The body in antiquity

Introduction

This free course will introduce you to the concept of the body in Greek and Roman civilisation. In recent years, the body has become a steadily growing field in historical scholarship, and classical studies is no exception. It is an aspect of the ancient world that can be explored through a whole host of different types of evidence: art, literature and archaeological artefacts to name but a few. The way that people fulfil their basic bodily needs and engage in their daily activities is embedded in the social world around them. The body is a subject that can reveal fascinating aspects of both Greek and Roman culture – it will help you to better understand the diversity of ancient civilisation.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A864 MA Classical Studies Part 2.

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.

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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.

Figure 1 Copy of Discobolus, by Myron (fifth century BCE), marble. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: Ancient Art and ...

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• understand what makes the study of the ancient body important for our understanding of ancient society

• understand 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 body

• display 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.

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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.

Figure 2 Relief depicting an oculist examining a patient, second century CE, stone. Museo della Civiltà Romana, Rome. Photo: Bridgeman ...

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’

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 2

Consider 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.

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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.

Figure 3 Roman implement, first century CE, bronze, length: 22 cm. Walters Art Museum, accession number 54.1926. Photo: Walters Art ...

Discussion

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.

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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.

Figure 4 Attic funerary stele for Agetor, son of Apollodoros of Megara. Archaeological Museum of Piraeus, Athens. Photo: Sites and ...

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.

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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.

Figure 5 Amulet in the shape of a phallus, Roman, bronze. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Siena. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

Finding out more

When 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)

Download this audio clip.Audio player: The art of insult

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Transcript: The art of insult

‘The art of insult’ audio

Presenter

It’s worth pointing out as we begin that five hundred years ago epithets like the dreaded ‘F’ word, ‘C’ word and the rest were not as unspeakable as they are today.

Remember Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale? Our ancestors were far more easy-going than we are about so-called foul language. Way back in Ancient Rome the poet Catullus was dishing out invective for popular consumption parts of which have been deemed unsuitable in 1991 for broadcast on good old Radio Four.

And apart from its endemic entertainment value, verbal abuse had a respectable place in ancient society in both Greece and Rome. Learning how to insult your opponents was part of formal rhetoric, the art of persuasive speaking. There were handbooks which laid out the best lines of attack. You could get at someone by insulting their ancestors, their military record or, above all, their sexual habits, not very different in fact from the way the tabloid so-called newspapers operate today although done with rather more intelligence and style.

Richard Hunter is a lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge.

Richard Hunter

There were handbooks that people read and wrote and these handbooks told you both how to say some nice things about people and also how to say nasty things about people. I think it’s always important to remember that in a law court speech or when you were addressing the assembly in Athens or something you weren’t particularly interested in the truth. You were simply interested in persuading people. And if you could suggest that your opponent had all kinds of unpleasant sexual habits you weren’t particularly interested in sexual habits per se but you were interested in what those sexual habits might suggest about them in the rest of their life that for example they weren’t a fit political leader or that they very clearly did steal your money because the sort of person who would do this in bed is the sort of person who would take your money.

Speaker reading quotation

As soon as he was past boyhood he settled down in the Piraeus and the establishment of Euthydicus, the physician, pretending to be a student of medicine, but in fact deliberately offering himself for sale as the event proved. The names of the merchants or other foreigners or of our own citizens who enjoyed the person of Timarchus in those days, I will pass over willingly but no one may say that I am over-particular to state every petty detail. But in whose houses he has lived to the shame of his own body and of the city, earning wages by precisely that thing which the law forbids under penalty of losing the privilege of public speech, of this I will speak.

Presenter

There is a handbook of rhetoric here from the fourth century BC which says that you should use irony and avoid scoffing at the person you are insulting. Well some of the stuff that we’ve got is very direct. I mean how did this all fit together?

Richard Hunter

Yeah there’s two kinds of traditions. One is a tradition which is an educated culture tradition which discusses how you insult people in a kind of theoretical way and that tradition constantly distinguishes between what you might call cultivated insult, in which you don’t actually call a spade a spade but you rely upon irony, innuendo, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, know what I mean? Whereas there is another kind of insult which used the calling a spade a spade, the use for example of – of the equivalent of what we would call four letter words, which is thought to be below the wit of the urbane man. Of course when it actually comes down to it those two different types of abuse tend to get mixed up and you know and practice is never really quite like theory.

Speaker reading quotation

What do you want woman best fit for black elephants?

Why do you send me gifts, why letters I who am of no firm use nor of unrefined nostril.

Indeed I alone can sniff out more sagely whether an octopus or a heavy goat lurks in hairy armpits than can a keen dog sniff out where the boar hides.

What a sweat on her shrivelled limbs. What a bad smell grows everywhere when after my cock is limp she hurries to quiet her unconquered lust. Nor does her wet powder stick now. Her blush painted on with crocodile dung now being in heat she breaks the taut bed and the covers.

Presenter

A little ancient misogyny from the poet Horace first century BC.

I think if Horace had been alive today he’d have been in a heavy metal band. Unpleasant sex and body smells appear to be the main preoccupation of poets of this era and their woman folk were not always exactly eulogised.

Richard Hunter

One of the interesting and I suppose mildly depressing things about ancient abusive poetry is that a lot of the themes and motifs in it just continue and continue I mean as long as you read ancient abusive poetry there are smelly armpits. There's a particular horror as expressed in abusive poetry of oral sex. The notion of the unclean mouth crops up time and time again.

Speaker reading quotation

I thought, so help me god, it made no difference whether I smelt Aemilius’ mouth or arsehole, one being no cleaner – the other no filthier. But in fact the arsehole’s cleaner and kinder. It has no teeth. The mouth has teeth half a yard long and gums like an ancient wagon chassis.

Presenter

A poem by Catullus from Northern Italy mid first century BC.

If you think that’s nasty the next part of the poem’s currently deemed too risqué even to be broadcast on public radio. People certainly seem to have become easier to offend as the years have rolled by.

In the street culture of ancient Greece and Rome the art of insult also flourished according to Richard Hunter. Surviving rock carvings and graffiti from places like Pompeii include obscenities rivalling anything you would find scrawled on a wall in a public toilet today.

And hurling verbal abuse seems to have been the ancients’ idea of a good time, not just in earnest at their enemies but also as an elaborate game as part of festivals and ceremonies.

Richard Hunter

We know of certain types of festival where abuse played a part. For example we know that in a great procession that went from Athens … the initiary procession to Eleusis for the rites of the Earth Mother Demeter that there was a part of the procession where the participants were subjected to abuse. We know that scoffing and jesting was a standard part of Greek weddings. There are quite a lot of literary representations of a stage of the wedding where the bride and groom would have been shut in together and the guests or chorus or whatever would stand outside the wedding chamber and you would make jokes about the size of the groom’s equipment and so forth.

Presenter

And as we see that the ancient Mediterranean was the cradle of one of the great pass-times of civilised western society – the art of verbal abuse.

End transcript: The art of insult

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4 Where does the body begin and end?

Even the way people think about bodies is determined by the cultural scripts of the culture in which they live. For example, some people may take it for granted that they possess a body on the one hand, and a mind or soul on the other, but this idea is in fact one that they have received from the culture in which they live, and other cultures have very different ways of perceiving the relationship between physicality, thoughts, physical drives and emotions. What we consider to be our body is also determined by our culture.

5 Keeping body and soul together

In the ancient world, people asked themselves what the essence of the human body was, and how the physical side of it related to thoughts and feelings. It was philosophers especially who pondered this question, and they came up with a variety of answers. Take, for example, the account from the philosopher Plato’s work Phaedrus. Plato (c.428–c.348 BCE) often used dialogues – most often involving students talking to his former teacher Socrates – to present his views. In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates engaged in a conversation with a man called Phaedrus. They are discussing the nature of love and how it affects the way people behave. In the course of this conversation Socrates explains his theory of the soul consisting of three parts. He uses the analogy of a charioteer, and two very different horses that are pulling the chariot.

Conclusion

All of us have bodies, which makes the subject of the body something that we can all relate to. But this can be a trap, because it is easy to assume that the way we see our bodies and the things we do with them are somehow ‘natural’ and universally human. What this free course, The body in antiquity, has aimed to show you, however, is that these things are actually profoundly influenced by the period and place – in short, the culture – in which we live. As a result, it is important to keep your mind open and to view ancient bodies in an objective way.

References

Further reading

Acknowledgements

This course was written by Ursula Rothe.

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated in the acknowledgements section, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this course:

Course image: Tilemahos Efthimiadis in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.

Text

Activity 3: Extract from Robb, J. and Harris, O, J. T. (2013) The Body in History: Europe from the Palaeolithic to the Future, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Images

Roman votive face, terracotta, 200BC-200AD. Science Museum, London. Photo: Science & Society Picture Library.

Figure 1: photo © Bridgeman Images.

Figure 2: photo © Bridgeman Images.

Figure 3: photo © Walters Art Museum, Maryland.

Figure 4: photo © Sites and Photos, Israel.

Figure 5: photo © Bridgeman Images.

Audio

From radio broadcast: ‘The Art of Insult’, 30.10.91, © BBC.

Websites

Classics Resources: http://classicsresources.info/

Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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