CLASSICAL CORNER

213: HAIRS APPARENT fORTEANA fROM THE ANciENT WORLD cOMPiLED BY BARRY BALDWiN

“But my brother Esau is an hairy man and I am a smooth man” – Genesis 27.11, inspiring Alan Bennett’s classic Beyond

The Fringe sketch. (Appropriate here that Britain’s most erudite and witty classicist should be Mary Beard.)

Back in the 1960s when Middle America regarded ‘long-haired hippies’ as immoral cowardly draft-dodgers, I enjoyed pointing out that antiquity’s greatest warriors had similarly long locks. Homer’s Achæans are regularly styled ‘long-haired’. Lycurgus, founder of Sparta’s militaristic life-style pronounced “Long hair adds beauty to a good face and terror to an ugly one.”

Plutarch ( Theseus, ch5) says both this Athenian king and the Abantes tribe wore their hair long behind but short in front to prevent face-to-face enemies from grabbing it. This so impressed Alexander the Great that he likewise banned beards.

‘Theseis’ became a style name. Likewise, the ‘Hector’; cf. RG Austin & J Boardman, Classical Quarterly 22, 1972, 199, & 23, 1973, 196-7. Both long before the likes of Beckham and Felleine were identified with individual coiffures.

Thucydides (bk1 ch6), not normally one for exotic detail, says the Athenians had only just given up tying their hair behind in knots fastened by golden grasshopper clips.

Mustn’t forget Samson, unimprovably described by Elvis: “Samson told Delilah loud and clear, Keep your cotton-pickin’ fingers Right out of my hair” – Hard-Headed Woman

Hatshepsut (below), the lone female Pharoah, wore a false beard in public to assert regal gender status. Greek brides (or bridezillas) at Argos wore false beards (doubling as merkins? see below) on honeymoon night for the same reason.

For lurid comparison, Juvenal’s Ninth Satire (“One of the most shocking poems ever written” – commentator Gilbert Highet) begins with Ravola’s beard sodden in the effluvia of the woman he was cunnilinguing – he otherwise eliminated unwanted hair with birdlime.

Carthaginian explorer Hanno’s log-book ( Periplus, ch18) reports finding “Hairy women which our interpreters called Gorillæ”. Three were captured, killed, and skinned; cf. E Post, Notes & Queries 23, 1850, 361-2.

At the other end of antiquity, Byzantine chariot-racing hooligans (Procopius, Secret History, bk7 ch4), whilst retaining luxuriant beards and moustaches, had hair cut back in front, flowing Loretta Lynn-style behind, dubbing this antiskinhead tendency ‘Hunnic’.

The actual Huns (Ammianus, bk31 ch31 paras1-6) had notably hairy legs but no beards, retarding their growth by childhood branding of cheeks.

According to their biographers Suetonius and the Augustan History, Nero, derided for wearing his hair in ringlets, offered his first-shave clippings to Jupiter – other Romans followed suit. His wife Poppæa (above) sported a ‘Tower’ bouffant, about which Nero wrote a poem – one word, sucinos = amber, survives; cf. JPVD Balsdon, Roman Women, pp255-60.

Poppæa (like Cleopatra) bathed daily in asses’ milk, which may have kept her tresses free from the infestations alleged in 1960s Dolly-Birds’ bouffants, the latter probably not rivalling the beard (presumably a ‘Full Marx’) of an old glutton in the Byzantine satire Timarion (ch18; cf my 1984 annotated translation) inhabited by mice.

(Nero’s ringlets, Poppæa’s tower: case of HIS-pid and HER-sute)

Augustus shaved his legs with redhot nutshells. Otho plucked out his own body hair and de-bearded by applying moistened bread. Domitian (author of a – lost – book on hair care) personally depilated his concubines, as did teenager Elagabalus his minions, using the same razor to shave first his beard then his own pubes. Apart from their tiny willies, statues of Greek gods and heroes conspicuously lack public hair. Likewise, those of women. Numerous sources point to a widespread aversion to pubic hair, often called the Delta, owing to its triangular configuration; cf. Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus. Despite the pain, they preferred the billiard-ball effect; personally, I like a good minge-fringe.

Since there is pictorial evidence for Roman two-piece bikinis, albeit not so itsybitsyteenyweeny as in the Brian Hyland song, we may speculate on ancient anticipations of full Brazilians and vajazzing – the latter inaugurated or revived by Mary Quant.

A famous anecdote has John Ruskin fleeing his honeymoon bed in horror at wife Effie’s pubic hair. Just as well he never peeked into the snuffbox at St Andrews University stuffed with the public hairs of one of George IV’s mistresses. The first Roman to shave daily was the aristocratic general Scipio Aemilianus. Two centuries later, Emperor Hadrian reversed the trend by sporting a rich growth advertising his obsessive philhellenism. In between (Cicero,

Letters to Atticus, bk1 no14 para5) come the ‘Beardlets’ ( Barbatuli), denoting the thugs in train to gangsterboss Clodius – rather different from today’s glabrous hard men.

Apart from the pain from using crude depilatories and razors, rulers and other bigwigs avoided shaving from fear of being done in by Sweeney Todd-minded barbers – apparently they were as incapable of shaving themselves as are the Granthams at Downton Abbey at dressing.

Many sources (e.g. Lucian, Petronius, Plutarch) ridicule barbers’ shops as gossip factories, the razor-wielders themselves derided for their garrulity and incompetence. Martial ( Epigrams, bk2 no17) complains of a female one in the Suburra slum district who “didn’t shave me; she skinned me.” Cf. FW Nicholson, Harvard Studies in Classical

Philology 2, 1891, 41-56. Whether they whispered as you paid, “Would there be anything else, Sir?” – suggesting, as I remember, the purchase of a packet of Durex – I cannot say.

A famous exchange, anciently attributed to Macedonian King Archelaus, modernly to both Enoch Powell and Quentin Hogg:

Q: How would you like your hair cut, Sire?

A: In silence.