Sex gods Sports stars have been erotic icons since the time of ancient Greece
Simon Goldhill
Sunday February 3, 2008
Observer Sport Monthly
The ancient Greeks thought that going to the gym regularly was a good way to prepare young men for war, and a necessary training for the body's health. It was also the place to pick up boys.
Socrates, the philosopher, always had an eye for the cute young man, and he describes the scene at Taureas's gym when the hunk of the day walked in. 'The fellow looked absolutely amazing: his beauty, his size. Everyone seemed to me to fancy him - they were so dumb-struck and confused when he came in - with a great crowd of lovers following him.' A friend adds: 'If he took his kit off, you wouldn't bother with his face ...'
This was a familiar scene to Socrates's audience. The classical Greeks were obsessed with beautiful bodies and spent a good deal of time talking about them, honing them, and looking at each other's flesh. In the gym, men - and men only - took all their clothes off, poured oil over their bodies and then had it scraped off, and then they exercised naked, including wrestling together. In a culture that supported affectionate and erotic relations between males, it is no surprise that going to the gym was a pretty sexy affair.
This was part of the good life. Every Greek city worth its name had a string of gymnasiums and many citizens went to the gym every day. One little poem celebrates the ideal vividly: 'He's a lucky guy, who's in love, goes to the gym, comes home and sleeps with his beautiful boy all day.' These words were written for performance by a man among his friends, drinking happily at a symposium - the evening parties at which men relaxed together. For the ancient Greek, sex and sport went together naturally.
The professional athlete on his way to the Olympic Games was sometimes advised not to have sex before the day to save his strength. But the man who won at the Olympic Games returned home in a procession as grand as any ticker-tape parade, and, like any modern celebrity, became a sex-bomb overnight. Even the cabbage-eared boxer, sweaty from the fray, had his passionate admirers.
Sport was where masculinity was on display - and masculinity was a turn-on for the Greek spectators. In a city such as Athens, the Greek man was surrounded by statues of beautiful heroes and warriors - naked bodies, impossibly developed, and perfectly formed. These statues are now seen as the masterpieces of classical art. But these wonderful bodies, like pictures of supermodels for women today, were a frightening ideal to live up to. The gym could also be an anxious experience.
Men should 'glow with fabulous conditioning: neither lean nor skinny, nor excessive in weight, but etched with symmetry'. That's Lucian, a Greek satirist from the Roman Empire, spelling out what to aim for: a six-pack, good legs, to be beautifully symmetrical but not too heavy with muscles ...
Socrates was famous for wandering up to acquaintances in the street and warning them that they had got flabby and clearly weren't working out hard enough. Looking at citizens' bodies and being looked at critically was all part of the life of the gym. In the city, there was no place to hide. Your body was open to the public gaze - and revealed what sort of a man you were.
Athenians found it disgusting that in Sparta women also exercised. For them it was an all-male business. And they recognised that sport in the gym was very much like the grapplings of the bedroom. 'Before wrestling under the rules of the Goddess of Love,' wrote the novelist Achilles Tatius, 'boys get to grapple on the wrestling mat, publicly locking bodies together in the gym - and no one says that these embraces are immodest.' Wrestling is a training for when 'bodies rub firmly against one another in the athletics of pleasure'.
Achilles Tatius is a sly and wicked writer, but he touches the heart of the issue. For ancient Greeks, going to the gym was never just about sport. It was always about sex, too.
· Simon Goldhill is a professor of Greek literature and culture at the University of Cambridge