Naked statues, naughty gods & bad wine | HistoryExtra
"‘Why are so many Greek statues naked? And I guess we should start here with what attitudes to nudity like at that time?’...
‘The most surprising thing for people who don't know much about the Greeks and Romans, or the Greeks, especially is how much public nudity there actually is, above all in the sphere of athletics. You know, to be in the gymnasium and the Greek world, which really means naked place, is to be nude. To be unclothed, to be, you know, working out, even just sauntering around, people are not wearing clothing. And this really is the origin of the convention that statues are naked in the Greek world, but it's not really sure why they are naked in the first place in the gymnasium. You know, this was not a common thing. You know, the Persians didn't get naked when they, you know, exercised. The Romans didn't until they learned it from the Greeks...
There are these kind of fun anecdotes about this one runner at the Olympics, he lost his loincloth, and then won the foot race. So it was better, you were faster without clothes. And another kind of a cautionary tale, about a runner who managed to trip somehow on some loincloth, and pulled that off, and then broke his neck in the foot race. So you obviously again, you, it was safer to be naked. But it probably comes down to… equality in some way. That if you're naked in a gymnasium, you couldn't be ostentatious, you couldn't wear fine clothing or jewelry. And it was kind of a leveling thing, in a way of confirming the that everyone in a gymnasium is a citizen of the same city, a compatriot, you know, working together...
‘It seems to be very male focused. So where does depictions of female nude fit into this narrative or does it not at all at this time?’
‘It takes a while. So there are female nudes, but they're mostly on pottery. There's often like female, like prostitutes bathing, for example, it's a convention on many attic vases. But when it comes to full size monumental statuary, it really takes until the fourth century BC when Praxiteles sculpts the famous Aphrodite of Knidos. And here the convention is to show all goddesses even Aphrodite, goddess of love and sexuality, fully clothed to this point. But he made this very daring choice to show Aphrodite nude as she was emerging from the bath. And this became just a sensation and a scandal when it first came out. They couldn't believe a goddess was naked like this. But it became wildly popular, the actual statue became a tourist attraction, people would come from all over the place to see the Aphrodite. It's a small temple of kind of the middle of a garden. And it was imitated on a vast scale almost immediately, both for the goddess Aphrodite became kind of a standard way of showing the goddess of love, but also by queens and empresses, who want to be likened to Aphrodite, and her role as goddess of fertility...
[On the Christians] Some cities would take down their statues, they smashed them, you know, dragged them down, buried them, others, many others kind of took the halfway house step of simply breaking off their genitals. Kind of just taking a chisel and knocking off, you know, the twig and berries. And even in the case of women, they would actually shave off the breasts sometimes. So kind of desexualized, desexualizing the statues, it didn't look good, of course, looked kind of ridiculous. But the idea was you had the story and the aesthetic pleasure without the kind of the prurient undertones of having these naked statues all over the place...
Why are the penises so small? Now and it is one of these things that’s kind of remarked by our history professors sometimes, you know, in hushed undertones. It's one of these things that it comes like the whole convention of showing important men as these you know, muscle bound athletes. It comes from that realism initially that someone who does work out, you know, who jogs, wrestles, their genitals do actually retract it. It's an actual physical thing, but it's more, ultimately, it evolves into this aesthetic way of showing that they have control over their baser emotions, their baser impulses. They act as someone shown with you know, nice diminutive genitals is someone who's thinking with their larger head. You know, they're not worried. They're not being carried off by you know, tides of passion. But a barbarian say, or a monster. They are shown invariably with these, you know, monstrous genitals. because they are the opposite. They are creatures of passion. And so again, it's kind of that this code, like the whole convention of showing someone nude and muscular, it's a code for showing something about the subject, describing who they actually are, to this visual language. That's, that's couched in the language of nudity.’...
‘Wine really is ubiquitous, um, in the classical world, you know, it's might not be the yo Cassatt [sp?] nonstop debauchery you might see in some of your, you know, lower end dramas, but it really is drunk in massive quantities at least in some periods in some places. You know, it wouldn't have tasted very good to our sensibilities. You know, it was stored in these resin lined containers, these amphorae. So probably tasted and smelled like turpentine more or less. You know, it didn't age very well, usually tend to go bad than a year or two, so be very sour almost always. It wasn't strained well, so you have all these you know, these galaxies of pips and skins floating around and it had to be, had to be filtered out. And when they drank it, it was, it was flavored with all kinds of strange substances from marble powder to perfume.
And above all, it was dosed with water. So most wine was only about, well wine as drunk but at least *something* was only about 1/3 or one quarter water by by quart, by volume. And so it was watered down, it was bitter, tasted like chewaken [sp?], smelled like turpentine, but they loved it. You know, they there's an estimate, a famous estimate by a French archaeologist that the average Roman man drank about a liter, about a liter of wine a day, give or take. And of course was drunk you know over the course of the day you know, with you know, all three meals, they weren't getting hammered constantly. But that's a lot of wine. And you know, again there there are stories about legendary drinkers, you know, who would take down gallons at a time. So that is one strange story about Alexander the Great who supposedly died after you know, taking this thing called the Cup of Hercules, this massive bowl and trying to drink all three gallons that contained at once and then keeling over pretty much and dying within a week’"
