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PLATE 2

Marble Statue of a Girl Runner. Vatican Museum, Rome.

The assumption long held that short hair was always characteristic of the athlete is incorrect.473 It is controverted equally by literary evidence and by the monuments. The Homeric Greek took pride in his long hair,474 and doubtless the contestants at the games of Patroklos in the Iliad had long hair. Long hair was worn by some Athenians throughout Athenian history. From the end of the fifth century B.C., long hair was regarded as a mark of effeminacy475 and was regularly worn only by the knights.476 Short hair was worn as a sign of mourning in Athens from early days down.477 Only the slaves regularly wore very short hair in the fifth century B.C.478 The change to short hair in Athens was certainly due to the influence of the palæstra and to athletics in general.479 We see just the opposite custom in vogue in Sparta. There, according to the code of Lykourgos,480 men were compelled to wear long hair and children short hair. Thus the heroes of Leonidas entered the battle of Thermopylæ after combing their long locks.481 After the Persian wars only children and men with laconizing or aristocratic sympathies482 wore their hair long at Athens. When boys arrived at the age of ἔφηβοι, they had their hair cut at the feast of the οἰνιστήρια483 and dedicated it to a god.484 Soon after the Persian war period, athletes wore their hair short. Before that time, the wearing of long hair had already been discarded for obvious reasons in wrestling.485 Similarly, in boxing and the pankration long hair was in the way, and was therefore early braided into two long plaits which were wound around the head in a peculiar way and tied into a knot at the top, the so-called Attic κρωβύλος, the oftenest mentioned manner of dressing the hair in Greek literature.486 The oldest notice of this style of wearing the hair is found in a fragment of Asios.487 Herakleides Ponticus488 says it was used up to the time of the Persian wars. The locus classicus is in Thukydides, who says it was worn in his day by old people only.489 Earlier young men wore it,490 but it went out of fashion between 470 and 460 B.C. In this connection we should mention that the professional athlete under the Roman Empire wore his hair uncut and tied up in an unsightly topknot known as the cirrus.491