upamfva
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Posted: 10.7.2022 12:34:07
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Would You Be Considered Beautiful in Ancient Greece?
Beauty was extremely important in ancient Greece both for men and women. But who, exactly, was considered beautiful in ancient Greece? Were their beauty standards much different from our own?To get more news about ????????????, you can visit our official website.
The countless works of art depicting the human form, and philosophical treatises on the nature of beauty from antiquity attest to the fact that beauty was indeed much prized in ancient Greece.
In fact, ancient Greeks believed that physical beauty had a direct correlation to internal beauty, meaning that good-looking people were also morally good while those deemed “ugly” were lacking character.
Ancient Greeks who were beautiful, particularly men, were often described as “kaloskagathos,” an adjective that combines “kalos,” meaning beautiful or handsome, and “agathos,” which mean virtuous or good.
Women who were stunningly beautiful, and even women generally, were often either “bad” figures or, at best, morally ambiguous ones in Greek mythology and literature.
While scholars may argue about the extent to which Helen was a willing participant in leaving her husband Menelaus for Paris, an act which caused the Trojan War, there is little doubt that she was not a beloved figure in ancient literature.
It seems that beautiful women were doomed from the start. Hesiod, an ancient Greek poet who was a contemporary of Homer, described the first woman as “kalon kakon,” or the beautiful, evil thing in his work Theogony, which describes the origins of the Greek gods.
The nature of beauty was a topic of great debate in ancient Greece. Philosophers, mathematicians, and artists in antiquity explored the topic endlessly.Famously, the brilliant mathematician, Pythagoras, developed the Golden Ratio, a geometrical formula that linked balance and symmetry to beauty—and not just amongst humans but in everything. According to this ratio, symmetrical faces are the most beautiful.
This devotion to symmetry even extended to eyebrows. In ancient Greece, those with eyebrows that joined in the middle—in a so-called unibrow—were considered more symmetrical and therefore more beautiful.
Those who did not already have a unibrow were known to use kohl, or black shadow-like eyeliner, to fill in the space between their eyebrows. Women in ancient Greece would also use this to line their eyes and darken their eyelashes.While many beauty standards from the past are not appealing to our contemporary sensibilities, there are some that indeed are.
According to Pythagoras’ Golden Ratio, the supermodel Bella Hadid is the most beautiful woman on earth—even without a unibrow.
Pythagoras may have had a point. Neurological and psychological testing has shown that humans do tend to prefer faces that are symmetrical but not unnaturally so.
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