Citizenship and Nudity, a ‘True History’

Forfattere

  • Oswyn Murray

Resumé

This paper is an attempt to write the history of the ‘grandeur and decadence’ of the Greek polis through the history of nudity in the ancient world from ca. 700 BCE to ca. 700 CE in eight episodes: (1) The origins of Greek male nudity in athletics; (2) the development of the ephebeia and the gymnasion as a universal aspect of Greek education; (3) the spread of the gymnasion through the Hellenistic polis; (4) the Maccabaean resistance and Jewish attitudes to public nudity; (5) the problem of circumcision; (6) conflicts between Greeks and Jews in the Alexandrian gymnasion and the Acts of the Pagan Martyrs; (7) the Roman Empire and the rise of the public bath; nudity in the bathhouse; (8) the Christian emasculation of public statues and the end of the Greek polis. Each episode rests on the detailed researches of others; it is merely the possible interconnection between them that I am seeking to establish.

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Publiceret

2026-08-21

Citation/Eksport

Murray, O. (2026). Citizenship and Nudity, a ‘True History’. Classica Et Mediaevalia, 335–369. Hentet fra https://tidsskrift.dk/classicaetmediaevalia/article/view/169637

Nummer

2026: Supplement 4: Tales from A Thousand Cities. Studies in Memory of Mogens Herman Hansen

Sektion

The Greek City-State Culture

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