Pumping iron with the Troy boys
I remember a year or so ago seeing a show about some people in a reality type TV show living as 1860’s frontier settlers. After the blokes lost there sedentary 21st century fat and started doing some hard yakka with a mostly meat and potatoes diet they developed a lean physique - rangey, you might say.
Were ancient greek warriors more likely to have this physique or look more like an ad for Pro Wrestling?
Well, those guys trained for speed, endurance and upper body strength. I’d say they were built like professional athletes - basketball players, maybe, or football quarterbacks. Big, but not too bulky, and zero body fat. They were foot soldiers, after all.
Sure, but most of the year they were farmers, merchants, tradesmen - we’re talking about a citizen soldiery here. AFAIK only Sparta had a full time army with professional soldiers - the rest were all militia. Most of the time they would have been busy making a living, not training for war.
Well, Charles Atlas and his philosophical descendants have even changed the appearance of modern athletes in the last 50 years. (As has the American diet, of course.)
Photos of Jim Thorpe and the pre-movies Johnny Weissmuller show muscle, but no rippling pecs or abs.
Similarly, when the Romans took over the art world with their prefereences for realism over stylized beauty, we find that their real live heroes were not pictured as lean, mean, fighting machines: Caesar Augustus, Trajan, Marc Antony.
(Remember that even as generals, each of these guys marched with their troops and was quite likely to find himself in battle, wielding a sword.)
Well, remember that we have plenty of people today who do hard farm work all day every day in the third world. The bulk of the greek soldiers would have been built like Mexican campesinos probably…short, tough, and enduring rather than muscular and cut.
But then we get to the aristocrats. Bearing in mind that in ancient Greek times “king” just meant a guy with a bigger manure pile than his neighbor. Oddyseus was king of Ithika, which is a tiny flyspeck of an island. The whole point of being an aristocrat is that you spend your time fighting and training to fight rather than working. You use your fighting skills to make the other guy work for you, and if he doesn’t like it you and your buddies kick his ass. Probably the aristos looked more like modern athletes. But even so, most of the soldiers weren’t aristos.
