How Did Ancient Greek Women Make Themselves Look Seductive?

Imagine that you’re a woman in ancient Greece and, for some reason, you find yourself in a situation where you need (or want) to seduce someone. How would you go about doing it? What kind of clothes or cosmetics would you wear to do it? Some readers may be surprised to learn that there are actually a significant number of surviving texts from ancient Greece that describe in considerable detail how goddesses and mortal women made themselves look sexy in order to seduce people and, in this post, I will put my years of classics education to excellent use by introducing all my wonderful readers to them.

In general, these texts indicate that, if a woman wanted to look sexually attractive in order to seduce someone, she might engage in preparations such as bathing herself, anointing her skin with oil, putting on perfume, dressing herself in beautiful, expensive, and sometimes diaphanous clothing, putting on ornate and expensive jewelry, powdering her face with white lead to make herself look paler, painting alkanet dye rouge on her cheeks to make them look rosier, and removing her body hair.

A disclaimer concerning literary descriptions of goddesses preparing to seduce people

The oldest surviving descriptions of this kind concern goddesses and occur in some of the oldest surviving works of Greek literature. When seeking to extrapolate historical information, one must approach these descriptions with great caution, since goddesses in Greek literature are supernaturally beautiful and have access to a whole array of resources for making themselves beautiful that human women, even in literature, do not. For instance, in both of the scenes I am about to discuss, a goddess is described as anointing herself with ambrosia, which is, of course, not a real substance that any real human women in the ancient world would have had access to.

This being said, Greek poets did at least model their conception of goddesses on human women. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that, when a poet describes a goddess preparing herself in a certain way in order to seduce someone, they base their description on the kinds of things that they expect a human woman might do when seeking to accomplish the same purpose.

Hera’s preparations to seduce Zeus in the Iliad 14

The earliest and perhaps most famous description of a goddess preparing herself to seduce someone occurs in the Iliad, which is a Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter verse that tells a story that is set during the final year of the Trojan War. The poem developed out of oral tradition and most likely became fixed in something resembling the form in which we know it today sometime around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE or thereabouts, although it may not have been written down in its entirety at least until much later.

For context, at the beginning of the Iliad Book Eight, Zeus issues an ultimatum forbidding any of the other deities from intervening in the war. Over the next several books, without deities constantly intervening to help them, the Achaians (i.e., the Greeks) are at a disadvantage and the Trojans are making serious ground against them.

As a result of this, in Book Fourteen, Zeus’s wife Hera, who favors the Achaians, forms a plan to seduce her husband in order to distract him from the battle so that the god Poseidon, who also favors the Achaians, can turn the tide of battle in their favor. This episode is known to classical philologists as the Διός ἀπάτη (Diòs apátē) or “deception of Zeus.” The poem gives a detailed description of how Hera prepares herself so that she will look sexy for Zeus (Il. 14.170–185):

“ἀμβροσίῃ μὲν πρῶτον ἀπὸ χροὸς ἱμερόεντος
λύματα πάντα κάθηρεν, ἀλείψατο δὲ λίπ᾽ ἐλαίῳ
ἀμβροσίῳ ἑδανῷ, τό ῥά οἱ τεθυωμένον ἦεν:
τοῦ καὶ κινυμένοιο Διὸς κατὰ χαλκοβατὲς δῶ
ἔμπης ἐς γαῖάν τε καὶ οὐρανὸν ἵκετ᾽ ἀϋτμή.
τῷ ῥ᾽ ἥ γε χρόα καλὸν ἀλειψαμένη ἰδὲ χαίτας
πεξαμένη χερσὶ πλοκάμους ἔπλεξε φαεινοὺς
καλοὺς ἀμβροσίους ἐκ κράατος ἀθανάτοιο.
ἀμφὶ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἀμβρόσιον ἑανὸν ἕσαθ᾽, ὅν οἱ Ἀθήνη
ἔξυσ᾽ ἀσκήσασα, τίθει δ᾽ ἐνὶ δαίδαλα πολλά:
χρυσείῃς δ᾽ ἐνετῇσι κατὰ στῆθος περονᾶτο.
ζώσατο δὲ ζώνῃ ἑκατὸν θυσάνοις ἀραρυίῃ,
ἐν δ᾽ ἄρα ἕρματα ἧκεν ἐϋτρήτοισι λοβοῖσι
τρίγληνα μορόεντα: χάρις δ᾽ ἀπελάμπετο πολλή.
κρηδέμνῳ δ᾽ ἐφύπερθε καλύψατο δῖα θεάων
καλῷ νηγατέῳ: λευκὸν δ᾽ ἦν ἠέλιος ὥς:
ποσσὶ δ᾽ ὑπὸ λιπαροῖσιν ἐδήσατο καλὰ πέδιλα.”

This means, in my own translation:

“First, with ambrosia, she cleansed from her skin which incites longing
all smudges, and anointed herself richly with oil,
ambrosial, sweet, which had been scented for her,
and, when it was stirred, through the bronze-floored house of Zeus,
alike toward earth and heaven went the fragrance.
When, in this manner, she had anointed her beautiful skin
and combed her loose hair, with her hands, she braided her shining locks,
which were beautiful, ambrosial, and from an immortal head.
And, around herself, she put an ambrosial robe, which Athena
had scraped and worked, and she set many ingeniously crafted things over it
and, with a golden brooch, she pinned them over her breast.
And she girded herself with a girdle that had been furnished with a hundred tassels,
and she set earrings in her well-pierced earlobes,
three-dotted, [inscrutable epithet, possibly “wrought with many pains” or “like mulberries”], and much grace shone out.
And the heavenly of goddesses veiled herself with a headdress above,
beautiful, newly-made, and as bright as the sun.
And, under her feet shining with oil, she bound beautiful sandals.”

ABOVE: Painting made by the Irish painter James Barry in 1773 depicting how he imagined the scene in the Iliad book fourteen in which Hera seduces Zeus atop Mount Ida, currently held in the City Art Galleries, Sheffield

Aphrodite’s preparations to seduce Anchises in Homeric Hymn 5 to Aphrodite

Another famous description of a goddess preparing herself in order to seduce someone occurs in the Homeric Hymns, which are a collection of hymnic poems to the Greek deities in dactylic hexameter, most of which most likely developed out of oral tradition at various points during the Greek Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 490 BCE).

Possibly the oldest of these poems is Homeric Hymn 5 to Aphrodite, which most likely became fixed in something resembling the form in which it has been passed down to the present day by sometime around the mid-to-late seventh century BCE. The poem describes how Zeus punishes the goddess Aphrodite for making deities erotically desire mortals by ordering her son Eros to make his own mother erotically desire a mortal man named Anchises.

Aphrodite, longing for Anchises, goes to her temple in the city of Paphos on the island of Kypros and prepares her body in order to seduce him. The hymn describes these preparations in lines 58–67:

“ἐς Κύπρον δ᾽ ἐλθοῦσα θυώδεα νηὸν ἔδυνεν,
ἐς Πάφον: ἔνθα δέ οἱ τέμενος βωμός τε θυώδης.
ἐνθ᾽ ἥ γ᾽ εἰσελθοῦσα θύρας ἐπέθηκε φαεινάς:
ἔνθα δέ μιν Χάριτες λοῦσαν καὶ χρῖσαν ἐλαίῳ
ἀμβρότῳ, οἷα θεοὺς ἐπενήνοθεν αἰὲν ἐόντας,
ἀμβροσίῳ ἑδανῷ, τό ῥά οἱ τεθυωμένον ἦεν.
ἑσσαμένη δ᾽ εὖ πάντα περὶ χροῒ εἵματα καλὰ
χρυσῷ κοσμηθεῖσα φιλομμειδὴς Ἀφροδίτη
σεύατ᾽ ἐπὶ Τροίης προλιποῦσ᾽ εὐώδεα Κύπρον,
ὕψι μετὰ νέφεσιν ῥίμφα πρήσσουσα κέλευθον.”

This means, in my own translation:

“And, going to Kypros, to Paphos, she descended to her sweet-smelling temple,
and there is her sacred enclosure and altar smelling of incense.
And, there, going inside, she shut the shining doors:
and, there, Charites bathed her and anointed her with oil,
with ambrosia, the sort which always grows upon the deities,
ambrosial, sweet, which had been scented for her.
And, wearing well all beautiful garments over her skin,
adorned with gold, laughter-loving Aphrodite
left behind sweet-smelling Kypros for Troy,
high up among the clouds swiftly passing the route.”

Later, the hymn describes the beautiful clothing and jewelry that Aphrodite is wearing (ll. 86–92):

“πέπλόν μὲν γὰρ ἕεστο φαεινότερον πυρὸς αὐγῆς,
καλόν, χρύσειον, παμποίκιλον: ὡς δὲ σελήνη
στήθεσιν ἀμφ᾽ ἁπαλοῖσιν ἐλάμπετο, θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι:
εἶχε δ᾽ ἐπιγναμπτὰς ἕλικας κάλυκάς τε φαεινάς:
ὅρμοι δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ ἁπαλῇ δειρῇ περικαλλέες ἦσαν.”

This means:

“For she wore a peplos [i.e., a kind of dress] more shining than the fire of sunlight,
beautiful, golden, all-embroidered. And, like the moon,
it shone over her soft breasts, a marvel to be seen:
and she had twisted brooches and shining earrings;
and there were surpassingly beautiful necklaces around her soft neck.”

ABOVE: Venus and Anchises, painted in 1889 or 1890 by the British painter William Blake Richmond, depicting the scene in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite in which Aphrodite appears to Anchises

Sappho’s lover adorning herself in Sappho fr. 94.7–23

All of the passages that I have quoted so far concern goddesses, but there are surviving Greek texts that describe how mortal women would dress up to look sexy. One possible early source for this information is Sappho, an early female Greek lyric poet who flourished on the island of Lesbos, which is located just off the west coast of Asia Minor (i.e., the Asian part of what is now Turkey), in the final decades of the seventh century BCE and early decades of the sixth.

Sappho composed poems about a range of subjects, but she is most famous today for her poems in which her female speaker openly discusses her erotic desire for other women. The standard edition of her poems in antiquity spanned nine “books” or rolls of papyrus, but, sadly, due to later history, the vast majority of everything she wrote has been lost; only a handful of nearly complete poems and a large number of tiny fragments of her work survive. (For more information, I discuss the history of how the majority of Sappho’s work became lost and how the fragments that have survived have survived in this blog post I published in January 2023.)

The specific poem that is relevant for our purpose is Fragment 94, which is sometimes known as “Sappho’s Confession,” because it is her only surviving poem in which her speaker alludes to herself as having had sex with another woman.

Unfortunately, like so much of Sappho’s surviving poetry, the poem is highly fragmentary; the beginning and end are both missing and the surviving portion is full of lacunae, so many details of what is going on are not entirely clear. In the extant part of the poem, however, the speaker tries to console her female lover (who is going away for some reason) by reminding her of all the good times they have had together. She says in lines 7–23:

“‘χαίροισ᾿ ἔρχεο κἄμεθεν
μέμναισ᾿, οἶσθα γὰρ ὤς σε πεδήπομεν·
αἰ δὲ μή, ἀλλά σ᾿ ἔγω θέλω
ὄμναισαι [ . . . . ] . [ . . . ] . . αι
. . [ ]καὶ κάλ᾿ ἐπάσχομεν.
πό[λλοις γὰρ στεφάν]οις ἴων
καὶ βρ[όδων κρο]κίων τ᾿ ὔμοι
κα . . [ ] πὰρ ἔμοι περεθήκαο,
καὶ πό[λλαις ὐπα]θύμιδας
πλέκ[ταις ἀμφ᾿ ἀ]πάλαι δέραι
ἀνθέων ἔ[βαλες] πεποημμέναις,
καὶ πολλωι[ ]. μύρωι
βρενθείωι. [ ]ρυ[ . . ]ν
ἐξαλείψαο κα[ὶ βασ]ιληίωι,
καὶ στρώμν[αν ἐ]πὶ μολθάκαν
ἀπάλαν πα . [ ] . . . ων
ἐξίης πόθο[ν ].’”

This means, in my own translation:

“Farewell—go and remember me,
since you know that I cherish you.
And, if not, then I want
to remind you [. . .]
[. . .] and the good things we experienced.
For many garlands of violets
and roses and crocuses together
you have put on alongside me,
and many braided necklaces
made of flowers
you threw around your soft neck,
and, with much expensive and royal perfume,
you anointed yourself,
and, on a soft couch,
tender [. . .]
you assuaged your longing.”

This passage differs from the earlier ones I have discussed in three important respects. First, in this passage, both the person who is adorning herself and the person she ends up having sex with are mortal. Second, both the woman who adorns herself and the person she has sex with are women; there are no men in this passage. Third and finally, the Greek phrase “πὰρ ἔμοι” (“alongside me”) in line 14 makes it clear that Sappho and her lover are doing the activities the passage describes together in each other’s presence, rather than alone in preparation before they see each other.

Despite this, there are numerous parallels between this passage and the earlier passages I have discussed. As in both of the previous passages I discussed, in this fragment, a female figure (Sappho’s girlfriend) is described as putting on necklaces (in this case made of flowers rather than gold), putting on perfume, anointing herself with oil, and then apparently having sex.

There are even striking verbal similarities; when Sappho describes how her beloved put necklaces “ἀμφ᾿ ἀ]πάλαι δέραι” (“around [her] soft neck”), she uses the exact same Greek phrase that the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 92 uses to describe the necklaces hanging around Aphrodite’s neck when she appears to Anchises, only with Aeolic instead of Ionic endings.

In the extant text of the poem, Sappho does not expressly describe her beloved’s purpose in putting on flower necklaces, anointing herself with oil, putting on perfume, et cetera as being to make herself attractive for her lover. Nonetheless, given the parallels with Hera in the Iliad 14 and Aphrodite in Homeric Hymn 5, it seems like a reasonable hypothesis that this is why she performs at least the last two of these actions.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a polychrome plate from Thera dating to c. 620 BCE depicting a homoerotic scene of two women, with one woman touching the chin of the other in a gesture of courtship

An introduction to ancient Greek makeup

The surviving Greek sources from the Archaic Period don’t say much about goddesses or women using makeup to make themselves look sexy. This is not hugely surprising. After all, goddesses like Hera and Aphrodite are supposed to have supernaturally perfect skin, so they don’t need makeup. Sources from the fifth century BCE onward, however, say a lot more about the topic.

I will not go into too much detail about ancient Greek cosmetics in this post, since I already wrote a highly detailed blog post surveying the evidence for the kinds of makeup ancient Greek women wore and how they wore them across different eras of Greek history back in August 2021. I highly recommend reading that post if you are interested in learning more about this subject.

That being said, I do feel it is important to give a shorter overview of ancient Greek makeup here, since makeup seems to have been a major part of how Greek women beautified themselves. First, though, we need to talk a little bit about ancient beauty standards. In ancient Greece, men were expected to spend most of their time outdoors in the sun. Thus, for men, the ideal of beauty was to have deeply tanned, brown skin. Greek women, by contrast, were expected to remain inside the home and out of the sun. Thus, for women, the ideal of beauty was to be as pale and white-skinned as possible.

For this reason, the most common form of makeup that women in ancient Greece wore was lead carbonate or “white lead,” a toxic lead compound that most commonly occurs in the form of a white powder. The ancient Greek name for this compound is ψιμύθιον (psimýthion). Many ancient Greek women would powder their faces with this compound in order to make themselves appear paler than their natural skin tone.

In addition to powdering their faces white with lead carbonate, some ancient Greek women also painted ἔγχουσα (énchousa), a kind of red dye extracted from the roots of the plant Alkanna tinctoria or dyer’s alkanet, onto their cheeks as rouge in order to make them appear rosier.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a sample of lead carbonate, commonly known as “white lead,” which ancient Greek women often used to make their faces appear paler

Depilation of body (especially pubic) hair

Sources from the fifth century BCE onward also attest that some Greek women would depilate their body hair, especially their pubic hair, in order to make themselves look more sexually appealing. One early piece of evidence for this comes from an Attic red-figure bell krater attributed to the Dinos Painter dating to between c. 430 and c. 420 BCE that was found in Sicily and is currently held in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Side A of this bell krater depicts a scene in which one woman singes off her own pubic hair using a lamp while a winged male figure singes off another woman’s pubic hair using the same method.

The sources from the Archaic Period that I have discussed above may have avoided mentioning women depilating their pubic hair for the same reason that these sources generally don’t discuss people urinating or defecating; it may have simply been too crass of an activity for them to mention it. It is also entirely possible that depilating one’s pubic hair may have been a beauty trend peculiar to late-fifth-century BCE Athens that was either not practiced at all or was not widespread in the Greek world in the earlier Archaic Period.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Perseus Digital Library Image Collection showing Side A of an Attic red-figure bell krater attributed to the Dinos Painter dating to between c. 430 and c. 420 BCE, found in Sicily and currently held in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums, depicting a scene of two women depilating their pubic hair with lamps

The women’s preparations in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata

One ancient source that mentions both makeup and depilation of pubic hair is the comedy Lysistrata, which the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) wrote and produced for the first time in Athens in 411 BCE. In the opening scene of the play, the eponymous protagonist, an Athenian woman named Lysistrata, tells her neighbor, a woman named Kalonike, about how she has a plan for women to save Greece by ending the Peloponnesian War, which was ongoing at the time that the play was written and performed. The two characters have the following exchange in lines 42–48:

Καλονίκη: “τί δ᾽ ἂν γυναῖκες φρόνιμον ἐργασαίατο
ἢ λαμπρόν, αἳ καθήμεθ᾽ ἐξηνθισμέναι,
κροκωτοφοροῦσαι καὶ κεκαλλωπισμέναι
καὶ Κιμμερίκ᾽ ὀρθοστάδια καὶ περιβαρίδας;”

Λυσιστράτη: “ταῦτ᾽ αὐτὰ γάρ τοι κἄσθ᾽ ἃ σώσειν προσδοκῶ,
τὰ κροκωτίδια καὶ τὰ μύρα χαἰ περιβαρίδες
χἤγχουσα καὶ τὰ διαφανῆ χιτώνια.”

This means, in my own translation:

Kalonike: “And what wise or shining thing could women accomplish?
We sit around like flowers,
wearing saffron robes and putting on makeup,
and Kimmerian dresses and fancy shoes.”

Lysistrata: “These very things are, in fact, the things that I expect to save us:
the saffron dresses, the perfumes, the fancy shoes
the alkanet-dye rouge and the see-through dresses.”

Later in the same scene, Lysistrata goes on to explain that the women of Greece will dress themselves up to look as sexy as possible so that their husbands will want to have sex with them, but then they will refuse to have sex with them until they agree to make peace and end the war. She gives more details of how the women will adorn themselves to drive their husbands mad with lust in lines 149–154:

“εἰ γὰρ καθοίμεθ᾽ ἔνδον ἐντετριμμέναι,
κἀν τοῖς χιτωνίοισι τοῖς Ἀμοργίνοις
γυμναὶ παρίοιμεν δέλτα παρατετιλμέναι,
στύοιντο δ᾽ ἅνδρες κἀπιθυμοῖεν σπλεκοῦν,
ἡμεῖς δὲ μὴ προσίοιμεν ἀλλ᾽ ἀπεχοίμεθα,
σπονδὰς ποιήσαιντ᾽ ἂν ταχέως, εὖ οἶδ᾽ ὅτι.”

This means:

“For, if we sit around indoors rubbed with makeup
and, in chitons [i.e., a kind of dress], the Amorginian kind,
we sit beside them naked, our pubic triangles plucked,
and our husbands get hard and long to have sex,
and we do not come near, but rather keep them away,
I know well that they will make peace offerings swiftly.”

These couple of passages reference many of the same kinds of preparations that the Iliad 14, Homeric Hymn 5, and Sappho fr. 94 have already mentioned (such as wearing ornate, expensive clothing and perfume), but also mention the women putting on makeup and plucking their pubic hair.

ABOVE: Illustration made by the English artist Aubrey Beardsley in 1896 for Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata showing one of the women of the play dressed up in her most seductive attire

Euphiletos’s wife in Lysias’s On the Murder of Eratosthenes

Another important ancient source that mentions women wearing makeup to make themselves look sexually alluring is a forensic speech written by the Athenian orator Lysias (lived c. 445 – c. 380 BCE), who worked as a professional logographer, meaning that clients would pay him to write speeches for them to deliver in court on their own behalf. Many of the speeches he wrote have survived, including one titled On the Murder of Eratosthenes, which Lysias wrote for a client named Euphiletos, who was brought to court on the accusation of having murdered a man named Eratosthenes.

In the speech, Euphiletos acknowledges that he did indeed kill Eratosthenes, but he argues that the killing was totally legal because he caught Eratosthenes in the act of having adulterous sex with his wife and killed him on the spot. He claims that Athenian law allows for a man to do this.

In the course of describing the events that led up to him killing Eratosthenes, Euphiletos describes various clues that led him to suspect that his wife was having an extramarital affair. One of the clues he mentions (Lys. 1.14) is that his wife had powdered her face with white lead face makeup, even though not even thirty days had passed since the death of her brother. He says:

“ἔδοξε δέ μοι, ὦ ἄνδρες, τὸ πρόσωπον ἐψιμυθιῶσθαι, τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ τεθνεῶτος οὔπω τριάκονθ᾽ ἡμέρας: ὅμως δ᾽ οὐδ᾽ οὕτως οὐδὲν εἰπὼν περὶ τοῦ πράγματος ἐξελθὼν ᾠχόμην ἔξω σιωπῇ.”

This means, in my own translation:

“And it occurred to me, o men, that she had powered her face with white lead, even though it was not yet thirty days since her brother had died. Nonetheless, I did not say anything whatsoever concerning the matter, but left the house in silence.”

This passage reveals that some aristocratic Athenian men in the fourth century BCE associated makeup so closely with seduction that a woman simply wearing makeup seemed to them like an indication that she was trying to make herself look sexy for someone.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble statue in the Vatican Museums dating to the third century CE, depicting a Greek orator, sometimes said to represent Lysias

Ischomachos’s wife in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos 10.2–9

In addition to the sources I’ve already discussed, another mention of a woman wearing makeup to make herself look more sexually alluring occurs in the Oikonomikos or Estate-Manager, a Socratic dialogue about household management written by the Athenian aristocrat Xenophon (lived c. 430 – 354 BCE). In the dialogue, Socrates tells a man named Kritoboulos about a conversation he had on a previous occasion with an extremely wealthy aristocratic man named Ischomachos, who has a reputation for managing his own estate extremely well.

As I discuss in this post I wrote in February 2023, the best evidence seems to indicate that Athenian citizen parents in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE most commonly forced their daughters to marry when they were between fifteen and eighteen years old. Athenian men, by sharp contrast, typically married much older, when they were in their late twenties or thirties. As a result of this, the groom at an ancient Athenian wedding was usually at least a decade older than the bride and sometimes much older than that.

In Xenophon’s Oikonomikos 7–10, Ischomachos tells Socrates about how he married his wife when he was already a mature adult and she was not quite fifteen years old, making her quite young, even for a bride in ancient Greece. He describes to Socrates in great detail how he trained his teenaged wife to be a proper housewife and manage the household.

In the context of this conversation, in the Oikonomikos 10.2–9, Ischomachos tells Socrates about how, on one occasion not long after he married his wife, he caught her wearing makeup and reprimanded her for wearing it. He describes the incident to Socrates as follows, as translated by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd for the Loeb Classical Library, with some edits of my own:

“Well, one day, Socrates, I noticed that her face was made up: she had rubbed in white lead [i.e., ψιμύθιον] in order to look even whiter than she is, and alkanet juice [i.e., ἔγχουσα] to heighten the rosy colour of her cheeks; and she was wearing boots with thick soles to increase her height. So I said to her, ‘Tell me, my dear, how should I appear more worthy of your love as a partner in our goods, by disclosing to you our belongings just as they are, without boasting of imaginary possessions or concealing any part of what we have, or by trying to trick you with an exaggerated account, showing you bad money and gilt necklaces and describing clothes that will fade as real purple?’”

“‘Hush!’ she broke in immediately, ‘pray don’t be like that—I could not love you with all my heart if you were like that!’”

“‘Then, are we not joined together by another bond of union, dear, to be partners in our bodies?’”

“‘The world says so, at any rate.’”

“‘How then should I seem more worthy of your love in this partnership of the body—by striving to have my body hale and strong when I present it to you, and so literally to be of a good countenance in your sight, or by smearing my cheeks with red lead and painting myself under the eyes with rouge before I show myself to you and clasp you in my arms, cheating you and offering to your eyes and hands red lead instead of my real flesh?’”

“‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I would sooner touch you than red lead, would sooner see your own colour than rouge, would sooner see your eyes bright than smeared with grease.’”

“‘Then please assume, my dear, that I do not prefer white paint and dye of alkanet to your real colour; but just as the gods have made horses to delight in horses, cattle in cattle, sheep in sheep, so human beings find the human body undisguised most delightful. Tricks like these may serve to gull outsiders, but people who live together are bound to be found out, if they try to deceive one another. For they are found out while they are dressing in the morning; they perspire and are lost; a tear convicts them; the bath reveals them as they are!’”

This passage provides further evidence that some married Athenian women during the Classical Period powdered their faces with white lead and wore alkanet dye rouge. It also, however, reveals that some aristocratic Athenian men during this time period felt uncomfortable about their wives wearing makeup and perceived wearing makeup as inherently a form of deception.

The scholar Allison Glazebrook has argued that Ischomachos’s wife’s agreement to stop using makeup is meant to present her as a new kind of wife who will contribute productively to the management of the household and not place economic strain on it (“Cosmetics and Sôphrosunê,” 233–248).

ABOVE: Photograph from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Antiquities Museum website showing a Roman marble portrait bust dating to around 120 CE, based on an earlier Greek original, depicting the Athenian writer Xenophon

Works cited

• Glazebrook, Allison. “Cosmetics and Sôphrosunê: Ischomachos’ Wife in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos.” The Classical World 102, no. 3 (2009): 233–248. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40599847.

(NOTE: This post is adapted from an answer I wrote to a question in r/AskHistorians.)