The ancient Greeks were world-famous for their Beards. All Homer’s
heroes are bearded, and Nestor the Sage is described as stroking his as
a graceful prelusion to an oration. Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto,
Mars, Vulcan, Mercury, are represented with Beards. Apollo is without,
as an emblem of perpetual youth. Hercules and the demigods are also well
furnished. And Æsculapius the God of Health,—significant fact!—is most
abundantly endowed. The mother of Achilles, when supplicating Jupiter,
touches his Beard with one hand, with the other his knee.
As might be supposed from their hardy characteristics, the Spartans
especially cherished the Beard. When one Nicander was asked why? he
replied, “because we esteem it the ornament that preeminently
distinguishes man.” It being demanded of another why he wore so _long_ a
Beard? his noble reply was, “Since it is grown white, it incessantly
reminds me not to dishonor my old age.”[9] Plutarch, after mentioning
the bushy hair and Beard of the Spartan commander Lysander, says, “that
Lycurgus was of opinion that abundance of hair and Beard made those who
were fair, more so, and those who were ugly, more terrible to their
enemies.” Regarding shaving as a mark of slavish servitude, they
compelled their chief magistrates to shave their upper lips during their
term of office, to remind them that though administrators of the laws,
they were still subject to them.
Footnote 9:
The Rev. John More, of Norwich, a worthy clergyman in Elizabeth’s
reign, who is said to have had the longest and largest Beard of any
Englishman of his time, seems to have chosen this Spartan for his
model; since when asked to give a reason for it he replied, “that no
act of his life might be unworthy of the gravity of his appearance.”
And Baudinus, quoted by Pagenstecher, says, Frederick Taubman, the
celebrated German wit, humourist, and theologian, being asked the same
question answered, “in order that whenever I behold these hairs, I may
remember that I am no vile coward or old woman, but a man, called
Frederick Taubman.”
The Greeks in general continued to wear the Beard till the decay of
Athenian virtue brought that free state into subjection to the
Macedonian Conqueror, who, according to Plutarch, ordered his soldiers
to shave, lest their Beards should afford a handle to their enemies.
This must have been when he was in one of his drunken fits, or he might
have had them trimmed like the old Greek warriors.[10] Be that as it
may, Greek freedom and Greek Beards expired together.
Footnote 10:
That the Beard, however, sometimes afforded a handle to an enemy in
ancient times, when swords, especially the Greek, were very short, is
admitted. And I possess an engraving from one of Raphael’s Vatican
Cartoons, where one soldier is represented in the act of cutting down
another whom he has seized by the Beard. He must be a poor master of
his weapon, however, who in modern times would allow a man to grasp
his Beard without being hewn down or run through in the process.
Diogenes, cotemporary with Alexander, once asked a smooth-chinned
voluptuary whether he quarrelled with nature for making him a man
instead of a woman? And Phocion rebuking one who courted the people and
affected a long Spartan Beard, said to him, “if thou needs must flatter,
why didst thou not clip thy Beard?”
It is a curious fact for those who resolve civilization into shaving,
that the only parties in ancient Greece who retained their Beards under
all changes were the Philosophers, or lovers of wisdom—they with whom
all that distinguished Greek intellect was a special study and
profession; who were in fact the most civilized portion of the
community.
From the time of the Emperor Justinian the Greeks resumed the Beard,
which was worn by all the Greek Emperors down to the last, the
unfortunate Paleologus, who died fighting bravely at the taking of
Constantinople by the Turks. It was by these Emperors regarded as an
ensign of royalty—an attribute of kingly majesty.