To be naked and unashamed was one of the glories of the cultivated Greek. It astonished (and still shocks) the barbarian. When Agesilaus, the Spartan king, was fighting on Persian soil he caused his Oriental captives to be exhibited naked to his men, in order that they might have no more terror of the great king’s myriads. Alone among civilised peoples of the earth the ancient Greek dared to strip his body to the sun, and this too, as Thucydides witnesseth, came from the manly city. “The Lacedæmonians,” he says, “were the first to use simple raiment of the present style, and in other respects were the first to adopt a similar scale of living for rich and poor. They were the first to strip and undress in public, for anointing with oil after exercise. Originally the athletes used to wear loin-cloths about their middles even at the Olympic Games, and that practice has not long been discontinued” (actually in 720 B.C.). “Even now some of the barbarians, especially the Asiatics, continue to wear clothes at contests of boxing and wrestling. One might point to several other analogies between the customs of ancient Greece and modern barbarism.” With female nudity the case is different. Although the girls of Sparta used to strip for their gymnastic exercises, that was a notorious Spartan idiosyncrasy. It is only under foreign influence and in the later periods that feminine nudity is exhibited in Greek art. Hear Plato on the subject: Socrates has been led by the logic of his argument into the assertion that the women of the Ideal Republic ought to be educated just like the men, to go through the semi-military training of the wrestling school and the gymnasium along with them. The only objection he can see to such a course is that the public exercises of women would appear _ridiculous_ to the Athenians of his day. That objection he dismisses as follows: “Well, then,” says Socrates, “as we have begun the argument we must take the rough with the smooth, and we must beg the wits to leave their usual trade and be serious. They must remember that it is not very long since it seemed to the Greeks ugly and ridiculous that men should appear naked, as it does now to most of the barbarians. And when the Cretans first, and after them the Lacedæmonians, began their stripped exercises the wits of the day had occasion to make fun of such things. Don’t you suppose they did?” “I do indeed.” “But when experience showed that it was better to strip than to cover the body, what the eye thought ridiculous was [Illustration: FIG. 1. THE “DORYPHORUS” OF POLYCLEITUS _Alinari_ FIG. 2. THE “APOXYOMENUS” PLATE XX] overwhelmed by what logic declared to be best, and it became apparent that it is only a fool who thinks anything ridiculous, except what is evil.” SPARTA