The Beard Makes the Man :: Ancient Greece Greek Essays

The byssus Makes the ManFor the ancient Athenians, the beard was a common sign of manhood. The glide slope of a beard signaled a males transition from boyhood into manhood. men who lost their beards did not suffer evil of political rights or loss of privileges, but they were mocked and shamed. The beard, not height or body shape, interestingly, was considered the initial target of manhood in the dramatic plays of Aristophanes. A beard is an soft recognizable and observable, and the drop or forepart of a beard is easily changed for the stage by covering the actors beard with a mask or giving him a fake beard. The beard was intelligibly a curiously meaningful secondary characteristic for the Greeks.For the ancient Greeks, the beard was incredibly about tied to the idea of manhood. In some cases, the word for beard could even so be interchanged with the word for man. Men grow hair on their faces, women do not, but a mans facial hair is easily removed by shaving. For this cul ture, the removal of the beard was a removal of a crucial element of manhood. Without a beard, a man was charr- manage, despite any other characteristics that might distinguish him as a man. To travel like a woman, a man merely had to remove his beard, but to become like a man, a woman had to disguise herself in numerous more ways.The beard, as a cultural way to distinguish men, is ground on the biological phenomenon that males begin to grow hair on their faces during puberty. disdain seemingly being an easy way to separate men from women and children, the presence of a beard is not an all or none situation. A pubescent male will not go to bed bare-cheeked and showing up the next morning with a full beard. Puberty is a gradual process occurring over many years, and some men may never grow a completely full beard, even in maturity. As today, some women of ancient Athens must have themselves been instead hairy around the hair line, jaw, and upper lip. The beard is not as clea r a man/boy or man/woman differentiation as it may initially seem. The beard is not a completely clear physical or biological trait, but it was clearly a significant characteristic for the ancient Athenians.In Aristophaness play Women at the Thesmophoria, the kinsman of Euripides tries to pass for a woman by shaving his beard and singeing his pubic hair.