by R Sennett
Perikles took for granted what might most strike a modern person. The leaders of the young warriors were depicted In art as nearly naked. their unclothed bodies protected only by hand shields and spears. In the city, young men wrestled in the gymnasium naked; the loose clothes men wore on the Streets and in public places freely exposed their bodies. As the art historian Kenneth Clark observes, among the ancient Greeks a nakedly exposed body marked the presence of a strong rather than vulnerable person-and more, someone who was civilized. At the opening of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, for instance, he traces the progress of civilization up to the war’s outbreak; as one sign of this progress, he remarks of the Spartans that they “were the first to play games naked, to take off their clothes openly,” whereas among the barbarians of his own day many still insisted on covering their genitals when in public at the games.The civilized Greek had made his exposed body into an object of admiration.
To the ancient Athenian, displaying oneself affirmed one’s dignity as a citizen. Athenian democracy placed great emphasis on its citizens exposing their thoughts to others, just as men exposed their bodies. These mutual acts of disclosure were meant to draw the knot between citizens ever tighter. We might call the knot today “male bonding”; the Athenians took this bond literally. In ancient Greek, the very words used to express erotic love of another man could be used to express one’s attachment to the city. A politician wanted to appear like a lover or a warrior.
The insistence on showing, exposing, and revealing put its stamp on the stones of Athens. The greatest building work of the Periklean era, the temple of the Parthenon, was sited on a promontory so that it stood out exposed to view from throughout the city below. The great central square of the city, the agora, contained few places which were forbidden territory as is modern private property. In the democratic political spaces the Athenians built, most notably the theatre built into the hill of the Pnyx where the assembly of all citizens met, the organization of the crowd and the rules of voting sought to expose how individuals or small groups voted to the gaze of all. Nakedness might seem the sign of a people entirely at home in the City: the city was the place in which one could live happily exposed, unlike the barbarians who aimlessly wandered the earth without the protection of stone. Perikles celebrated an Athens in which harmony seemed to reign between flesh and stone.
The value placed on nakedness derived in part from the ways Greeks of Perikles‘ time thought about the interior of the human body. Body heat was the key to human physiology: those who most concentrated and marshalled their bodily heat had no need of clothes. More, the hot body was more reactive to others, more febrile, than was a cold and sluggish body; hot bodies were strong possessing the heat to act as well as react. These physiological precepts extended to the use of language. When people listened, spoke, or read words, their body temperatures supposedly rose, and So again their desire to act---a belief about the body which underlay Perikles’ belief in the unity of words and deeds.
This Greek understanding of physiology made the idealization of nakedness far more complex than the stark contrast Thucydides drew between a Greek, proud of his body and proud of his city, and the barbarian dressed in patchy furs who lived in the forest or in the marshes. The Greek understanding of the human body suggested different rights, and differences in urban spaces, for bodies containing different degrees of heat. These differences cut most notably across the dividing line of gender, since women were thought to be colder versions of men. Women did not show themselves naked in the city; more, they were usually confined to the interiors of houses, as though the lightless interior more suited their physiology than did the open spaces of the sun. In the house, they wore tunics of thin material which extended to the knees; on the street, their tunics were ankle-length, coarse, opaque linen. The treatment of slaves similarly turned on the belief that the harsh conditions of enslavement reduced the body temperature of the slave, even if a noble-born male captive, so that he became more and more dullwitted, incapable of speech, less and less human, ht only for the labor which the masters imposed on him in the first place. The unity of word and deed celebrated by Perikles was experienced only by male citizens whose “nature" fitted them for it. The Greeks used the science of body heat, that is, to enact rules of domination and subordination.
Athens was not alone in subscribing to this ruling image of the body, in treating people in radically unequal ways based on it, and in organizing space according to its dictates. But the Athens of Perikles’ time speaks to us in modern times as ancient Sparta perhaps does not in part because of how this master image of the body inaugurated crises in Athenian democracy. In his history, Thucydides returned to the themes of the Funeral Oration again and again; he feared the confidence Perikles expressed in the POHWThUCYdideS' hi5t01'Y
