Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (5 page)

When his Macedonian and Greek army conquered the vast and powerful Persian Empire, Alexander the Great reshaped the political landscape of the known world and greatly extended the power and reach of Greek language and culture. One of his greatest legacies, however, was so subtle, or rather so obvious, that it has been entirely overlooked: he forever changed men’s faces. Before Alexander’s time, a respectable Greek man was fully bearded. Afterward, he was shaved. By shaving himself, and ordering his officers and infantrymen to do the same, Alexander set a standard that would endure unchallenged for the next four hundred years. After that long stretch, natural hair regained favor only through the relentless efforts of defiant philosophers, and then only for a brief time. This great transformation was certainly not a fashion trend. It makes no sense, after all, to speak of four-hundred-year fashion cycles. On the contrary, changing facial hair mirrored competing ideals of manliness. The razor’s ultimate victory was to have profound consequences then and now.

The revolution that overthrew the reign of beards occurred on September 30, 331 BCE, as Alexander prepared for a decisive showdown
with the Persian emperor for control of Asia. On that day he ordered his men to shave. What can explain this unprecedented command? In Alexander’s view, his difficult situation required it. As the climactic battle with the Persian emperor approached, Alexander had many worries. Though he and his men had proved invincible in three years of battle against large Persian armies in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria, Alexander now faced a truly vast army gathered by Persian emperor Darius to put an end to his invasion. When Alexander’s Macedonian and Greek troops reached the crest of a hill near Gaugamela (in what is now northern Iraq), they were chilled to discover below them a vast carpet of orange flames—countless thousands of campfires lit by their massed enemies. Some ancient historians wrote that Darius commanded a million men, while others offered the more believable figure of a quarter million. Even at the lower figure, Alexander was outnumbered five to one. Uncharacteristically accepting the cautious advice of his commanders, he delayed his attack, ordering his men to camp for a day while he assessed the terrain and his own situation. One major difficulty was that the battlefield was a wide plain, offering no natural protection for his smaller army.

Facing these pressures, Alexander took several unusual precautions: he confronted the anxieties of his men by performing, for the only time during his campaigns, a sacrifice to the god Phobos (Fear);
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he dispensed with his usual rousing speech on valor, instead quietly instructing his commanders to remind the soldiers that success depended on every man concentrating on his own assignment;
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and his final command before the battle was the deployment of razors. The ancient historian Plutarch, writing many centuries later, tells us that “when all preparations had been made for battle, the generals asked Alexander whether there was anything else in addition to what they had done. ‘Nothing,’ said he, ‘except to shave the Macedonians’ beards.’”
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When the commander Parmenio asked the reason for this strange order, Alexander replied, “Don’t you know that in battles there is nothing handier to grasp than a beard?”

There is no reason to doubt that Alexander gave such an order, but there is ample cause to doubt Plutarch’s explanation. Stories of beard-pulling in battles were just that—stories from myth rather than history. It is possible, of course, that the soldiers nervously shared tales of hair-pulling
disasters and that Alexander hoped to make them feel less vulnerable. On the other hand, given the powerful association of hair with manly strength, an idea that featured prominently in ancient Greece’s most popular work of literature, the
Iliad
, shaving could just as likely have made the men feel
more
vulnerable. In any event, no Greek or Macedonian leader before this time had required his soldiers to shave.

Plutarch and later historians misunderstood this order because they neglected the most relevant fact, namely that Alexander himself shaved. Every image, especially the famous statue by Lysippus (
figure 3.1
), depicts a smooth-faced Alexander, distinguished by the graceful turn of the neck and, in Plutarch’s words, “the melting glance of his eyes.”
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Whatever else might be said or believed about the benefits and dangers of beards, the most obvious result of Alexander’s command was to make his troops look more like him. This would have had a far greater psychological effect than any hypothetical protection against grabby Persians. Symbolically, he was calling upon his men to identify with their smooth-faced leader, and to distinguish themselves from the inferior, bearded Asians they confronted. Alexander wished above all, as he told his commanders before the battle, that each man see himself as a critical part of the mission. They would certainly see this more clearly if each of them looked more like their heroic commander.

Alexander’s subsequent triumph at Gaugamela established a new political, economic, and cultural order throughout the Middle East. After his death, only a few years later, Alexander’s generals divided the vast new empire among themselves and established a collection of kingdoms administered by Greek-speaking colonists. The Hellenistic Age had dawned, and though Alexander himself was gone, his glorious image lived on in the smooth faces of Hellenistic rulers, courtiers, and soldiers. From Macedonia to Mesopotamia, it was a complete about-face for respectable men: a new look for a new era. Even in Egypt, which had a long tradition of shaving, the Pharaohs had worn an elaborate, false beard. In the Greek world, however, beards were dethroned as a symbol of masculine authority. How and when this great transformation took place is clear enough, but not why. Why did Alexander shave in the first place, and what sort of manliness was he trying to project? To find answers, it is necessary to step a bit further back in time.

Alexander’s choice to shave himself and his soldiers was surprising because there were strong prejudices in Greek culture against it. From time immemorial, Greek and Macedonian men had been ashamed to lack a beard. A smooth chin on a grown man was everywhere taken as a sign of effeminacy or degeneracy. This stereotype was so thoroughly
engrained in classical Greece that comic playwrights like Aristophanes could count on it for big laughs from their audiences. In one play, for example, Aristophanes made fun of one of his contemporaries, the tragic playwright Euripides. The story was that Euripides had infuriated Athenian women with his portrayal of female characters. To improve his reputation, Euripides concocted an absurd scheme to have his effeminate friend Agathon dress in drag and infiltrate women’s meetings in order to defend him. When Agathon refused, Euripides was reduced to an even more desperate plan. Taking Agathon’s razor—a feminine rather than masculine implement—he recruited his very reluctant father-in-law to be shaved and dressed as a woman. The ensuing scene was the typical stuff of comic farce:

Any respectable Athenian man would have felt the same. Without his beard, a man was stripped of his “armor,” unmanned and humiliated.

More serious social critics, such as the writer Theopompus, took an even dimmer view, damning what Aristophanes mocked. In his diatribes against the Macedonian courtiers surrounding Alexander’s Macedonian (bearded) father, King Philip, Theopompus decried their “shameful and terrible deeds. “Some would shave themselves and make themselves smooth,” he complained, “although they continued to be men. Others would mount each other although they had beards.”
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It would be unwise to take Theopompus too literally. He was slinging mud at his political adversaries. The relevant point is that he considered it a scandal for men to shave themselves to appear like women or youths. Men who shaved were deviants, either laughable or dangerous, depending on one’s point of view. Some Greek cities, wishing to stamp out this social threat, even passed laws requiring men to grow their beards.

The corollary to this negative opinion of shaving was a positive opinion of facial hair. The bearded men of classical Greece took as models the long-haired and bearded warrior-heroes of Homeric verse. In the
Iliad,
Homer’s epic tale of the Greek conquest of Troy, the beards of the Greek kings Menelaus and Agamemnon were specifically associated
with their masculine authority. Likewise, the power of Zeus, the father of the gods, was symbolized by his flowing hair and beard. Early in Homer’s
Iliad
, the goddess Thetis made a very intimate and effective appeal to Zeus on behalf of her son Achilles by stroking his beard.
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This sensual appeasement of the ultimate male ego succeeded in persuading Zeus to restore Achilles to King Agamemnon’s graces.

Men of all ranks acknowledged the majesty of great beards and laughed at Aristophanes’s jokes about shaved men. Philosophers and physicians also backed this pro-beard prejudice. The medical works attributed to Hippocrates (only some of which were written by him) put forward several different theories about the physiology of hair, but all shared a notion that hair in general, and the beard in particular, was a manifestation of male superiority. Greek scientists agreed that men had greater “vital heat” than women or children, and that this heat—a life force rather than just warmth—accounted for men’s greater hairiness as well as their greater size, strength, and reasoning powers. In connection with this notion, many Greek medical writers discussed the importance of semen, which they believed to be the purified essence of vital heat. Introduced into a woman’s womb, this concentrated life force produced new life. Flowing within men’s bodies, it produced a profusion of hair. Even Greek physicians who supposed that women had some semen believed that no woman could sustain a masculine level of vital heat. One medical text, for example, discussed the cases of two women who had stopped menstruating and started growing facial hair, after which they became sick and died. It was surmised their bodies could not handle the abnormal buildup of semen caused by the failure of their feminine cycles. Only men’s bodies were strong enough to grow beards and live.
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It made perfect sense to Greek physicians that vital heat would produce hair. The author of a medical text entitled
Nature of the Child
explained it thus: the flow of semen acted on certain kinds of porous flesh to cause hair to grow, much as a plant would grow from fertile soil. Because both men and women had semen, both sexes grew hair on their bodies, particularly on the head, where the semen was stored. But there were two differences in men’s bodies. First, they had greater heat, which made the skin more porous, and second, they had more semen to nourish the hair. The beard could also be explained by the
way semen flowed in the body. Stored in the head, it traveled from there to the rest of the body when required, particularly during sex. For men, the hair on the chin grows thick “when the fluid in its course from the head during intercourse is delayed by its arrival in the chin, which projects forward of the breast.”
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Presumably, men had sex facing downward most of the time, and this would make the face the repository of more semen, and more hair growth.

The great philosopher Aristotle did not quite agree with this view. He reasoned that hair was residue from the evaporation of moisture that built up in the pores of the skin. Even so, he agreed that hot fluids, including semen, were the ultimate source of hair, and that this explained why men had more hair as well as more strength and reasoning power. Men with “strong sexual passions” had especially full, thick beards because of an abundance of semen, but these men were also more likely to go bald from the depletion of that semen through repeated intercourse.
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More sex, more hair loss. “That is why,” Aristotle concluded, “no one goes bald before the time of sexual intercourse, and also why that is the time when those who are naturally prone to intercourse go bald.” In spite of the apparent flaws in his theory, including his unwillingness or inability to explain female hair, Aristotle found reasons to support the general consensus that both the growth of hair and its opposite, baldness, were intrinsic to the greater vitality and capacity of males. In this way Greek science and philosophy conspired with literature and common opinion to bolster admiration for facial hair. Men had every reason to grow their hair with pride because it signified their privileged nature and their authority over women and children.

Given this prejudice, why would Alexander shave? Was it not shameful, deviant, and demeaning? As someone tutored by Aristotle himself, Alexander could not have been blind to the apparent absurdity of a war leader attempting to “fight without armor.” On the contrary, Alexander was the most image-conscious leader the world had yet seen. He was careful to hire all the best public relations people: an official historian, Callisthenes; an official painter, Apelles; and an official sculptor, Lysippus. His choice to shave was therefore a carefully calculated move.
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During his years of world conquest, Alexander’s propaganda machine portrayed him as a true superhero. Callisthenes cast Alexander as the new Achilles, the demigod hero of the legendary battle of Troy, and
Alexander played the part with gusto. After conquering most of Asia, which was far more than Achilles could have claimed, Alexander preferred to liken himself to another demigod, Heracles, who was known for accomplishing seemingly impossible tasks. It stood to reason that Alexander would attempt to look like these heroes, and because painters and sculptors of his day rendered gods and heroes in the immortal splendor of youthful, beardless nudity, he did his best to follow suit. With limitless self-confidence, Alexander dared to do what no self-respecting Greek leader had ever done before: shave his face. Audaciously, he cast himself in an otherworldly image of ageless perfection, taking advantage of the fact that he was still only twenty-two years old when he led his forces into Asia. He did not, of course, shed his clothes in public, though Lysippus’s famous full-body bronze portrait
Alexander with a Lance
(now lost) was indeed nude. For the real conqueror, a smooth, youthful face with flowing curls of hair was the best he could do. In this way life imitated art: it was as though Heracles had stepped straight out of a vase painting to lead the Macedonians and Greeks into a new golden age.