14 DAY TRIAL // We all know the ancient Greek art depicting gorgeous male bodies, with well defined and developed muscles, always ready to act.
Male nudes seem a norm of the ancient Greek art, but don't think that ancient Greeks lived like in a nudist camp. Historians have stated that, in fact, ancient Greeks kept their clothes on for the most part of the time.
New investigation allures that art might have been depicting life more than previously thought.
Nakedness was a means to enhance various men traits, from heroism and the status of defeated. "In ancient Greek art, there are many different kinds of nudity that can mean many different things," said Jeffrey Hurwit, an historian of ancient art at the University of Oregon. "Sometimes they are contradictory."
Hurwit's research shows that nudity appeared in some situations in ancient Greece. Males gave up of their togas in the bedroom and at the symposia parties, where they ate, drunk and caroused, but also on the athletic fields and at the Olympic Games. As many ancient images depict in fact old Olympic Games, many believe that the Greeks were in their birthday suits all the time.
But going naked was risky for the Greeks. "Greek males, it is generally agreed, did not walk around town naked, they did not ride their horses naked, and they certainly did not go into battle naked," Hurwit said. "In most public contexts, clothing was not optional, and in combat nakedness was suicidal."
Warriors and heroes are often, but not always, depicted nude to enhance the effect of the physical power men used to wipe out their enemies. "But, if you can go into battle naked, you've got to be pretty good." said Hurwit.
But nudity was also used to present defeated, dying and dead men, in order to intensify the subjects' weakness. Common laborers were also represented nude to suggest their sweat and muscles while they worked hard. Gods and people of higher social class were sometimes depicted naked to show their social rank.