Serena Newmark

Gender and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity

The Beard Makes the Man

For the ancient Athenians, the beard was a common sign of manhood. The coming of a beard signaled a male’s transition from boyhood into manhood. Men who lost their beards did not suffer loss of political rights or loss of privileges, but they were mocked and shamed. The beard, not height or body shape, interestingly, was considered the initial marker of manhood in the plays of Aristophanes. A beard is an easily recognizable and observable, and the lack or presence of a beard is easily changed for the stage by covering the actor’s beard with a mask or giving him a fake beard. The beard was clearly a particularly meaningful secondary characteristic for the Greeks.

For the ancient Greeks, the beard was incredibly closely tied to the idea of manhood. In some cases, the word for beard could even be interchanged with the word for man. Men grow hair on their faces, women do not, but a man’s facial hair is easily removed by shaving. For this culture, the removal of the beard was a removal of a crucial element of manhood. Without a beard, a man was woman-like, despite any other characteristics that might distinguish him as a man. To become like a woman, a man merely had to remove his beard, but to become like a man, a woman had to disguise herself in many more ways.

The beard, as a cultural way to distinguish men, is based on the biological phenomenon that males begin to grow hair on their faces during puberty. Despite seemingly being an easy way to separate men from women and children, the presence of a beard is not an all or none situation. A pubescent male will not go to bed bare-cheeked and wake up the next morning with a full beard. Puberty is a gradual process occurring over many years, and some men may never grow a completely full beard, even in maturity. As today, some women of ancient Athens must have themselves been quite hairy around the hair line, jaw, and upper lip. The beard is not as clear a man/boy or man/woman differentiation as it may initially seem. The beard is not a completely clear physical or biological trait, but it was clearly a significant characteristic for the ancient Athenians.

In Aristophanes’s play Women at the Thesmophoria, the kinsman of Euripides tries to pass for a woman by shaving his beard and singeing his pubic hair. Of course, this farce does not last very long, and due to his slanderous remarks and sudden, mysterious appearance, he is quickly exposed as a fraud. Apparently the Kinsman’s hairless state is so convincing that, although the women have suspicions, they do not find him to be a fraud until Kleisthenes, an Athenian man, tells them of Euripides’s plot to send a male spy to the women’s festival. The Kinsman’s beard is a great source of pride for him, and he knows that the other troops in his regiment will mock him when they see him shaven. The Kinsman complains to Euripides, "When I rejoin my regiment I’ll literally be a leatherneck!" Not only is the Kinsman’s beard shaved to make him look like a woman, hair is also singed off of his genitals. Of course, if the women at the festival had a chance to see his newly singed pubic hair, they would immediately know, by his genitals, that he was indeed a man. The Kinsman’s pubic hair is carefully singed off by Euripides, but it was never meant to be seen. This suggests that the two men thought that this feminine practice of hair removal would help the Kinsman psychologically become a woman. This seemingly irrelevant singeing of the Kinsman suggests that the men viewed hair removal as mental and psychological, not merely cosmetic and physical.

A man’s beard is very closely connected to his personality and intentions. In Women at the Thesmophoria, the personalities of some characters in the story are signified by the hair on their faces. Kleisthenes, the man who helped expose the disgused kinsman, is described as an extraordinarily effeminate man. He claims that his loyalty to womenkind is honest by saying, "My devotion to you [women] is evident from my clean jowls." In the case of this admitted woman-sympathizer, beardlessness proved his honesty towards women. The Harold speaks to Kleisthenes, "I may fittingly call you boy, since your jowls are not armored with a beard." His lack of a beard makes him a boy in the Harold’s eyes, and his being other than a mature, bearded man makes him an ally of the women. Kleisthenes’s inward sympathies towards the women are shown outwardly by his beardless state. Euripides, the famous playwright, admittedly slanders women in his plays, and womenkind’s anger toward him drives the action of the play. He and his male-centered personality are so tied to his beard that he even refers to himself as one: "I’m an old gray beard." The word "beard" in this phrase is a metaphor for the word "man." These terms are so close in connotation that they are interchangeable in this instance. It is extraordinary that a man can so closely identify himself with a body part that is so easily removed and so easily grown back.

In another of Aristophanes’s plays, Assemblywomen, women disguise themselves as men by imitating many practices and appearances of men, including wearing fake beards. To prepare to imitate men, the women obtain false beards and "Steal their husbands’ clothes." The women also alter their cosmetic appearance by preparing for a long time. One woman states, "I’ve let my armpits get nice and bushy . . . I oil myself and spend the whole day in the sun trying to get a tan." Tanned skin and unshaven armpits were clearly characteristics of men, yet none of the women claims that her new manly traits will cause her to be mocked by her female friends, as the Kinsman would be mocked for his beardlessness. Changing secondary characteristics, such as hair, does not seem to threaten the women’s femininity as it threatens the men’s masculinity.

The women plan for many days to be able to imitate men, but the Kinsman of Euripides only takes a few minutes to be disguised as a woman. The women, especially the protagonist, Praxagora, put an emphasis on the beard as well. Praxagora tells another woman, "Put on your beard and become a man." Beards are an important part of the male costume, but the women also prepare mentally. They practice speaking like the other gender, something the Kinsman in Women at the Thesmaphoria failed to do. The women practice speaking the way they believe men do when they are alone, saying things like, "I say we outlaw the use of kegs in barrooms -- to hold water!" Praxagora scolds many women because they expose themselves as women by invoking the twain goddesses while speaking instead of invoking Zeus or some other male deity. "You did swear by the Twain when you’re supposed to be a man!" Praxagora tells one of her fellow women. Unlike the Kinsman of the aforementioned play, the women in Assemblywomen spend quite a lot of time altering their behavior and speech as well as their physical appearance. But unlike the Kinsman who singed his hair, the women do not do anything, such as wear a phallice, to alter their unseen genitals. Unlike the Kinsman and his last-minute costume, Praxagora and her women had been practicing and preparing for months to imitate men. They might have believed such psychological, yet completely physically unseen, changes to their genitalia were unnecessary. They might also have believed that adding a false penis to their costume would really not make them men, but the Kinsman and Euripides believed that singeing a man’s pubic hair would make him more like a woman. Again, only one step is needed to alter the genitals of a man to look like a woman, but the women do not even bother trying to make their genitals seem like those of a man.

In the works of Aristophanes, men are easily made to look like women by removing their beards. In order to imitate men, the women practice their speaking and manner as well as change their physical appearance. The Kinsman will be mocked for his lack of a beard, but the women feel no shame because of their accumulation of underarm hair or newly tanned skin. The presence of a beard was so much a part of the adult masculine identity, that the presence of a beard, and not the ability to grow facial hair, was the symbol of masculinity. Kleisthenes is perfectly able to grow facial hair, but he is seen as feminine because he shaves it. In this ancient Athenian culture, a man is easily made a woman, but a woman is never made a man.

Work Cited

Aristophanes, Three Plays by Aristophanes. trans. Jeffery Henderson. Routledge.

New York: 1996.