tell us, the best physic, but it served as a valuable incentive to

the youth of Greece to keep themselves in gwd

231
Journal of Sport History, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Winter, 1985)
Nudity endured in Greek sport because it was supported by heroic
tradition and faith. So the use of nudity for aggression and apotropaic
Goals that is characteristic of the early phases of human society and which
reflects the animal part of human nature lived with an uncommon persistency
and beyond recognition in the historical period and found refuge under the
mantle of one of the most illustrious facets of Greek civilization: the athletics.
condition. The Greek with his keen eye for physical attractiveness seen flabbiness, a light
skin, need of condition, or
imperfect development as disgraceful, and the ill-developed youth was the laughing-stock of
his comrades."
Kenneth Clark (The Naked, p. 19) remarked: "So our surmise the discovery of the nude as a
form of artwork is
connected with idealism and religion in quantifiable proportions seems to be accurate, but it
is only half the truth. What
other peculiarities of the Greek head are required? One clear solution is their belief that the
body was something
to be proud of. and should be kept in perfect trim." Yet, Clark continued, "But in fact Greek
trust in the body
can be understood only in relation to their doctrine. It expresses above Top 15 Oddest or
Most Difficult Bare Stock Images and Funny Naked Pics of human wholeness.
Nothing which related to the whole guy could be isolated or evaded; and this serious
awareness of how much was
implied in physical beauty saved them from both evils of sensuality and aestheticism (p. 21).
James Arieti
["Nudity in Greek Sports," 4361 asserts "The public nakedness which doesn't, in the 1970's
shock us as it
shocked the Romans-though it does, maybe, appear somewhat uncivilized for the Greeksempowered the athletes
to reveal the complete control they exerted over their bodies. Since they were the only folks
to compete naked,
they could well consider they were the only individuals capable of such self control: here,
perhaps, was a clear
superiority over the barbarians, who had to hide themselves both to prevent tempting others
and to conceal their own
lack of management." For more references regarding the practice of nudity in Greek
athletics, see ibid., pp. 434 n. 10,

Nudity as a Costumein ClassicalArt

LARISSA BONFANTE
Subjective
The Greeks viewed their custom of athletic man nudity
as something that set them apart from the barbarians,as
well as from their own past. A surveyof male nudity as a
costume in Greece tries to track its origin in eighthcentury rite, its slow transformationfrom
initiation
Rituals to the "civic"nudity of the Classical period, and its
significance in various religious, magic, and societal contexts. The characterof this
association can be viewed more
clearly by comparing it with before Near The best way to Practice Nudity in Your Family to
nakedness, and to the after contemporary"barbarian"perspectives of the Hebrews,
Etruscans,and Gauls,
as well as to the contemporaryviews of female nudity,
before its acceptancein the Hellenistic span.*
as a costume.' This is a surprising phenomenon. That
we have not been more surprised by it's due to the fact
that we follow in their custom and take the Greeks
as models, forgetting how frequently their associations and
Dispositions made them the exception, and not the rule,
among early peoples. The Greeks of the Classical
world did not forget. While not, as we shall see, totally
understanding the importance of the custom, they
were proud of its singularity.
A study of nudity in Greece should be undertaken
from the historic perspective. I restrict myself, in the
Current article, to a concern of the signs of art
and literature in an attempt to comprehend what lay
behind the words and figures concerning and representing nudity that have come down to us,
and to describe something about the original character of anOne of the innovations of the ancient Greeks that
changed our way of seeing the world, among the most
prominent is a specific type of public nudity-nudity
* An earlier versionof the
present articlewas presentedat
the Institute for AdvancedStudy in Princetonin 1980. I 'm
Thankful for the support and advice of Homer and Dorothy
Thompson, Christian Habicht, S.D. Goitein, W.S. Heckscher, Seth Benardete, Leo Raditsa,

Myles McDonnell,
Nancy de Grummond, Judith Swaddling, Ingrid Strom,
Brunilde S. Ridgway, Evelyn B. Harrison, R. Ross Holloway, Mark Davies, Michael Vickers,
Brian Shefton,
Hans JiorgBloesch, and the anonymousAJA reviewers.
Along with the typical AJA abbreviations,the following are used in this post:
Boardman,
Five fundamental reasons accounting for humanity's use of
Garments will be located to be applicable at various
Phases of our discussion of nudity: 1) as protection
against the components, notably the cold; 2) for societal
Motives, to differentiate members of a tribe or class; 3)