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Gottfried Benn recounts events that illustrate the view Dorian Greeks such as the Spartans and Argives had of the body: “Doric means the physique, but the active physique: the physique of muscles, of male flesh, of the body itself. The body tanned by the sun, hardened by dust, scraped by the strigil, cooled by cold baths, accustomed to wind, mature and already toned. Every muscle, the kneecap, the joints were treated, aligned, and integrated into each other. The whole form was martial in character, yet highly refined. The gymnasiums were the schools where this ideal took shape, and from there it spread throughout Greece. Plato, Chrysippus, and the poet Timocreon had all first been wrestlers. Pythagoras was reputed to have won the prize in boxing. Euripides was crowned for wrestling at Eleusis. The body served as proof of servitude or of rank. Agesilaus, the great Spartan, once had the captured Persians stripped in front of his soldiers to encourage them. When the Greeks saw the pale, flaccid flesh of their enemies, they began to laugh and advanced with renewed contempt. Throughout Hellas, the Dorian seed: beautiful bodies. Every festival of the gods, every major celebration included a beauty contest. Even elderly men were chosen for their beauty to carry branches at the Panathenaea. In Elis, the most handsome men were selected to bring offerings to the goddess. As for great bodies: in Sparta, during the Gymnopaedia, generals and renowned men who lacked sufficient height or outward nobility were assigned to the secondary rows of the chorus. The Lacedaemonians, according to Theophrastus, fined their king Archidamus for marrying a short woman, arguing that she would bear him not kings but puppet kings. A Persian, a relative of Xerxes and the tallest man in the army, was worshipped as a demigod after dying in Greece. Among the wrestlers celebrated by Pindar were giants: one carried a bull on his shoulders, another held back a moving chariot, another threw a discus weighing eight pounds to a distance of ninety-five feet. Their home cities recorded such feats on statues of honor and remembrance. These were bodies for breeding. The law determined the age for marriage and selected the most favorable time and conditions for conception. They proceeded as horse breeders might. Malformed offspring were discarded. The body served many ends: for war, for festival, for vice, and, finally, for art. That was the Dorian seed, and it became the history of Hellas.” This is an excerpt from Benn’s 1934 essay “Dorische Welt” (“The Doric World”), translated by me.

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