A youth goes by, his body quite stripped, and delicately bronzed by constant exposure to the sun. His limbs are graceful, but vigorous and straight, his chest is magnificently curved. He lifts his head modestly, yet with a proud and easy carriage. His hair is dark blonde; his profile very “Greek”—nose and forehead joining in unbroken straight line. A little crowd is following him; a more favored comrade, a stalwart, bearded man, walks at his side. No need of questioning now whence the sculptors of Athens get their inspiration. This happy youth, just out of the schoolroom, and now to be enrolled as an armed ephebus, will be the model soon for some immortal bronze or marble. Fortunate is he, if his humility is not ruined by all the admiration and flattery; if he can remember the injunctions touching “modesty,” which master and father have repeated so long; if he can remember the precept that true beauty of body can go only with true beauty of soul. Now at least is his day of hidden or conscious pride. All Athens is commending him. He is the reigning toast, like the “belle” of a later age. Not the groundlings only, but the poets, rhetoricians, philosophers, will gaze after him, seek an introduction, compliment him delicately, give themselves the pleasure of making him blush deliciously, and go back to their august problems unconsciously stimulated and refreshed by this vision of “the godlike.”[*]
[*]For pertinent commentary on the effect of meeting a beautiful youth upon very grave men, see, e.g., Plato’s Charmides (esp. 158 a) and Lysis (esp. 206 d). Or better still in Xenophon’s Symposium (I.9), where we hear of the beautiful youth Autolycus, “even as a bright light at night draws every eye, so by his beauty drew on him the gaze of all the company [at the banquet]. Not a man was present who did not feel his emotions stirred by the sight of him.”
143. The Greek Worship of Manly Beauty.—The Greek worship of the beautiful masculine form is something which the later world will never understand. In this worship there is too often a coarseness, a sensual dross, over which a veil is wisely cast. But the great fact of this worship remains: to the vast majority of Greeks “beauty” does not imply a delicate maid clad in snowy drapery; it implies a perfectly shaped, bronzed, and developed youth, standing forth in his undraped manhood for some hard athletic battle. This ideal possesses the national life, and effects the entire Greek civilization. Not beauty in innocent weakness, but beauty in resourceful strength—before this beauty men bow down.[*]
[*] Plato (Republic, p. 402) gives the view of enlightened Greek opinion when he states “There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul, with outward beauty of body, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters into both.”
It is this masculine type of beauty, whether summed up in a physical form or translated by imagery into the realm of the spirit, that Isocrates (a very good mouthpiece for average enlightened opinion) praises in language which strains even his facile rhetoric. “[Beauty] is the first of all things in majesty, honor, and divineness. Nothing devoid of beauty is prized; the admiration of virtue itself comes to this, that of all manifestations of life, virtue is the most beautiful. The supremacy of beauty over all things can be seen in our own disposition toward it, and toward them. Other things we merely seek to attain as we need them, but beautiful things inspire us with love, love which is as much stronger than wish as its object is better. To the beautiful alone, as to the gods, we are never tired of doing homage; delighting to be their slaves rather than to be the rulers of others.”
Could we put to all the heterogeneous crowd in the wide gymnasium the question, “What things do you desire most?” the answer “To be physically beautiful” (not “handsome” merely, but “beautiful”) would come among the first wishes. There is a little song, very popular and very Greek. It tells most of the story.
The best of gifts to mortal man is health;
The next the bloom of beauty’s matchless flower;
The third is blameless and unfraudful wealth;
The fourth with friends to spend youths’ joyous hour.[*]
[*] Translation by Milman. The exact date of this Greek poem is uncertain, but its spirit is entirely true to that of Athens in the time of this sketch.
Health and physical beauty thus go before wealth and the passions of friendship,—a true Greek estimate!
144. The Detestation of Old Age.—Again, we are quick to learn that this “beauty” is the beauty of youth. It is useless to talk to an Athenian of a “beautiful old age.” Old age is an evil to be borne with dignity, with resignation if needs be, to be fought against by every kind of bodily exercise; but to take satisfaction in it?—impossible. It means a diminishing of those keen powers of physical and intellectual enjoyment which are so much to every normal Athenian. It means becoming feeble, and worse than feeble, ridiculous. The physician’s art has not advanced so far as to prevent the frequent loss of sight and hearing in even moderate age. No hope of a future renewal of noble youth in a happier world gilds the just man’s sunset. Old age must, like the untimely passing of loved ones, be endured in becoming silence, as one of the fixed inevitables; but it is gloomy work to pretend to find it cheerful. Only the young can find life truly happy. Euripides in The Mad Heracles speaks for all his race:—