In a bizarre culture like presnt-day America, people go crazy if the media portrays a woman with bare breasts-witness the outrage at Janet Jackson’s tit ring on TV.
Yet, if you go to the beach, there are people wearning almost nothing.
In the Classical world of Greece and Rome, was public nudity a big issue? I assume that in Greece (where athletes competed naked), or Rome (every body in the public baths was naked, or close to it).
Was pblic nudity prohibited by laws? Take the market place-somebody selling togas-would clients strip down in public to try on the goods?
Or was this sort of thing frowned upon?
Well this is pre-Classical, but several places in the Jewish Bible equate nakedness with shame (cf. Genesis 3:7; Isaiah 47:3; Lamentations 1:8; Nahum 3:5; Habakkuk 2:16). This attitude continues into the New Testament (cf. Revelation 3:18 & 16:15), which was written during the Roman period. As to how unique or unusual the Jewish attitude toward nakedness was in those times, I don’t know.
In the Hellenistic world, it definitely depended on the time, place and gender. (Just as it has in pretty much every other society, AFAICT.)
The wives and daughters of high-status men were most definitely not strolling around town in the nuddy.
I’ll be in mine bunketh.
It really did vary from place to place. The culture of classical Rome, for example, held up modesty in dress as a virtue. Citizens, particularly the upper classes, kept themselves well covered in public, stripping down only at home or at the baths. Public displays of skin were for uncouth foreigners, harlots, and actors.
Greeks were famously much more tolerant of nudity. In the Olympics games, for example, not only were the athletes unencumbered by clothing, (the word *gymnasium *essentially translates to “the naked place” in Greek), but even the audience members enjoyed the show in the buff (take that in whatever manner you wish). Such sartorial tolerance, predictably, was not extended to the womenfolk – at least not the respectable ones. Unless you were in Sparta, of course.
Going back a little further, though, you do have the interesting anomaly of Minoan fashions. Frescoes preserved from the time show women (including those of the upper class) wearing dresses with full, flouncy skirts, but with bodices that left the breasts completely exposed to view.
This is true of Etruscan culture as well. But it comes with the asterisk that Etruscan culture lasted a thousand years and this didn’t hold true in every place and time.
Even in the Mediterranean it gets cold. I don’t know of any culture that isn’t tropical where nudity is a common mode of dress. (Nitpickers: don’t bother. Nudist camps are not cultures.)
nm
In many cases it was more of a social convention than a general prohibition.
For example, slaves and peasants often worked naked or almost naked. But a well-born free citizen would never go half-dressed in public - not because people objected to nudity but because nudity implied low social status.
For similar reasons, a person could appear naked in some circumstances like public bathing or athletic competitions or a battle without a problem. But that same person would never appear undressed in a different situation.
The concept of nudity, by itself, being wrong for all people in all circumstances appears to have originated in Judeo-Christian culture.
To give a more recent example, there were some people complaining when Beyonce recently breast fed her baby in a restaurant.
blink
There’s so much wrong with this statement I’m not sure where to begin…
Here’s a tidbit I learned in a college-level World History class, and from an Art History class:
The ancient Greeks, of course, were tolerant of (male) nudity and it featured greatly in their art (especially sculpture). In an Art History class I took, it was argued that they didn’t do many sculptures of female nudes because of a lack of available models 
The Romans were not innovators, by and large, but instead they were copy-cats. They didn’t progress much in art, math, science, technology, but readily adopted all that they could learn from others, especially the Greeks. They didn’t do so much with original art, but copied Greek art, and made replicas of Greek statuary.
But the Romans were less tolerant of nudity. Thus, they added the fig leaves to the statues they copied. Where original Greek statues of nudes (almost all male) showed everything, the Roman copies usually had the fig leaves.
ETA: Classical paintings of Adam and Eve, BTW, where often fairly modest. But it wasn’t genitalia they were hiding. (Well, that too, probably.) What they were hiding was the belly-buttons. One of the Great Debates Of The Ages was whether Adam and Eve even had belly-buttons, and the classical painters often evaded the question by keeping the mid-abdomen covered in their works.
Well, if you’re going to raise an objection, try and follow through.
First off, define what it is you object to. Do you feel Judeo-Christian culture didn’t have a general nudity taboo? Do you feel that the general nudity taboo originated elsewhere?
Then present some evidence that supports your position. Historical examples would be appropriate in this debate.
Work with me here. It’s awkward if I have to hold up your side of the argument as well as my own.
Well, the first thing would be that there was no Judeo-Christian culture. It’s a modern way of combining two cultures, not some historical culture that actually existed. The second is that a culture with a nudity taboo that predates both involvement with Judaism and Christianity–the Ancient Roman culture. And while others haven’t been mentioned specifics, they’ve talked like nudity taboos were pretty common before then.
And that’s just stuff I noticed in this thread. I’m far from an expert.
IIRC, “nakedness” in the bible was a code work for sex. When the bile says that thou shalt not “uncover her nakedness” they are saying don’t hide the sausage in there. When Noah’s son was forever cursed, unto the present generation, for finding his father drunk and “uncovering his nakedness”, the general consensus was that it probably was not a locker room glimpse that was the offense. (There are several threads here on this).
So the old Jewish prohibition went with the association - don’t be naked because that leads to hanky, then to panky. Oddly, a lot of cultures in that part of the world have that association.
One item I read suggested that the more moderm concept of locking up or hiding the womenfolk in the middle east comes from a different cultural attitude. Victorian european attitudes seems to be that women are either tramps or (mostly) saints, to be protected from corruption by the devil menfolk. Thus women who have any normal urges are told they must be failing to suppress the urge to be sluts and terrible persons.
The Arabic attitude (perhaps more healthy) is that women are horny devils just like men, and (less healthy) have to be locked up to protect them from their baser urges. Read an unexpurgated 1001 Nights, where there are stories like “a woman decided to have sex with a genie…” No wonder Scheherazade keep her hubby on the hook for 3 years - that was before internet porn.
OTOH, perhaps any discussion of nakedness will also have to discuss the attitude to casual sex in a society. With public display goes invitations and public behaviour.
Captain Cook, for example, recounts an episode on Hawaii where he watched a ceremony where a girl of about 10 or 12 “performed the rites of Venus” with an older man, while the whole village watched. Several of the older women yelled comments and helpful hints from the sidelines, and Cook suggested the girl seemed experienced enough that this was not the first time.
One account I read of Magellan’s voyage around the world, was that the rest stop that did him in, when he reached the Phillipines - his men were enthralled by the sights and availablility of the local womenfolk, as were the crew of the Bounty many years later. He got dragged into the local wars and killed because the women were more willing to have casual sex, something less familiar in Europe.
To get back to the OP, I have read that the Roman attitude was that it was very bad behaviour to have sex with the slaves, but what the slaves got up to between themselves was up to them. Of course, divorce was a common behaviour in Roman society, so the concept of life-long monogamy probably did not hold much sway. Women had a fairly high social status compared to many societies, so were able to act for themselves in many situations.
Of course, when you read about the Romans, IIRC Gibbon when repeating some of the gossip tidbits makes the point that Romans in calssical writings were not above slandering their enemies with various transgressions, including sexual, that may not have happened.
Another thing to keep in mind is the cost of clothing. When everything was made by hand, and materials were scarce, clothing obviously is smaller and less elaborate. Clothing is also decoration to display riches. So nobody was going to cover up slaves when they don’t need to be covered. Even today it is not uncommon in poorer tropical areas to let the kids to run around naked the first few years, at least until they have some self consciousness.
One thing I find odd and strange, is that the Greeks and Romans had no problem displaying statues with (flaccid) male genitalia, but there seems to have been a convention to display women naked with the Barbie Doll look, no pubic hair and no visible genitalia…
As is often the case, context is everything. Here’s a handy educational video on the subject:
Early Christian culture was Jewish culture, due to the obvious fact that early Christians were former Jews.
And plenty of people have pointed out that Roman culture didn’t have an absolute nudity taboo. There was no prohibition on slaves being naked. And there was no prohibition on citizens being naked in public bathhouses.
What you keep missing is that no culture has an absolute nudity taboo. At all. Ever.
…
Here is your entire mistake broken down:
Little Nemo, Jews and Christians bathed, had sex, and went swimming in the buff for a very long time. What you say makes no sense whatsoever. Hell, this isn’t a very good stereotype. What almost every culture worldwide says is that nudity is inappropriate for an adult in public. Christianity and Judaism say the same. The rest is mostly details, or extremely small cultures with a lot less competition (and then then they still nearly always follow the same ideas, which you find in small tribes in South America).
First, there is no Judeo-Christian culture. It included Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and probably Syrians and other small peoples within the very first generation. And culturally, they kept their heritage, just as they do today. Judaism, then as now, was as much as religion as an ethnicity, and Jews in 30 AD dwelled in every city people around the Med, and did not necessarily form a distinct culture within every city. There was also a sizable class of quasi-Jews, non-Jewish ethnics who held much of the Law sacred, who also converted.
You might also notice, if you ever studied history, that public baths remained a feature of Christian lands (at least in a city) for over a millenium following the fall of Rome, and still exist in many cities.
And even without that, Christianity spread rapidly among complete Gentiles. And none of these people lost their culture. They disapproved of people going naked in public, but not terribly differently than the Greeks or Romans did. Note that the Olympics were not shut down because of nudity, but because it was considered a pagan cult. And did you not notice that the nude painting was highly developed in Christian art, and that old nude pagan statues were not all smashed up?
Second, prohibitions against nudity long predate recorded Judaism or Christianity . The Greeks did not walk around in the buff casually. The Romans considered it completely uncouth. We have no evidence suggesting the Egyptians permitted public nudity, nor the ancient Chinese or Bablyonians or Persians or Assyrians.
In all places and times, of course, people permit nudity in a few specific cases, which are distinguished by being unusual or low-class. Many cultures shrugged at naked servants or entertainers. yet this was as much caused by issues of expense as culture, and even today we find that the very poor in isolated areas tend to focus on buying clothing as they can, precisely because things like good cloth was not cheap for most of history.
Now do you understand why I had a hard time getting started here? Your entire comment is incorrect, ahistorical, and seemingly founded on a belief you made up from nothing.
Respectfully, I think you’re mistaken.
There was a distinct Jewish culture. Jews lived alongside Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Romans and each group recognized that the other group had different cultural standards.
And one of those distinctive differences was opinions on nudity. The Greeks had no problem putting up statues of nudes in public places. And the Jews living in that town would complain that this was offensive.
Don’t mistake this as me saying the Greeks and Romans had no nudity taboos. They certainly did. But their taboos were that there was a time and place when nudity was appropriate.
Public baths did survive for a long time - but as a remnant of Roman culture. Christians leaders condemned them as immoral and shut them down as soon as they had the power to do so.
Nudity in art declined with the rise of Christianity. If it appeared at all, it was associated with shame - Adam and Eve would be depicted as naked to show they had fallen into depravity and Christ would be shown naked on the Cross to show how he was humiliated.
Nudity returned as a subject for art with the Renaissance, when artists deliberately rejected Christian artistic values and sought a return to Classical Greek and Roman artistic values.
Weren’t Jews kind of down on statues period, regardless of clothing or lack thereof?
Erm, Adam and Eve started out naked. They didn’t start wearing clothes until after they fell. As to Christ on the cross, I’m given to understand that Romans crucifying people naked was standard procedure.
Note that Romans normally wore underclothing beneath their togas. so that even if they removed their toga to try on a new one, they would not be completely naked.
And I don’t see any reason that a Roman market clothing seller couldn’t have set up a changing booth, if his customers wanted it. I’ve seen makeshift ones at modern flea markets even.