See Judith Weingarten’s comment at the end of the last post.
This discussion began when Adrian Murdoch spotted a moustache on a picture of Elagabalus I had posted and remembered Bryan Ward-Perkins’s statement that there is no Latin word for moustache and, in Adrian’s words, but according to Ward-Perkins, “no image in the whole history of the empire showing a Roman wearing a moustache on its own”.
But Elagabalus was wearing one on its own. (Professor Ward-Perkins, who has seen these posts, and stands in this tiny way corrected, has added in an email that “I now see Elagabalus sometimes also had a weedy chin-beard!” He must have seen some other images.) Judith’s insight, I suspect, is to the point: “I think that the moustache worn alone is what unmakes the man, not when he wears it together with a beard. Shaving (or plucking) off the beard is the fatal sign of effeminacy. If so, Alexander Severus’ moustache passes muster and he can’t be called a ‘sissy’ for that reason.”
Where and when after Syria, early third century AD, could a moustache without a beard have been the sign of a sissy? The Castro, San Francisco, etc, 1970s and ’80s. Those moustaches were rather more convincing than Elagabalus’s or his successor’s.
Much of the early part of Toynbee’s Study is spent clearing away contemporary nonsense about race. He seems to dwell too long on some arguments, because they have since been won, but we need to remember how people thought in 1930. For Toynbee’s early political views touching on race, see, for example, this. But some of his own writing – here on skin and hair types – is charmingly dated.
It is said that David Livingstone, on one of his expeditions, after passing many months in Central Africa with no White companions and none but Negroes round him, began to find that the sight of his own naked skin turned him sick, as though he were looking at some deformity of nature.
This craving for the normal in physical appearance (whatever the normal may be in the particular circumstances) is not of course confined to the single feature of colour. For example, in the United States, where the physical appearance of the White people is the norm for the Coloured people, [footnote 1] the Coloured women try to lessen their unlikeness from the White women by straightening their hair. On the other hand, the White women, who have no fear of looking like Negroes, take pleasure, as White women do in other countries, in having their hair waved or curled. Thus, in the same American town at the same moment, some barbers may be busy straightening women’s hair in the Negro quarter while others are busy curling women’s hair in the White quarter – in both cases alike, for the satisfaction of the universal human craving to be “in the fashion”. [Footnote 2.]
Hair, indeed, is just as good – or just as bad – a criterion of Race as pigment. [Footnote 3.] The North American Whites and Negroes are sensitive to the straightness or curliness of the hair on the head. The Japanese are sensitive to the general hairiness of the human body, because, in Japan, this happens to be a more significant feature than the colour of the skin. The Japanese people (like almost every other people that has ever distinguished itself) is of mixed race; and its original racial components must have differed widely in colour; for there is a considerable diversity of colour among the Japanese people to this day. In the same district and in the same social class and in the same family you may find skins varying from copper-colour to what White people call white. Hence, the differences of colour within this range do not excite race-feeling among the Japanese any more than this is excited among Europeans by differences in the quantity of hair on their bodies. On the other hand, Japanese of all shades of skin are alike in being more or less hairless except on their heads, in contrast to the aboriginal inhabitants of the Japanese Islands who, like Nordic Man in the unshaven state of nature, have bushy beards and hairy chests. [Footnote 4.] For this reason, the Japanese call these aborigines (the remnant of whom are now philanthropically preserved, on the northern island of Hokkaido, in “reservations”) “the Hairy Ainu”. In the local circumstances of Japan, it is just as natural to emphasize the hairiness of the inferior race as it is in the United States or in the Union of South Africa to emphasize their colour; and as the people of European origin apply the colour-classification, which suggests itself in their own local circumstances, to the whole of Mankind, so we might expect the Japanese to divide the human family, not into a “White Race” and a “Coloured Race” but into a “Hairless Race” and a “Hairy”.
Logically there is nothing to choose between one classification and the other; but it may be edifying for us to glance at the classification with which we are less familiar. It yields what, to our minds, are disconcerting results. It brackets “Nordic Man” with the Hairy Ainu of Hokkaido and the Blackfellows of Australia and the Veddahs of Ceylon and the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills in Southern India, as one of the representatives of a race whose abnormal hairiness makes them not as other men are. [Footnote 5.]
[Footnote 1: This is not because the Negroes are in a minority; for though they are in a minority of about 10 versus 90 per cent. in the United States as a whole, they usually live in a milieu of their own race owing to the tendency towards local segregation. The reason why the Coloured people aspire to resemble the White people is that the White people have the prestige of being the ruling race. Moreover, the Coloured population of the United States is crossed with White blood in all degrees; and the Coloured people who are seven-eighths or fifteen-sixteenths White look forward to the possibility of “passing” surreptitiously into the White community. It may be questioned, however, whether even if, in the course of generations, all visible traces of their Negro origin were bred out of the Coloured population of the United States, their descendants would be permitted by the descendants of the pure Whites to “pass” wholesale and thus extinguish “the colour-bar”. The precedent in India suggests that, even if the visible difference of colour eventually disappeared, the racial barrier originally founded on this difference would survive, as rigid or more rigid than ever, in the form of Caste. In India to-day the caste divisions are reflected only slightly, or not at all, in any corresponding differences of colour; yet Philology shows that Caste – for which the Hindu word is Varna, meaning “colour” – originated in a colour-bar such as exists in the United States to-day.]
[Footnote 2: It may be added that, in this generation, “nigger” is a popular colour for White women’s clothes, and that the colour of a Negro woman’s skin is one of the favourite shades of White women’s silk stockings, which are intended to convey to White men’s eyes a suggestion of the naked flesh.]
[Footnote 3: Hair is taken as the primary basis of racial classification by Haddon, A. C., in The Races of Man and their Distribution, revised edition (Cambridge 1929, University Press).]
[Footnote 4: The Ainu also resemble “Nordic Man” in being white-skinned. In fact, their physical resemblance to him is so close that, if they choose to claim that they are his poor relations, he would find it difficult to disprove the embarrassing assertion.]
[Footnote 5: All the races mentioned in this sentence are bracketed together as members of the “cymotrichous” or wavy-haired family by Haddon in op. cit. (e.g. in “An Arrangement of the Main Groups of Mankind”, on pp. 14-15). The author duly notes (in op. cit., on p. 6) that “some cymotrichous peoples have very hairy bodies, e.g., Ainu, Toda, some Australians, some Europeans. The Xanthoderms [i.e. Mongoloid Asiatics, Bushmen, and Hottentots] [brackets in original] usually have an almost hairless body, as have most Negroes.”]
Even Toynbee has not entirely escaped from the contemporary fascination with racial classification.
The country with the highest proportion of very hairy people in it must be India.
A Study of History, Vol I, OUP, 1934
