Week 2: Health and identity: the face and eyes
Introduction
How was vision understood in the ancient world? How well could people see, and how were problems with the eyes treated? In Week 2 of this course, you’ll look at how colour was used, and why ordinary people feared the Evil Eye.
To start the week, Helen King and Mathijs Lucassen discuss the role of the face in giving you your identity. How do you decide by looking at someone whether they are healthy or not?
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 1
Transcript: Video 1 Here’s looking at you
HELEN KING
Hello. I’m Helen King. I’m Professor of Classical Studies at The Open University. And I’m here talking to Mathijs Lucassen who’s a lecturer in the School of Health, Wellbeing, and Social Care. So we’re going to talk about the face and its role in giving us our identity. So what do we think a healthy face looks like?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
A healthy face will have a clear complexion with the right level of hydration, not too oily, not too dry. I guess we’ve got the sort of health-- we associate health with youth, so it’s going to be mostly wrinkle free. And the right sort of complexion, so having had the right amount of sun.
HELEN KING
Right. So in terms of what that would look like in the ancient world, and I think it’s very similar. But, as now, you can always enhance it if it’s not quite right. So we have all sorts of cosmetics that we have today. These are exactly the same sorts of things as will be used in the ancient world-- eye shadow, lipstick, rouge to make you look a bit more sort of pink and healthy and rosy cheeked. These are all the sorts of things you’d have.
And you could also enhance your appearance by using things like interesting hairpins. This is genuine Roman hairpin. So you put your hair up on your head and stick that in. You can have quite decorated hairpins. All sort of project an image of looking good.
But there’s also this extra,moral dimension. Although we know people were using these things, Roman writers sometimes talk about them as a bad thing. Greek writers, too. So they talk about using cosmetics as the mark of the prostitute, the loose woman, not what you want your wife to be doing. Do we have those sorts of moral judgments about cosmetic use today, do you think?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
I think we probably still do. I mean, I think that one of the ways in which we can tell is because of the way in which we would view make-up use across genders, so how do we feel about men wearing make-up versus women wearing make-up?
And another thing that gives us an indication of the morality that we might still associate with make-up use is how do we feel about girls or teenagers wearing make-up? And is it OK for them to wear make-up to school? At what age are you old enough to wear make-up? How much make-up is too much make-up? So I think some of these themes still exist.
HELEN KING
Yes, there is still a moral dimension. That's interesting. The eyes are very important in the ancient world. They talk about the eyes as the windows of the soul, for example, is one reference. And generally, eyes are powerful. You can use your eyes to communicate. I'm looking right into your eyes now obviously. That's what we do when we talk to each other.
So what about the eyes? How can you pick up your eyes in modern terms, if they’re looking a bit faded after a bad night out? You’ve got your post-party pick-me-ups there. What do you do to make your eyes look better?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Yeah, well, you’ve got the sort of remedies in terms of potions and lotions. But you would also have surgical procedures. So functionally you've got the surgical procedures associated with, say, cataracts and the surgery that’s needed to improve your vision should that be lacking. But you also have, I guess, eye lifts and things that you can do for sort of cosmetic reasons to make you look good in terms of aesthetics.
HELEN KING
Yeah, so I’ve got my eye-bath here, so I could always use that if I’m wanting to perk my eyes up. If I’m looking a bit lousy, I could put something in that. But the cataract thing is interesting because certainly there there’s actually a functional problem with the eye, not just a sort of cosmetic effect. But we know that Ancient Romans were actually quite good at cataract. It’s something which is described and we’ve got the needles, we’ve actually know how they did it, we’ll be looking at that later and it seems it would have worked so in fact their knowledge is pretty good. So similar to us on the cosmetics front, but actually much better than we might think when it comes to looking at how they did operations. So it can be done.
So the eyes are not just the window to the soul. They’re also something you can modify in a quite interesting way. Do you think men have the same approach to identity in the face as women do nowadays?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
That’s an interesting question. I think that there is probably an increase in pressure in terms of men having to look good in the same way that there’s that pressure on women. And one of the ways in which we would be able to sort of establish that, I guess in a more objective fashion, is looking at things like sales around male cosmetics and access to appearance medicine, when we see more men turning to appearance medicine to enhance their looks.
HELEN KING
So what would you count as appearance medicine?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
For men, it could be things like hair transplants, face-lifts, Botox, all sorts of different procedures to, I guess, make men look more attractive and younger.
HELEN KING
Well, Julius Caesar is supposed to have had a comb-over. So that’s one way of dealing with the problem. But also there are lots of ancient texts that talk about depilation for men, so actually making the male body less hairy. But they’re all a bit iffy about how far you should go. So is it OK to do the armpits maybe, legs, mmm, depends. So the modification of the body there depends entirely on who you read as to what they think is OK or not.
But going back to the face, then, so the face is still clearly the way we think of ourselves, the way we present ourselves most to other people. And I think that is the same in the ancient world. Thank you very much.
Video 1 Here’s looking at you
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Your body gives you your identity in many ways: other people make assumptions about you based in particular on your face and eyes, and assess your age, race and gender mainly from this first impression. For most people, making eye contact is very important in social relationships and many cultures regard its absence as disturbing.
This week, you’ll think about how people in the ancient world reacted to the face and altered its appearance. You’ll look at evidence of attempts to enhance or mimic a healthy appearance, and consider whether some of the substances used may have damaged the health of those using them. For example, white lead was used to make the skin look pale because this suggested that a woman hadn’t needed to work outside but was rich enough to stay inside her home. You’ll also think about how modern scholars use facial reconstruction to reconstruct faces from skulls, and consider how this helps people today to feel a direct link to the remains of antiquity.