The introduction of athletic nudity: Thucydides, Plato, and the vases

Abstract

A swell of recent books on Greek athletics has resurrected, often no higher than a footnote, an old question: when did Greek athletes begin to exercise nude? Bronze Age archaeology and the Homeric poems make it fairly certain that athletic nudity was not practiced before the late eighth century. The evidence for its introduction is, however, contradictory. A complex, confused, and predominantly late tradition crediting the innovation variously to the Olympic victor Orsippos of Megara (or of Sparta), Akanthos of Sparta, or to an unnamed Athenian athlete, places it in the eighth or seventh centuries. But both Thucydides and Plato report that it was only shortly before their time that Greeks stopped wearing the zoma and began to compete nude.