Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (7 page)

Some historians still repeat the fable that the Roman emperor Hadrian (r. 117–138) grew a full beard to cover blemishes on his face. This is the fabrication of a frequently faulty Roman history composed some two hundred years after the emperor’s reign. More savvy historians tell us that Hadrian grew his beard to look Greek, and thus sophisticated and
philosophical.
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This explanation is far better, but still not quite right. It makes no sense to say he wanted to look Greek. After all, Romans had been looking Greek since Scipio Aemilianus began shaving three hundred years earlier. As for looking philosophical, this also misses the point. Hadrian was less interested in looking intellectual than he was in appearing virtuous. His new facial hair presented not the look of contemplation but the face of stoic fortitude, self-discipline, and good judgment. With his beard, Hadrian was declaring to the world that his mind and character, not birth, luck, or divine intervention, were the true foundations of his authority. He got these ideas from the philosophers.

When he was still a general, and not yet emperor, Hadrian looked like any other decent Roman, that is to say, smoothly shaved. He was a serious young man, eager to imbibe the wisdom of Roman politicians and Greek philosophers. Like many of his class he spoke fluent Greek, and he eagerly sat at the feet of the greatest minds of the age. The most persuasive to Hadrian was Epictetus, the leading champion of Stoicism, a school of Greek philosophy especially popular among the Romans. Hadrian spent many months in Greece as a military officer, and some of those days at the home of Epictetus in Nicopolis. The Stoics believed in living and acting in concert with universal laws of nature, and for this reason they were the most militant proponents of growing beards. If beards were given by nature, they argued, why would men refuse to grow them? Why would they seek to deny their true selves? One can easily imagine Epictetus reproaching his noble Roman admirer with sarcastic comments about powerful generals afraid to face up to the calling of true manliness. Thus chastened, Hadrian found the courage within himself to return to Rome with a leonine face.
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In so doing, he reversed four centuries of Greco-Roman tradition and won a great victory for Western civilization’s first beard movement.

To understand just what Hadrian was saying with his new look, it is necessary to consider the philosophy of beards that stood behind it. During the previous four centuries of shaving, professional philosophers had routinely suffered abuse for their defiantly woolly faces. Virtually all philosophers wore beards, though there were differences in style among the various schools. The Sophists often kept well-groomed and curled beards. The Peripatetics, devotees of Aristotle’s thought,
and the Epicurians, searchers for the source of earthly happiness, both favored well-trimmed beards. Stoics preferred fuller beards, though not so ragged as those of the Cynics, who in their disdain for the body allowed their hair to grow long and tangled.
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Pride of place as father of the beard movement must be granted to Musonius Rufus, a Roman Stoic of the first century and onetime mentor to Epictetus.

Musonius’s philosophy is now known through lectures and sayings collected by later writers. One of these lectures was a critique of shaving that amounts to a true manifesto. “The beard,” it declares simply,
“should not be shaved from the chin.” In pruning a plant, Musonius argued, the wise man takes away only that which is useless. A beard is not like that; it is not useless. It is rather “a protection provided to us by nature . . . a symbol also of the male, just as the crest is for the cock and the mane for the lion. Therefore the part of one’s hair that is bothersome ought to be removed, but nothing of the beard.”
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In defense of this conclusion, Musonius invoked Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, who had once stated, “One must cut one’s hair for the same reason as one must let it grow—that is, following nature.”

Here, then, was the essential principle of Stoicism applied to masculinity and the male body. Men who shaved ran the risk of denying their own manly nature in a vain attempt to make themselves attractive to women or boys. Such men, Musonius said, were “broken by luxurious living and completely emasculated.” Here he was appealing to old Greek associations between shaving and sexual perversion, but he was also advancing a new line of reasoning that would resonate with future beard advocates like Epictetus: though a beard did not make a man virtuous, a virtuous man would wear his beard because he wished to acknowledge his own manly nature, and live in accord with its solemn responsibilities. The virtues of fortitude and self-control were given to men by nature, as were beards. It was up to them to accept all such natural gifts, and to live accordingly.

Though Dio Chrysostom, a later contemporary of Musonius, was identified as a Sophist rather than a Stoic, he held very similar opinions. At one point in his writings, Dio complained about the citizens of Tarsus, who had ridiculed him for his long hair. Dio retorted that the real shame was not his long hair but the Tarsans’ smooth faces. How terrible it was that young men shaved their faces and even their legs, imagining they became more attractive by being effeminate. “Thus ridicule and scorn are being showered by the clever younger set upon the artistry of Nature.”
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In the following generation, Epictetus established himself as the philosophic champion of beards, and the man who, through Hadrian, finally broke the spell of the classic shave. It is easy to imagine how the great Stoic confronted the future emperor. “Young man, whom do you wish to make beautiful?” the philosopher had said in one of his recorded discourses:

After harangues like this, it is no wonder that Hadrian determined to return to Rome with visual proof of his rationality and manliness.

Had Hadrian not been the first to adopt the new style, then his near successor Marcus Aurelius would have been, for Aurelius was even more deeply committed to Stoicism. The magnificent statue of Aurelius in equestrian and bearded glory, now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, is a fitting memorial for this revered emperor, even if the ideological significance of his personal appearance has not been fully appreciated (
figure 3.7
). Hadrian and Aurelius initiated a new masculine style in Rome and Greece that lasted a century. Leading men now opted for the natural manliness promoted by philosophy rather than the heroic manliness modeled on iconic conquerors of the past. With their ample hair, several generations of Romans and Greeks declared that wisdom and virtuous character were the true basis of manly honor and imperial rule, not some mindless imitation of idealized heroism.

It comes as no surprise that the new enthusiasm for beards during the second century stimulated renewed scientific interest in facial hair. Galen, whose encyclopedic writing established him as the most influential medical authority in late ancient and medieval Europe, revived Hippocratic and Aristotelian theorizing on the matter of facial hair. As Marcus Aurelius’s personal physician, his writings on beards confirmed his master’s Stoic moralism. Male hairiness, Galen argued, confirmed gender roles and the superiority of men, whose hair helped them perform
hard, outdoor work. According to Galen, however, the real value of beards was moral rather than physical, for nature made the body “appropriate to the character of the soul.” A woman was not given a beard by nature because she does not have an “august character” and therefore “does not need an august form.”
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In writing this, Galen was channeling classical ideas from before Alexander, when beards were essential to male dignity.

If Roman civilization had persisted in its second-century condition, distinguished men might have banished barbers from empire for good. But it was not to be. Economic decline and political turmoil threatened Roman civilization in the century following Aurelius’s reign, and emperors were hard-pressed to maintain social cohesion and imperial authority. In this troubled era, a long succession of short-lived emperors abandoned philosophy and resorted to assassination and coup d’état. These usurpers also discarded longer beards, tending to favor a fearsome stubbled look. As Rome reeled from one political crisis to the next, it was apparent that some form of restoration was needed. In the late third century, Emperor Diocletian propagated new images of himself, some of which depicted him in an old-fashioned style: wearing a
toga, with short hair and a clean-shaven face. The idea was to imbue his image with divine mystique, particularly in eastern provinces where he hoped to establish an emperor cult, as part of his larger plan to restore social order and reform the imperial administration. The era of bearded virtue was over. It was back to the future for the imperial state.

Diocletian’s successor Constantine followed this path as well. He strengthened and solidified the state and forged an alliance with the burgeoning Christian movement. He also perpetuated the new (old) imperial image of the original caesars. The most striking example was a colossal statue of himself installed in a massive new basilica he built near the Roman Forum (
figure 3.8
). The statue’s most outstanding features were its size (thirty feet tall), the cross held in one hand, large eyes, and classical, Alexandrian youthfulness, all of which invested the ruler’s form with superhuman majesty. Subsequent fourth-century emperors all followed Constantine’s lead, establishing Christianity as the official religion of the empire while looking as much as possible like the shaven emperors of old. All of them, that is, except Julian “the Apostate.”

During his brief time in power between 361 until his untimely death in battle in 363, Constantine’s nephew Julian attempted to put the empire on a different track to recovery. He chose a different back-to-the-future scenario than his uncle, modeled on the wise Marcus Aurelius, not the divine Augustus. Like Aurelius, Julian found his solace in Stoic philosophy, not Christianity. He styled himself after Aurelius, the paragon of philosophic self-restraint and benevolent wisdom, and grew a thick, full beard to match.

Ironically, Julian hoped to be revered for his humble virtues of ascetic self-denial. Following the motto of Marcus Aurelius, he strove to “have the fewest possible needs and do good to the greatest possible number.” He ostentatiously avoided luxuries and comforts and openly disapproved of popular entertainments like plays and chariot races.
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His scolding pride and anti-Christian policy rubbed many of his subjects the wrong way. He infuriated Christians by insisting upon the restoration
of traditional religion, and non-Christians by hectoring them about their love of sports and entertainment.

These and other grievances motivated some wits in Antioch (where Julian had established temporary headquarters in preparation for an invasion of Persia) to publish a satire of their haughty emperor during
the new year’s celebrations of 363. His beard became for them a symbol of his retrograde boorishness, and they delivered many cutting remarks about it, including a suggestion that it might be put to better use as material to make ropes. Julian responded with a little satire of his own titled
Misopogon
, or “Beard-Hater,” meant to mock both himself and his Antiochene critics. He wrote that he had “out of sheer perversity and ill-temper . . . added to [my face] this long beard of mine, to punish it, as it would seem, for this very crime of not being handsome by nature.”
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This was, of course, a joke. In Julian’s text, however, jokes soon gave way once more to invective, and the emperor unleashed a torrent of disparagement on his subjects for their disregard for moral restraint, religious propriety, and social decorum. Julian’s conceit was to accept the beard as boorish indeed, but still far preferable to the smooth-faced degeneracy of his subjects. He told the citizens of Antioch that though he had a dirty beard, “you . . . by your soft and delicate way of living, or perhaps by your effeminate dispositions, carefully make your chins smooth, and your manhood you barely reveal and slightly indicate by your foreheads, not by your jaws as I do.” Men will soon be sorry when they discover that their distaste for manly discipline and rule of law leads to the collapse of their authority over their own households. With his messy beard, Julian would continue to stand firm against feminine wantonness and social dissipation. Just months after his clash with the citizens of Antioch, however, Julian died of wounds suffered in battle. It was truly the end of an era, for Julian would prove to be the last non-Christian emperor, as well as the last exponent of the first beard movement.

The fall, rise, then fall again of beards in classical civilization reflected a cultural struggle over the true source of masculine virtue: was it natural reason or divine genius? Would a man do better to model himself on the philosopher or on the hero? Before Alexander, both learning and prejudice favored beards as the mark of masculine virtue. Though artists devised a type of beardless masculinity during Greece’s golden age, this was an idealized image not meant to represent mortal men. It took the audacity of Alexander, who claimed to be the equal of the demigods Achilles and Heracles, to bring this ideal to life. Lesser men followed his lead, setting a new masculine standard for Western history that still asserts its power today. Philosophers, however, held
out for a different idea of manliness. The aspiration to transcend nature, they argued, was a serious mistake. A truly good man cultivated natural virtues of self-discipline and sound reason. They offered themselves as the bearded alternative and called upon all men to follow their lead. For a time, starting in the reign of Hadrian, these ideals triumphed. But it was not long before the glamorous Alexandrian ideal asserted itself once more, much to the regret of holdouts like Emperor Julian.

The eventual collapse of the western empire and the triumph of Christianity throughout the Roman world dropped the curtain on both the classical shave and its antithetical beard movement. Manliness was henceforth shaped in the context of Christianity rather than classical art or philosophy. The beard controversies of the classical era, however, carried forward into the new age, articulated the context of Christian theology. In the Middle Ages that followed, Christian arguments were devised both for and against beards, and though early theologians at first adopted a stoical defense of natural hair, later reformers successfully revived heroic shaving on an entirely new basis.