Ancient Greece

Men and Youths

This was a normal part of aristocratic culture, but with strict boundaries. The relationship of an adult man (erastes) and a youth (eromenos) was considered pedagogical and military. For the eromenos, it was considered shameful to behave passively and effeminately. The relationship often lasted until the youth grew a beard.

Women and Women

Sources are extremely scarce, as women's lives were hidden. However, lesbian love certainly existed — the word itself comes from the island of Lesbos, the homeland of Sappho, who wrote of love for women. In Athens it was not a public institution like male relationships, and it remained in the shadow of the gynaeceum.

Athenian society is not a pyramid with a "king" at the top. It is a complex system where status determined everything.

Citizens (Politai)

The highest stratum. Divided into aristocrats (eupatridai) and merely wealthy landowners. There were no "kings" in the classical period (except Sparta with its two kings, or tyrants in some poleis, but tyranny was condemned).

Male citizens: Full political rights. Life — in the public sphere (agora, court, war, symposia).

Female citizens: Legally — "eternal children." Under the guardianship of father, husband, son. Their world — the gynaeceum (women's half of the house). The ideal: "Let nothing be said of her, neither good nor bad."

Metics (Metoikoi)

Free foreigners living in Athens. Paid a tax, served in the army, but had no political rights. Women metics often worked. Their daughters could hardly marry a citizen.

Freedmen

Former slaves who had received freedom. Did not have citizenship.

Slaves (Douloi)

The complete property of the master. Performed all the work. Women slaves — servants or prostitutes. Slave clothing — minimal: a loincloth.

Hetairai

The word means "companions." These are not "prostitutes" in the modern sense.

Education: The only women educated at the level of men. Versed in philosophy, literature, art. Aspasia, the companion of Pericles, was known as an intellectual; Socrates and Plato visited her salon.

Status: Could be economically independent. Some — very wealthy.

Appearance: Bright, often translucent clothing. Dyed their hair red or light. Appeared in public.

Role: "Emotional partners" for men. Pseudo-Demosthenes: "We keep hetairai for pleasure, pallakai for the daily care of the body, and wives for the bearing of legitimate children."

Jewelry-making was highly developed: casting, filigree, engraving. Materials — gold and silver. Bronze — for cheap jewelry and military equipment.

Women wore: earrings, necklaces, intaglios (carved stones), cameos, clasps, bracelets, rings, diadems. Bracelets were often made of twisted wire with enamel.

Hairstyles: hair tied in a knot at the back of the head, arranged in nets of gilded cords, decorated with diadems, hairpins, combs. Men of the classical period — short hair, a round beard, a mustache. Youths shaved their faces.

Cosmetics: Lead white for the face, rouge from cochineal, soot for eyeliner. Blue eyes (in poetry) and light skin were valued.

This is a key point for the card, because color in Greece is a social code.

· White: Ceremonial, aristocratic, ritual color. Considered "the most refined." But impractical for everyday wear.
· Purple (porphyra): The color of power and wealth. Extracted from sea mollusks, incredibly expensive. In Sparta, the purple himation was battle dress: a "manly color" that hides the blood of the wounded. In Athens — a sign of very high status.
· Saffron (yellow): Associated with women and festivals (Demeter). Hetairai wore bright, "loud" colors.
· Red/pink: Popular color schemes with a contrasting border.
· Dark green, grey, black: Mourning, sorrow, the everyday life of the poor. Black in Greek costume was almost never used as a main color.
· Green, grey, brown: "Ordinary colors of country dwellers."

An important nuance: mesoleukon — a chiton in which the middle is woven with a white stripe on a purple background (or vice versa). This is not an appliqué but a feature of weaving. Such fabrics were worn by kings and high officials.

Basic Elements

Greek clothing consists of rectangular pieces of fabric draped on the body. There was no tailoring. All the charm lay in the folds.

Chiton — the undergarment. Men's — short (to the knee), women's — long. The women's chiton could have a fold-over diplodion (on chest and back) and an overhang kolpos above the belt. It was belted once or twice.

Himation — a cloak (3×1.8 m or 4×1.7 m), draped around the figure. Men could wear it on a bare body; women — always over a chiton, sometimes throwing it over the head.

Chlamys — a short cloak of horsemen and warriors, fastened with a fibula on the shoulder or chest.

Peplos — women's outer garment, similar in form to the chiton but longer and wider. The Doric peplos — made of a rectangular piece of fabric, fastened with fibulae at the shoulders.

Footwear: Sandals of colored leather, decorated with gold and silver. Kothurnoi — footwear on a thick cork sole for the elite. Slaves often went barefoot or in simple sandals.

The youth (ephebe): From 18 to 20 he underwent compulsory military service — the ephebia. Before that he was the object of paideia (education). The ideal eromenos (youth in a relationship with a mentor) was supposed to be modest but not effeminate. Kouroi — statues of youths — are always beardless, as they are "not yet old enough." The youth's hair — long, curled locks held by a band (fillē).

The maiden (parthenos): Before marriage (often at 14–15) she lived in the gynaeceum. Spartan girls wore their hair long and unkempt, but on their wedding day their heads were shaved. A girl's value lay in future legitimate offspring.

For the Greeks, a beautiful woman is by definition a problem. Hesiod describes the first woman as kalon kakon — "beautiful evil." She is evil because she is beautiful, and beautiful because she is evil.

The ideal of female beauty:

· Light skin (a sign that the woman does not work in the fields)
· Wide hips, "white arms" — sometimes whitened with lead white
· Fullness below the waist was valued: the contest in honor of Aphrodite Kallipygos ("of the Beautiful Buttocks") is a historical fact.

An interesting contrast: in vase painting, the bodies of hetairai are often depicted as emaciated, with protruding bones and hollow flanks. Researchers suggest this is not an ideal of beauty but a marker of social status: the thinness of a hetaira comes from poverty or illness, not from fitness. The respectable wife, hidden by clothing, probably had a more straight, less curvy figure.

Sculptural canons: Polykleitos calculated proportions by "heads" (7 heads in height), Lysippos — 8.5. But these are mathematical abstractions that were unattainable in life — art showed not what is, but what ought to be.

What a female citizen had: The right to a dowry, the right to divorce (formally), participation in religious rituals. What she did not have: Civil rights, the right to vote, the right to own property without a guardian (kyrios), the right to leave the house without escort and a veil.

For the Greeks, beauty of body was direct proof of beauty of mind. The word kaloskagathos ("beautiful and good") meant a person pleasing to look upon and therefore good inwardly as well.

The ideal male appearance according to Plato — the "golden mean":

· Honey-colored skin (neither pale nor too swarthy)
· A straight nose (neither snub nor aquiline)
· An athletic but not hypertrophied body
· Plato contrasts: the "swarthy" (melanas) are "manly," the "white" are "divinely beautiful," and the "honey-colored" are the golden mean.

Anthropologically, Greeks belonged predominantly to the Mediterranean type: long skull, narrow face, slender build.

The athlete's body was a political symbol. A citizen who spent up to eight hours a day in the gymnasium was expected to have defined muscles, a narrow waist, and oiled skin. Xenophon and Plutarch describe Spartan warriors in purple cloaks — a color that, according to Plutarch, is "manly" and hides the blood of the wounded.

What a male citizen had: The right to vote, the right to own land, the right to speak in court, access to public life. What he did not have: Freedom from liturgies (the obligation to finance a theatre or the fleet), the right to public "romantic" love for his wife (this was considered indecent).

Adult Greeks were, in the mass, dark-haired and dark-eyed. Aristotle in the Physics defines grey hair as a process in which hair transitions from dark to grey, which indirectly confirms that the usual hair color of the Greeks was dark. The author of the Physiognomy (attributed to Aristotle) mentions blue-eyed (glaukoi) and black-eyed (melanommatoi) people without attributing moral superiority to either.

Plato in the Republic gives important evidence: describing ideal statues, he insists that the eyes should be painted black — that is, black, not of an "exotic" color. This does not mean blue eyes did not occur, but they were not the norm of beauty.

Blond hair — xanthos (golden/reddish) — was an epithet of heroes in epic poetry. However, as historian Bettany Hughes notes, among all mortals in the Iliad only four are described as fair-haired. This is exceptionality, not the rule. Red hair (pyrsos) had a special aura: on the one hand, it was associated with magical power (the fresco on Santorini, where only the red-haired woman is admitted to the goddess); on the other, with the femme fatale like Helen of Troy.

Takeaway for the card: A typical Greek — dark hair, dark eyes, skin that tans easily. Blond/red hair — a rare trait that draws attention, sometimes with a shade of danger or divine marking.