It’s no coincidence that she’s a lowly slave. Some suggest it dates from an early event, when an athlete won the 200m after he’d lost his trunks, and his rivals promptly copied him.Īnother theory proposes that the nakedness reflected an ancient ritual to mark the reaching of adulthood, when you took off your child’s cloak - a shorter gown worn by juveniles - at the age of 20, and ran naked to join the grown-up citizens.Īll athletes covered themselves not with garments but olive oil mixed with dust Enter the first moisturiser.Įxperts still aren’t sure why athletes competed at the original Olympics in the nude. Quack doctors scooped up this gloop - ‘paidikos gloios’, or ‘boy oil’ - and prescribed it for illnesses and ageing skin. He is also completely naked.Īll the athletes covered themselves not with garments but olive oil mixed with dust an early sort of suntan lotion to protect themselves from the blazing Mediterreanean sun in their outdoor gyms.Ī 300 BC bronze statue shows a young athlete wiping off the oil with a strigil, or scraper.
He is a study in composed balance, with the discus in one outstretched hand, the other bent in counterbalance down towards his knee. Indeed, perhaps the most famous Greek sculpture of all, also in the show, is the Discobolos - the discus-thrower.
But they were naked in the gym in fact, the word ‘gymnasium’ comes from the Greek ‘gymnos’, meaning ‘naked’.Ī 530 BC Athenian vase shows four athletes - a long-jumper, two javelin-throwers and a discus-thrower, all of them naked. It’s not as if the Greeks were naked the whole time, such as when they were doing the shopping or eating a meal. ‘When a youth removes his clothes to compete in the ancient Olympic Games, he does not merely stand naked before his peers, rather he has put on the uniform of the righteousness.’ ‘Greek nudity is a sign not of humiliation, but of moral virtue among the social elite of male citizens,’ says Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. The Greeks were the first to see nakedness as, literally, a heroic state. For them, nakedness was a sign of weakness a sign of losing the battle, of your body being humiliated. The victorious Assyrians, however, are all clothed.įor there was a vital difference in civilisations that existed before the Greeks. Other naked men have their heads chopped off. You can see them in a 730 BC panel from Nimrud in ancient Assyria, now in modern Iraq - one of the ancient cities tragically bulldozed by Islamic State militants earlier this month.īut in the Nimrud panel - which is also at the British Museum - it is dead enemies of the Assyrians who are impaled, naked, on stakes. Yes, there had been naked figures in the art of earlier civilisations. But when those statues were first carved, the Athenians were breaking an extreme taboo. Nowadays, we take Greek nakedness for granted. Goddesses step into the bath without a stitch on. Athletes hurl the discus in the altogether. Warriors die on the Trojan battlefield in the buff.
What’s even more incredible is that many of those statues were naked. Walk around the dazzling new blockbuster show at the British Museum - already being hailed by critics as ‘the absolutely must-see exhibition of the year’ - and there’s barely a scrap of clothing to be seen. Perhaps the most famous Greek sculpture of all, Discobolos, the discus-thrower, shows how athletes competed in the nudeĪbout two-and-a-half thousand years ago, a cultural miracle took place in ancient Greece.ĭemocracy was born in Athens, the first great tragedies and comedies were written - and statues were carved that were more astonishingly lifelike than ever before.