-backed chair, the supporting legs of which form a cross. Discs are visible on its joints. His feet rest on a low platform at the base of the chair. His right arm and hand rest on his lap. His left hand rests on the top of a square box which is held at waist height in the left hand of a second man wearing knee-length garments. This man is standing immediately in front of him. The two men face each other with their heads perfectly aligned. The man on the right is shown stepping forward slightly so that his right foot is half hidden behind the low platform at the base of the chair. His right arm is raised and he touches the seated man’s left eye. A double-tiered bell-shaped object hangs from the wall on either side of the scene. An inscription is carved on the architrave above the panel. It reads MEMPHI GLEGORI.The centrality of the body to human cultures is something an increasing number of scholars have begun to explore and, in the past few decades especially, there has been an explosion in the number of studies that use the human body as a starting point for understanding various aspects of the ancient world. When we bring the dimension of the body into the way we view the past, we suddenly find that new questions and new ways of approaching old questions emerge. For example, in the field of architecture the study of ancient buildings is as old as the discipline of classical studies itself, but what did it feel like to walk through the streets of, say, a Greek or Roman city? What were the smells and sounds one might have experienced? How far could one see? How much light was there in a given area? But why is the body so interesting? It doesn’t take much to consider that all humans throughout history have been born, have eaten, slept, fallen ill, experienced injuries and died. This is precisely where it gets interesting, because although all humans have done or will do these things, the way that they have gone about them has differed dramatically according to the society in which they lived. In other words, the way that people fulfil their basic bodily needs and engage in their daily activities is embedded in the social world around them. 2 ‘Habitus’Activity 1Write a list of things that you have done with your body since you got up this morning. Where did you sleep? Did you have a bath or shower? Did you eat breakfast? Where are you now? As you ponder these questions, I would also like you to write down all of the physical things around you that have played a part in those things: furniture, tools and infrastructure. Jot down some notes for each of these on how they relate to the culture in which you live. Think about how your environment has determined how you go about certain things, and even whether you go about them at all. Most of you will have woken up in a bed. While all humans sleep, their beds can look very different depending on their culture and climate. Your bed is a cultural construct. If you’re like me you were woken by an alarm clock. In the long view of human history, this is a very recent invention. Mine goes off at the same time every day, but even this is a characteristic of the society in which I live. Other people and people in other cultures wake at different times each day according to their needs, or respond to more natural impulses like daylight and birdsong, which fluctuate from season to season. Many people in the ancient world would have lived by this kind of clock. I had a bath this morning, finding it normal to wash every morning, but this is something that I was taught to do – in some societies a wash every morning would be considered excessive, in others it would be deemed insufficient. In many western countries I might have been expected to have a shower – baths, if existent at all, being the preserve of children or the elderly. In ancient Rome, bathing was generally done communally in a public bath. Even the fact that I have a bathroom in my flat is something that has a specific history in modern western culture relating to how we expect to live our lives. Referring to the post-war fashions for alfresco dining and indoor bathrooms, my grandfather once declared that the world had gone mad because people were going outside to eat, but coming inside to defecate! Moving on with your day, did you have breakfast? I had muesli and orange juice; both things we readily associate with breakfast, but which are in fact arbitrary foodstuffs our society, for one reason or another, has assigned to the breakfast table. Even the idea of breakfast and the three-meal day are rituals our society has invented. In another society I might have had only one meal later on in the day, or be tucking into a communal bowl of hot rice or lentils. You probably put on some clothes and maybe did something with your hair. Again, the society in which you live will have had an effect on how you did your hair and what clothes you chose to wear. If you have left your home like I have, you will probably have put on a different set of clothes than if you were staying at home. Depending on your cultural background, going outside might also have meant covering up key parts of your body such as your hair. In ancient Greece, respectable women were expected to veil their heads whenever they were in public. This rule applied to Roman women too, but we do not have evidence that it was followed very often! What this exercise has attempted to highlight is that some of the things associated with our bodies that we take entirely for granted are in fact deeply embedded in our cultural background. There is a specific cultural history behind when we wake, what we eat and whether or how we clean our teeth. This may seem simple – even banal – to you, but that is far from the truth. If, in 2,000 years’ time, archaeologists were to dig up the remains of our households or read written accounts of our bodily routines, they would, even if they had nothing else, already be able to say a great deal about us: the alarm clock would tell them that our society had the concept of the regular working day; our clothes would tell about which parts of our body we considered proper to cover, what it was acceptable to reveal, and how we constructed gender and other identities in appearance. Our plates, cutlery, tables and chairs would tell them we ate communally, but from separate vessels; they might guess that meals were social occasions over which we talked about our day or shared jokes. If they found written internal memos pertaining to the homes of important political figures, they might discover an important decision was negatively influenced because of the poor quality of the meal over which it was discussed. History and culture cannot be separated from the body. All of this relates to what the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘habitus’ (1990, pp. 52–79). He was writing mainly about modern society, but his theories can be applied to human society in general, including the ancient world. In its essence, this concept denotes the way bodies interact with the world around them. It holds that all the everyday things that we do – and take for granted – and all the ways that we think about these things are actually determined by the structures and beliefs of the society in which we live. However ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ they may feel to us, in fact these are but learned processes. Through this view, human experience becomes ‘embodied’. But why does this matter? Surely it stands to reason that in, say, the history of food, someone is eating it, and in the history of dress someone is wearing it. Well, it’s not quite as simple as that. How we interpret the shreds of evidence from the ancient past that have come down to us depends very much on what framework we use to interpret them. When looking at artefacts in archaeology, for example, a key question here would be: “Are we interested in the object itself, or is it more important what was done with it?”. The following exercise will get you thinking about this, and demonstrate that even the most banal human activities could be done in a very different way in the ancient world. Activity 2Consider the object in Figure 3. You may already know what it is, but if you don’t, take a good look at it, and try to think how it might be used: what are the different parts, what could they be used for? When you have finished looking at it, reveal the discussion for the solution.
Figure 3 Roman implement, first century CE, bronze, length: 22 cm. Walters Art Museum, accession number 54.1926. Photo: Walters Art Museum, Maryland.
This is a black-and-white photograph of a one-piece metal instrument displayed vertically. The body of the instrument is wider than the handle. It consists of an elongated scooped blade which curls upwards at the end. An arced ridge separates it from the handle. The handle rises up becoming slightly wider at the top where it bends backwards in the opposite direction. It becomes narrower again as it continues down parallel to the front of the handle in the manner of a hairpin.This item is called a strigilis. The Greeks and Romans used it to clean themselves. It is essentially a kind of scraper, used to scrape oil and sweat off the surface of the body, like the man in this grave stele from classical Athens demonstrates (Figure 4).
Figure 4 Attic funerary stele for Agetor, son of Apollodoros of Megara. Archaeological Museum of Piraeus, Athens. Photo: Sites and Photos, Israel.
This is a colour photograph showing a funerary stele resembling the façade of a temple. The sides are carved into columns which taper slightly as they rise towards a Doric capital. They support a triangular pediment decorated with a finial at each corner. There is an inscription in Greek carved across the base of the pediment.The figure of a young man carved in high relief stands in the recessed space between the columns. He has short hair and is beardless. His left arm touches the column on the viewer’s right. His weight is on his left leg and his hip is raised. His right leg is slightly bent in a relaxed position. His lower body faces forward but he twists his upper body slightly to his right as he looks down. His arms are held loosely at the sides and in his right hand he holds a curved instrument (strigil), which appears to represent him scraping his thigh with it.A small globular vase in the shape of an aryballos, with a short neck and small mouth, hangs at chest height on the wall to the viewer’s left. A piece of cloth (towel) hangs just above it. The folds fall either side of the vase covering part of the column on that side. The lower part of the stele is damaged and has been reconstructed. The figure’s feet and lower legs are missing. These have not been restored.We take it for granted that when we wash ourselves in the shower or bath, we use some kind of soap that lifts grease and dirt which we rinse off, leaving our skin dry. But whilst soap was known in the ancient world, it was associated with the cultures of northern Europe. When Greeks and Romans went to the bath, they used an entirely different method of cleaning. They took with them a flask containing oils, a strigilis and a towel. They would immerse themselves in water – often of different temperatures including a hot bath in order to sweat – and then dry themselves off using the towel. After that, they would massage – or be massaged – using the oils from the flask, and then scrape the oils and sweat off their skin using the strigilis. In other words, this implement reveals a whole very peculiar world of habit in the ancient world – the culture of bathing. It also tells us about how differently the ancients viewed what it meant to be ‘clean’. It is hard for us to imagine getting up in the morning and scraping ourselves down with what looks for all the world like a bent butter knife! In the way that it is made the strigilis may look to us more like a kitchen implement or DIY tool, but in terms of habitus its modern equivalent would be more accurately found in the idea of the common flannel! 3 ‘Cultural scripts’In many ways, the body is an unusual subject. We all have bodies, and biologically and physiologically they are more or less the same as the bodies of ancient Greeks and Romans, so anything to do with bodies is always going to be very familiar and personal to us. At the same time, the ancient world involved cultures that were in many ways different from our own. Engaging with ancient bodies draws into contrast something that is true of all studies of the ancient world: the constant tension between familiarity and distance. Historically, western culture has identified very strongly with the Graeco-Roman world. It is often seen as the ancestor of our own western culture, and has been appropriated as the origin of much that is familiar to us now, including science, philosophy, democracy, art and architecture, poetry and drama. But other aspects of the classical world have not been greeted with the same enthusiasm. From polytheism and animal sacrifice to gladiatorial combat, and from infanticide to slavery, some features of Greek and Roman society have come to be regarded as alien, and if we choose to focus on these then the Greeks and Romans may look to the modern viewer more like a dangerous ‘Other’ than our honoured ancestors (Cartledge, 1993). It is important, then, to maintain an objective standpoint on all matters concerning the Graeco-Roman world. The societies of Greece and Rome must be seen as cultures in their own right, with their own systems of beliefs, values and ideas influencing the way they did things. In this way we can see the cultural beliefs and practices behind the things we do with our bodies as ‘cultural scripts’. This is a term that comes from linguistics and has a very specific meaning in that discipline, but here we mean something very similar to Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’. However, it is different in the sense that it can be conscious as opposed to simply an automatic way of doing things that we take for granted. It is important to be aware of habitus or cultural scripts when looking at the body, as beliefs and ideas have an especially profound effect on what humans do with their bodies. For example, in ancient Rome, mosaics of phalluses could sometimes be found at the entrance to Roman buildings and children often wore amulets in the shape of phalluses around their necks. The cultural script underlying this is that phallic symbols were thought to ward off evil. In a modern context this would be considered obscene in the case of the entrance decoration and inappropriate in the case of the children. This is not because we have more respectable house entrances or a more protective attitude to our children, but because we have a different cultural script underlying our use of the phallic symbol.
Figure 5 Amulet in the shape of a phallus, Roman, bronze. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Siena. Photo: Bridgeman Images.
This is a colour photograph of a metal object seen against a blue-grey background. It resembles a winged creature. The head is aligned centrally and is topped by a circular disc of the same size. Eyes, mouth, nose and hair are indicated. The shoulders and two short limbs project straight downwards from the neck which is shown as a collar of short lines. The limbs are joined at the end by a bar. The area between the limbs and the bar forms a semi-circular opening. The creature’s wings are formed of a phallus which curves downwards from left to right. The left-hand part of the shaft where the arc begins is thicker and terminates in a straight edge. This side is decorated with a narrow column with three curved lines splaying out from it on either side. The arc of the right-hand part of the shaft is more slender and curves down to the rounded end of the glans penis. It is decorated towards the tip with a diagonal ladder design rising from left to right. Finding out moreWhen we see the stately marble statues of Romans and Greeks, it is hard to imagine that obscenity in many ways played a more central and acceptable role in many forms of public life than it does for us today. For a humorous (and somewhat adult-themed – beware!) insight into this, listen to the audio ‘The art of insult’. (please note that this audio contains language that some students may find offensive)