If you say just one thing about the ancient Greeks, say that they had good taste. Probably no culture in ancient history was more renowned for the beauty it produced than Athens during its High Classical Period, when the statesman Pericles oversaw a citywide rebuilding project after the Persian invasion of 480 BC. The revolution in arts and letters that followed was era-defining. In Virgil’s Aeneid, when the patriarch Anchises lists off the distinctions of civilizations besides Augustan Rome, he pays his respects to peoples who can “mold breathing bronze” and “coax living faces out of marble.” He doesn’t even have to mention the Greeks by name—every reader would have realized who he was talking about. The way Cubans are known now for their cigars and Scots for their whisky, Greeks were known for making beautiful things.
Today, the word “classical” is practically synonymous with a certain sense of purity and proportion, embodied in fluted columns and lissome marble nudes. But in Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato, Hugo Shakeshaft argues that the Greeks were enamored with beauty well before the Classical period. His focus is on the Archaic period, starting around 800 BC when the epic poems of Homer were first composed. Those earlier centuries, Shakeshaft argues, set the stage for Classical authors like Plato to make loveliness itself an object of philosophical scrutiny. “Beauty bore a transcendent power and value in Greek culture long before Plato gave it new life in his philosophical musings,” he writes. As far as we can see from the historical record, the Greeks were always in awe of beauty. If they came to understand it deeply in the age of Plato, that was because they had loved it dearly since the age of Homer. More than that—they held it sacred. That is what Shakeshaft’s book is about.
It is not a book that will be relished from cover to cover by the general reading public. Shakeshaft, a postdoctoral fellow at Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art, is a scholar writing for scholars. But that’s what makes Beauty and the Gods so useful as a repository of information on its subject. Those not in the habit of reading academic prose for pleasure will still find it beneficial to consult the book on questions of particular interest. The material is well organized into five chapters on the divine power of beauty in Greek epic, music, natural landscapes, architecture, and figural art.
Shakeshaft’s approach is a synthesis of art history, literary analysis, and archaeology: there are close readings of famous poems like Homer’s epics and Sappho’s lyrics, but also detailed analyses of vase paintings and temple sites from Delphi to Sicily, richly complemented with color images. The overall effect is a kind of immersion in what the world of Homer and Sappho must have looked, felt, and sounded like. Shakeshaft manages to be nigh on exhaustive within his chosen time period—an impressive feat in itself with such an unwieldy and wide-ranging topic—and he makes some intriguingly subtle arguments along the way.
One early Christian writer (erroneously, but wonderfully) related the Greek word for beauty (kalos) to the word for “call” (kaleō). His point was that beauty, various and difficult to define as it may be, always calls us toward itself. It’s what makes things literally attractive—the alluring face or the body you can’t resist looking at, the room you want to sink into and never leave, the landscape on the postcard that makes you wish you were there. This force of attraction makes beauty feel like a breath of something otherworldly wafting across the earthly plane. If bodies, rooms, and postcards have almost nothing else in common, the thing they share must be something beyond them all, something above our physical existence. In the language Medieval writers came to use, beauty is transcendental, on a par with other eternal ideals like goodness and being. It is in but not of the world.
A tricky thing about beauty when compared with the other transcendentals, though, is how often it seems to be “in the eye of the beholder.” That cliché, in that form, comes from Margaret Wolfe Hungerford’s Molly Bawn—a nineteenth-century novel known chiefly for being mentioned in Joyce’s Ulysses and for containing that line. Even there, in its first appearance, the saying is described as “an old axiom.” Hungerford wasn’t observing anything about beauty and its subjectivity that ancient Greek authors hadn’t already noticed. In one of her justly famous lines, the poet Sappho declared that “some say the most beautiful thing on the dark earth is a cavalry corps; some say a host of infantry; some say a fleet of ships. I say it’s whatever you love best.” The coy vixens of Lesbos that made Sappho’s heart flutter seemed worlds apart from the lethal weapons that set the blood of more martial poets racing.
Today, this fact is often cited in support of the fallacy that because beauty is subjective, it must be arbitrary. Archaic Greek thought on the subject was more subtle than that. Of course beauty is necessarily something we perceive (what else would it be?), and it’s true, if somewhat trivial, that different people sometimes perceive it in different things. More interesting is the fact that the experience provoked by beauty—the flutter of the heart, the racing of the blood—is recognizably similar from person to person. The Greeks were aware of this too, and they called the universal longing that beauty inspires by the name of love. It was, they sensed, a primordial force holding the world together. “Love, most beautiful among the deathless gods,” was one of the first deities to set the world in motion according to Homer’s rough contemporary, Hesiod. In this mythology, writes Shakeshaft, love “represents the generative force of attraction driving the cosmos’ evolution.”
Even the most earnest efforts at artistic revival will fall short unless they aspire upward to that higher source of beauty, the wellspring from which all goodness also flows. There is no true beauty without the gods.
This is an idea with a long afterlife. It helped inspire Dante’s vision of God as “the love that moves the sun and other stars.” It seemed to Francis Bacon like a precursor to the scientific principle that certain universal forces explain and drive “the natural motion of the atom.” Whatever the powers are that draw fire upward through the air and bind the chemical compounds of our bodies together, they are closely related—if not identical—to the tug that pulls the heart toward beautiful things. The Greeks’ infatuation with beauty was not some frivolous pastime, adjacent to their more serious philosophical interest in natural science. The two pursuits were really one and the same.
To heed the call of beauty in its most refined forms was, for Archaic Greeks, to come cheek to cheek with the ultimate powers of the universe. This is one common thread that Shakeshaft sees running through practically all the sources he reviews, from the writing scrawled on the thighs of votive statues to the poetic reflections of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Beauty is the thing humans share most intimately with the gods in Greek theology: “Deities bestow beauty on mortals, which likens them to deities and attracts their interest as a result.” Other academics have puzzled over Archaic paintings and sculptures, wondering whether they depict gods and goddesses or beautiful young mortals. But Shakeshaft, in a nice bit of anti-pedantry, argues that it may be missing the point of such imagery to try drawing the line too sharply between men and gods. Maybe it’s supposed to be hard to tell the difference. Maybe the whole point is that human loveliness is the closest thing on earth to a vision of the divine form.
If this seems tantalizingly close to the Biblical principle that mankind is made in the image of God, that’s because Greek storytellers were coming from a different angle at core truths that Jewish prophets also embedded into their scriptures. Shakeshaft occasionally takes stock of Near Eastern hymns and poems, including those in the Bible, which dwell on similar themes. “Oh worship the lord,” say the psalms, “in the beauty of holiness!” Few societies on earth, except some very modern ones, have doubted that beauty is a gift shared with this world from beyond. If the Bible tends to emphasize the beauty of holiness, however, the Greeks tended to insist on the holiness of beauty. Wherever they found it occurring in nature, they assumed the gods were there—so much so that the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder had the Greek pantheon in mind when he wrote that “trees served as the first temples of the gods.”
If beauty is sacred, it’s tempting to believe that it’s also a mark of divine favor. The Greeks of the Classical period had a word, kalokagathia, which came from mashing the word for “beautiful” and the word for “good” together. Some interpreters have taken this to mean that, as art historian Alexandra Sofroniew puts it, “the ancient Greeks believed that being beautiful on the outside was a reflection of a good person on the inside.” Shakeshaft deftly puts paid to this notion: “such statements drastically misrepresent Greek sources,” he writes. From Homer on down, Greek writers easily distinguished between what we might call “inner” and “outer” beauty. Among the warriors of the Iliad, Paris on the Trojan side and Nireus on the Greek side are both handsome weaklings with pretty faces but little martial prowess to speak of. All the same, the very idea of kalokagathia betrays a willingness to associate excellence of form with excellence of character. In Greek story and statuary, gods seem just as susceptible as mortals to the misapprehension that being good to look at means being good per se.
This was and remains the most troubling thing about beauty. “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” are often grouped together as the three great transcendentals, and Keats—channeling what he took to be Greek wisdom—even went so far as to say that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” But if goodness is obviously good and the value of truth needs little defense, beauty often comes paired with idiocy, frivolity, and outright villainy. It can deceive and perplex as well as enrapture. Beauty is so obviously desirable that it’s hard not to feel as if it should, in a just world, belong to good and moral people. In the real world, things don’t always work out that way. Hesiod may have been right that beauty itself draws the world together in love, but it’s equally true that beautiful things can come imbued with other, more sinister traits. The artists of the Archaic period were alive to this complexity, though they don’t seem to have solved the problems it posed.
In a sense, that may have been what Plato was trying to do in one of his greatest dialogues, the Symposium. Shakeshaft points out that this watershed in the history of thought drew deeply on concepts already latent in the Greek tradition. “Part of its brilliance lay in calling on traditional ideas and repurposing them.” The dialogue is ostensibly a series of speeches in praise of love. When Socrates’ turn comes to speak, though, he relays a lesson he learned from the priestess Diotima about the holiness of beauty. Love is a grasping beggar, a child of poverty, in search of beautiful partners to mate with. But the beauty love finds immediately to hand in the world is jumbled and confused, “tangled up with flesh and men and things and all the rest of that mortal junk.” A soul that wants to refine itself has to examine its own desire for beautiful things—beautiful people, beautiful artwork, beautiful ideas—until it siphons off the essence of beauty that is reflected in all those things and yet distinct from them. In itself, earthly beauty is riddled with impurities. It will eventually decay and deceive. But it is also a glint thrown off from a greater light on high. Understood in that way, it can lead to God.
Shakeshaft refrains from intervening in contemporary politics, but the intellectual history that leads to and from Plato is most definitely still unfolding. A recent Calvin Klein ad, featuring the obese rapper Chika Oranika spilling out of her underwear, has become representative for many of a long-running effort to strip physical attractiveness of any meaning or value whatsoever. Usually this is done by insisting on ugliness where beauty is obviously to be expected. One predictable reaction has come from “vitalists” and other Nietzscheans who assert that toned bodies and square jaws do, indeed, correspond to moral virtue and genetic nobility. President Trump’s intervention into this debate, in both of his terms, has been to issue executive orders “promoting beautiful federal civic architecture.” This translates directly to reviving the neo-classical style favored by America’s early architects.
Critics of the orders have portrayed them as representing an endorsement of the view that there really is no daylight between kalos and agathos. But there’s another way of looking at things to be learned from the Greek tradition. If it’s wrong to equate visual beauty with moral goodness, it’s also dishonest and unacceptably absurd to ignore the manifest spiritual value of beauty altogether. The trick, as Diotima explained, is to regard even the most ravishing earthly beauty as representative on the physical plane of something much higher on the spiritual plane, something “that always exists and never changes or passes away.” Even the most earnest efforts at artistic revival will fall short unless they aspire upward to that higher source of beauty, the wellspring from which all goodness also flows. There is no true beauty without the gods.