Greeks, Gymnasia, And The Ideal
The men who came to me carried their bodies in particular ways. Some arrived with their shoulders back and their chests forward, a posture that announced confidence but sometimes, if I watched carefully, also announced effort. Others came in collapsed slightly at the sternum, as if the body needed apology before it could be offered.
The men who worried most about their bodies were not always the men whose bodies gave them the most obvious reason to worry. Some of the men most visibly ill at ease in their own skin had bodies that, by any measurable standard, other men might have envied. They had arrived in those bodies carrying something that the body itself hadn’t generated.
This gap between the actual body and the felt body has a long history, and I wonder how much of it leads back, in the Western tradition at least, to a set of ideas that began in the gymnasiums of ancient Greece and have never quite been dislodged since.
The Greek word gymnos means naked. The gymnasion was, in its literal sense, the place where you went to exercise without clothes. Not a changing room or a bath—a civic institution, managed by public officials, sometimes located near the temples of Heracles or Hermes, and later associated with the most significant intellectual life of the ancient world. Plato’s Academy was a gymnasium. So was Aristotle’s Lyceum.
The connection between the naked exercising male body and the life of the mind was not incidental to the Greeks. It was structural. The gymnasium was where the core of what it meant to be a Greek man was both performed and assessed, and that the performance happened in the nude, in public, among peers.
The gymnasium was not a private space. Men were looked at there, and the looking carried meaning.
The Greeks had a word for what the looking was measuring: kalokagathia, from kalos, beautiful, and agathos, good. The concept connected beauty with goodness, nobility, or excellence, although its meaning varied and should not be reduced to the claim that Greeks universally believed every beautiful person was virtuous. In practice, the word carried the claim that genuine physical beauty—the kind legible in the gymnasium, in the oil-slicked wrestling body or the running form—was inseparable from moral and civic virtue. Those who excelled athletically and displayed a sculpted physique were assumed to possess the leadership qualities necessary to guide the state. Beauty was not decoration. Beauty was evidence of inner order.
I find this extraordinary to hold alongside the ordinary bodies I have spent my working life with. Not because those bodies lacked beauty—they had it, in many different forms—but because the Greek proposition links the visible body to character in a way that seems both appealing and alarming. Appealing because it takes the body seriously as a moral matter. Alarming because it produces, if followed to its logic, a world in which your visible form becomes a statement about your worth as a person. I cannot read kalokagathia without thinking about what it would be like to walk into a gymnasium knowing that your body was being read as evidence of your soul.
And then I think about the posture of some of the men who arrived at my door, that slight collapse at the sternum, and I begin to wonder how long the ghost of that assessment has been with us.
The ideal body the Greeks used to measure these things was not simply a healthy body or a strong body. According to the Greek playwright Aristophanes, the ideal man should have had ‘a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick.’ The small penis in the ideal is worth a moment’s attention, because it has surprised modern readers who come to it expecting the Greeks to idealise scale. The historians I have read suggest it is that the small, unerect penis in Greek statuary expressed sophrosyne—self-possession, rational control over the body’s desires. The body under the mind’s governance. In visual form, this translated into relatively small, unerected penises—a symbol of control over the urges of the flesh, showing that rational and intelligent minds were capable of restraint. The phallus in full expression represented the body out of control, overwhelmed by appetite. In the gymnasium, the ideal body was the body disciplined into its best form, and the form included restraint made visible.
What the gymnos in gymnasion also tells us is that Greek male nakedness had a different cultural grammar from the nakedness in northern European traditions, where exposure tends to accumulate discomfort almost regardless of context. To exercise naked was to be civilised, whereas shame over one’s body marked the “barbarian,” someone who could not appreciate its significance. The Greek construction ran precisely opposite to the tradition Gladstone would later try to project backward onto it: in Athens, the naked male body in its proper context was an achievement, not an embarrassment.
Gladstone. He appears in this history like a man who has walked into the wrong room. His three-volume Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, published in 1858 when he was a Member of Parliament for the University of Oxford, contained among its many arguments a refusal to believe what Homer quite plainly described. In the Odyssey, Nausicaa and her handmaidens bathe and anoint the shipwrecked Odysseus, naked on the shore. In the Iliad, women of standing attend to the bodies of male warriors. Gladstone found this incredible. It was, he wrote, “almost of itself incredible, that habitually, among persons of the highest rank and character, and without any necessity at all, such things should take place. And, as it is not credible, so neither, I think, is it true.”
What strikes me is the word “habitually”. Gladstone was not disputing that it might happen once, in extremity. He was disputing that it could be ordinary practice—that the unclothed male body and hands that attended it could belong to the routine texture of daily life among respectable people. He could not credit the habitualness. And in that word I think I can see a Victorian Prime Minister projecting onto ancient Greece the specific discomfort of his own century, in which the unclothed male body had become a problem requiring management rather than a civic fact requiring observation.
Gladstone had wanted to show that there were traces in Homer’s pages of a divine revelation made to humanity in its earliest days—which is to say, he was reading Homer through his own theological and political framework. He was making the Greeks safe for Victorian England. And in doing so, he was doing something that scholars of Greek culture had been doing since the Renaissance: retrofitting ancient Greece with the concerns of the present, using it as a mirror rather than a window.
I hold the Gladstone passage beside my own experience not because I think the comparison is precise but because I notice something similar in the language men used when they arrived. “I hope this is all right,” several men said, meaning the state of their bodies, meaning the ordinariness of what was happening. The phrase assumed that their naked body might require apology or permission. It assumed a viewer who might be inconvenienced by the sight. This is not the grammar of the gymnasium, where the naked male body was the unremarkable condition of civic participation, where being seen was the point. It is the grammar of a tradition in which the unclothed male body has been made to feel that it needs to justify itself.
The statue I keep returning to is not the Apollo Belvedere, although that is the one most associated with the legacy of the Greek ideal in the Western tradition—the one that the eighteenth-century art historian Winckelmann called the highest achievement of sculpture, the one that shaped the neoclassical revival and sent its proportions rippling through European art for two centuries. I keep returning instead to the Kritios Boy, made around 480 BCE, found in fragments on the Athenian Acropolis. He is small, damaged, and quiet. What makes him remarkable is a technical innovation: his weight rests on one leg, and the resulting slight shift of the hip—the contrapposto that later filled Italian Renaissance sculpture—gives the body a quality of momentary presence, as if he has just arrived in this posture and will shortly move into another. He is not heroic. He is simply there. The ideal, in that figure, is not an announcement. It is a condition of natural ease.
I have seen that ease in men, occasionally. Not very often, and not always in the bodies that might be expected to carry it. I saw it in an older man—I am not going to describe him in the way that would make him recognisable, because that is not what this is about—who undressed without the brief covering gesture I have written about elsewhere, who simply moved from clothed to unclothed as if the transition were of no particular interest. He was neither showing off nor hiding. His body was just the body, doing what it was doing. He had no reason to perform the gymnastic ideal and no reason to apologise for failing to meet it. He had simply, somehow, arrived at a relationship with his own physical fact that the centuries of assessment had not disturbed.
I thought about the Kritios Boy then, and I think about him now. And I think about the gymnasium, and about what it might have meant to walk naked among other naked men with the serious purpose of becoming better at being human, before anyone had decided that the sight of a man’s body was something that, in Gladstone’s word, was not credible.
I do not know how much of the discomfort I have watched men carry into my room comes from the Greek legacy and how much comes from what displaced it. What I notice is that the ideal the Greeks built—the beautiful body as the good body, the trained body as the civic body, the naked body as the natural condition of serious participation in the world—passed through the Victorian century and came out the other side, and what came out the other side was not quite the same thing. Something had been retained and something had been lost, and I am not sure the men who came to me with their shoulders slightly forward knew what either thing was.
The gymnasium is still with us. The word is still with us. The ideal is still with us, in some form, in every fitness magazine and every anxious posture in a changing room. What we seem to have lost is the part where being seen was ordinary.
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