TRIVIAL HIRSUTE:
by Judy Greenhill
LIKE GREEK WOMEN, male athletes of Ancient Greece were adamant about removing all the hair from their bodies. All gymnastics and sports were performed in the nude, and athletes wanted their sleek, graceful bodies to be smooth, oiled, and unencumbered by furry outcroppings.
The hair of the head was a different matter. From the writings of the Greek poet Homer (c.700 B.C.) we know that a well-groomed head of hair was one of the greatest signs of male beauty among men of the heroic age.
In the cities, Greek men went without headgear, protected from the sun by their abundance of strong black hair. Only travellers, hunters, sailors and merchants who spent long hours outdoors needed the extra protection of a pilos (Gk. felt, felt cap. L. pilus hair) - a light head covering usually made from the skin of a dog, cow or goat.
The length of a Greek man's hair varied according to the fashion of the day, but generally it was on the long side. At Athens, about the time of the Persian wars, both men and women wore their long hair tied in a knot on the top of the head, fastened with a long hair-pin. Dandies and philosophers tended to let their locks fall down to their shoulders. Severely cropped hair, however, was taboo for Romans: inasmuch as people in servitude or bondage were compelled by law to shear their hair short - and no gentleman of means could risk being mistaken for a slave.
The frugal Spartans, around 600 B.C., never paid any special attention to the arrangement of their hair, but by sacred custom all boys had their hair cut short and were only allowed to let it grow as they reached the age of ephebus ‹ the boy to man transition period, at about 18 or 19 ‹ when they received their military and gymnastic training in preparation for full citizenship.
In contrast to the Spartans, the Athenians allowed a boy's hair to remain long until he attained the age of ephebus. At that time the surfeit of hair had to be cut and offered up to one of the gods, the Delphic Apollo, for instance, or some local river god.
The beard was especially important to the early Greeks. In portrait statues and other works of art from the period, the beard is always treated as an individual characteristic: mostly arranged in graceful locks that cover the chin, lips and cheeks without a separation being made between whiskers and moustache.
In the 4th century B.C., Alexander the Great violated Greek custom by removing his beard and ordering his troops to be similarly clean shaven. According to tradition, many Macedonian soldiers had lost their lives when the Persians pulled them to the ground by their beards. Alexander swore that the smooth chins of his troops would offer the enemy no easy handles of that sort.
After the time of Alexander, the custom of wearing a full beard was abandoned and barbering became a lucrative business. The neighborhood barber shop ‹ offering shaving, hair cutting, nail cutting, the plucking of small hairs and the paring corns ‹ was the place where all the men congregated to gossip. The Greek essayist Plutarch (A.D. 46?-c.120), described the barber shops as "a symposium without wine," where all the latest news and politics were discussed.
Alkiphron, another historian of the day, had some harsh words to say about the owner of an establishment he patronized in Athens: "You see how the d--d barber in yon street has treated me; the talker who puts up the Brundisium [the Italian city of Brindisi] looking-glass and makes his knives clash harmoniously. I went to him to be shaved; he received me politely, put me in a high chair, enveloped me in a clean towel, and stroked the razor gently down my cheek so as to remove the thick hair. But this was a malicious trick of his. He did it partly, not all over the chin; some places he left rough, others he made smooth without my noticing it."
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