Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

NAKEDNESS

leads us to a discussion of the part which nakedness played in the life of the Greeks. We have already said something about this in the description of the costume of Spartan girls, the question of decolletage, and elsewhere.

It is a tolerably widespread opinion, which is found even among well-educated people who know many things about antiquity without having consulted the best authorities, that among the Greeks nakedness was quite common. But this assumption requires essential limitation. In order to get to the bottom of the question we must distinguish between natural and erotically emphasized nakedness.

It is certainly correct to say that the Greeks showed themselves entirely or partly naked in public far more frequently than would be possible amongst ourselves; and Wieland is doubtless right when he says in his Essay on the Ideals of the Greek Artists, that Greek art obtained the mastery in the treatment of the naked, since the sight of it was an almost everyday occurrence. He goes on to say: “ The Greeks had more opportunity and were more at liberty to contemplate, study, and copy the beauty represented to them by nature and their times than is the case with modern artists. The gymnasia, the public national games, the contests for the prize of beauty at Lesbos, at Tenedos, in the Temple of Ceres at Basilis in Arcadia, the wrestling matches between naked boys and girls in Sparta, in Crete, etc., the notorious temple of Venus at Corinth, whose young priestesses even Pindar does not blush to celebrate in song, the Thessalian dancers, who danced naked at the banquets of the greatall these opportunities of seeing the most beautiful forms uncovered and in most lively movement, beautified by emulation, in the most varied positions and groupings, were bound to fill the imagination of artists with a quantity of beautiful forms, and by comparing the beautiful with the more beautiful

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