Skin and beyond: reading the surfaces of the body in ancient Greek literature

Abstract

The skin looms large in our cultural imagination: this is as true for us now as it was for the ancient Greeks. This dissertation takes its cue from the field of Skin Studies and examines how ancient Greek authors from the Homeric poems up to the Hellenistic periods conceptualized skin; how skin was talked about. More specifically, it is concerned with what an ancient Greek audience thought it could ‘read’ from the skin through such features as colour, texture and the markings on it, and the ways in which it did so. The dissertation consists of three parts, which respectively focus on 1) different ways of conceptualizing skin, the kind of 'stuff' it represents; 2) discourses of looking at skin for signs of, for example, social status; and 3) the relationship of skin to touching. The skin in ancient Greek literature and science emerges as a 'site of truth': it is deeply bound up with questions of truth, authenticity and deceit. Skin might represent the surface of our bodies, but it is anything but superficial.