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THE CLOTHED BODY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002

Dr. Paul Christesen
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

Undress as Ritual: A Reconsideration of the Emergence of Athletic Nudity in Ancient Greece

Recent scholarship has explored the importance of ritual in structuring combat in ancient Greece. This paper draws on Victor Turner's work and argues that a similar emphasis on ritual is helpful in explicating the appearance of athletic nudity.

Combat in Archaic and Classical Greece (700-323 BCE) consisted of a hand-to-hand struggle between two mass infantry formations (phalanxes). Tactics consisted largely of attempts to fragment the enemy formation; once a phalanx was fragmented, its members were extremely vulnerable and were forced to flee the field. Moreover, premature flight by those stationed in the rear of the phalanx doomed those in the front to near certain defeat. Cohesion-both physical and mental-was, as a result, of supreme importance.

The Homeric poems (c. 750-725 BCE) consistently depict athletes in loincloths. Black Figure vase painting makes it clear that this had changed by 575 and that group nudity in the context of informal, everyday athletics-what the Greeks called gymnastics-had become common by that time. While numerous reasons for the movement from clothed to unclothed athletics have been proposed, the role of ritual has been largely neglected.

The males in each community who participated in gymnastics also served together in the community's phalanx. This paper re-interprets the group undress involved in gymnastics as a repeated ritual that fostered a sense of corporate identity and bound its practitioners together into a permanently liminalized, highly cohesive group.

The origins of group nudity are then traced to the societal reform that took place in Sparta in the early seventh century. A highly structured educational system was introduced, which isolated males from age 12 to 30. This isolation was achieved, in part, through the institutionalization of pre-existing initiation rites. It is in this institutionalization that the origins of gymnastics should be sought. The success of the Spartan system in producing highly effective soldiers led to the selective emulation of Spartan practice elsewhere in Greece, including gymnastics. While a simplistic functionalist view of gymnastics is unsustainable, the evidence does imply that a certain degree of conscious manipulation of ritual was involved in the introduction of athletic nudity in Sparta.

The contribution of this paper is to suggest a new interpretation of the emergence of athletic nudity in ancient Greece and to more precisely situate the practice in both societal and historical terms.