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Feminism has always been a taboo subject. In modern times, feminism is now portrayed as women hating men and their view of women. However, this wasn't always the case. In ancient times, women were portrayed very differently. Even though society has advanced drastically since ancient times, equality between genders has not. Sadly, in some parts of the modern world, it may have possibly regressed. Both societies show many similarities, especially the type of makeup women would wear and they way they are preferred to look by men. This shows how we’re not actually that different to our ancient ancestors and women have faced the same struggles throughout all ages through the male misrepresentation.
To start with, the physical image of a woman has altered throughout the thousands of years, however there are many similarities to ancient Roman and modern day makeup. Ovid, the poet famous for his ballads about love in ancient times, wrote the ‘Medicamina Faciei Femineae’, which is a didactic poem for the optimal female face, whose descriptions and practices are actually still used in the manufacture of beauty cosmetics today. This shows the advancement of the ancient philosophers and poets, and how far they had progressed both scientifically and humanistically. This was tragically lost after the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Dark Ages where people refused to write down and document experiences and also began to refuse to be ‘Roman’ and have Roman ideas and points of views. This therefore meant that society as a whole began to regress and sink back into the darkness of a lesser formed society, hence the appropriately named ‘Dark Ages’. After these unfortunate years of refusal of documentation, society began to build up their advancements once again and mould the modern day society. We can only imagine of what our lives would be like if Rome had never fallen and we had continued to advance at such an alarming rate, possibly creating a Utopian society.
In an Ancient Greek mind everything had an intrinsic meaning; nothing was pointless. Therefore even women’s beauty had a purpose; it was an active, independent reality, not a unimportant and indefinite quality that only came into being once it was discerned. Women’s beauty in both Greece and Rome was widely important. The ideal eyes, from an Ancient Roman perspective, were large with long eyelashes. Pliny The Elder once wrote that a woman’s eyelashes fell out from excessive sex and so it was especially important for women to keep their eyelashes long to prove their chastity. This could be achieved by lining them with kohl. Kohl became a staple addition to a typical Roman woman’s everyday makeup, and was composed of ashes or soot, with saffron usually added to improve the smell. Kohl was applied using a rounded stick, made of ivory, glass, bone, or wood, that would be dipped in either oil or water first, before being used to apply the it. The use of kohl as makeup came from the east, showing the influence of the cosmopolitan society of Rome and the impression it creates on other countries and the influences other countries has on moulding and forming the hub of central activity as Rome ruled the world at one point in time. Furthermore, although the Roman’s oral hygiene was nowhere near as good and healthy as today’s standards, white teeth were viewed as incredibly attractive by the Romans as it showed a sign of wealth to be able to afford appropriate oral hygiene, and so therefore false teeth, made from bone, ivory and paste, were popular items to be found among Roman women and also surprisingly men as they also took pride in their appearance, not for women but to other men to portray signs of wealth and a high position in the social hierarchy. Ovid also shed light on the way clean and white teeth were viewed in society when he wrote the statement, “You can do yourself untold damage when you laugh if your teeth are black, too long or irregular.”
However, the overuse of cosmetics could have the opposite reaction of the desired effect. Juvenal wrote that “a woman buys scents and lotions with adultery in mind” and mocked the need for cosmetics, believing that they were ineffective and implied that the woman using them needed them because she was impure and therefore needed something to mask up her deceit. This was especially related to the use of perfumes, which were even further looked down upon because they were thought to mask the smell of sex and alcohol. In fact, Seneca advised virtuous women to avoid cosmetics, as he believed that the use of deceitful appearances of women is a part of the decline of morality in Rome. Cosmetics, especially red lipstick, was seen as the mark of a prostitute and does not promote the innocent and clean image that Roman women are desperate to achieve
Women wanted to give the impression of purity and chastity, which was achieved through the use of cosmetics. Sadly, pure white skin, the main symbol of chastity and also a demarcation of the leisure class, was the most important feature of Roman beauty. Ancient Roman women weren’t naturally fair-skinned and spent their time outside with oils on their faces, therefore this mean requiring whitening makeup to fit their model of beauty. This was achieved through various creams and lead-based powders as described by Ovid in ‘Medicamina Faciei Femineae’. Young women were also expected to have no hair on their bodies except the hair on their head much like modern day women, in order to achieve the smooth, hairless look they would perform acts such as shaving, plucking, waxing their legs with a hardening resin paste or scraping the hair off with a pumice stone. This would be viewed that women do this in order for preparation for sex and therefore older women would be scorned at and ridiculed for their depilation.
The visual portrayal of women was hard to find in ancient scriptures, and therefore it is important to find evidence from real life accounts of similar women in the same time and place to get a representation of what the literary heroines would have looked like. If Helen of Sparta accurately represents the real aristocrats of the Bronze Age Aegean, then we understand that a Spartan queen three thousand and five hundred years ago would have exhibited intense, kohl-rimmed eyes, much that like of Cleopatra and the ancient Egyptians, possibly a support of the cosmopolitan visualisation of the ancient world and the transportation of fashion and style throughout it. Furthermore Helen would have displayed red tattoos of suns on her chin and cheeks, she would had her hair shaven as a teenager and then dressed to look like snakes, this would have been done by applying plaster in the shape of snakes in on a headdress. Her breasts would have been bare or covered in a diaphanous gauze, this sheer cover would not have been to cover any part of her body, just applied for decoration as a sign of wealth to be able to afford such lightweight and delicate cloth.
Antithetical to evidence, some real life portrayals of ancient women and beauty in fact somehow contradict the view of the ‘ideal perfect woman’ because of the accounts of attraction that men had for these women and the description of their physical attributes does not match the accounts that they wrote about them. One particular example is the portrayal of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. In modern day media and society, we imagine queen Cleopatra as a beautiful woman with fierce dark eyeliner and alluring long dark hair with braids and beads in. In fact, Cleopatra did not look like that at all, and the visual representations of what she did in fact look like is very different to what society thinks of how she looked like. The possibility that her attractiveness has been exaggerated for the beauty of Hollywood films about her doomed love with her lover Marc Antony. Lindsay Allason-Jones, director of archaeological museums at Newcastle University, in a statement described how “Roman writers tell us that Cleopatra was intelligent and charismatic, and that she had a seductive voice but, tellingly, they do not mention her beauty. The image of Cleopatra as a beautiful seductress is a more recent image.” It seems that Cleopatra’s intelligence and charm managed to change the course of Roman history, and not her portrayal of beauty. It is also possible that her ability to control men and her masculine attributes and actions were also attractive to men as she was very unlike the weak submissive women that they were used to back and home, and someone more feisty and exotic meant that they found her intriguing and inevitably attractive. Cleopatra managed to seduce two of the most important Roman citizens at the time.In forty eight B.C. she successfully seduced Rome's first emperor, Julius Caesar who was in fact thirty years in her senior, she then bore him a son. However sadly, her relationship years later with Marc Antony, with whom she had three children, ended in tragedy. After Antony's tragic defeat by Octavian, who was set in becoming Rome's second emperor, in thirty one B.C., both Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide together in a tragic love story. According to legend, Cleopatra chose to perish by an asp's bite, causing a slow and painful death, possibly to metaphorically punish herself for her actions with Marc Antony.
Furthermore, another influential ancient female is the princess Boudicca who has remained an important cultural symbol in the United Kingdom. In two thousand and two, she was number thirty five in the BBC's poll of the top hundred Greatest Britons. However, sadly the absence of native British literature during the early part of the first millennium due their uneducated states and also lack of Roman knowledge and the lack of understanding and writing Latin means that knowledge of Boudicca's rebellion comes solely from the writings of the Romans, therefore creating a bias in what she did and how she was portrayed. However, we can determine that Boudicca was queen of the Iceni people of Eastern England and led a major uprising against occupying Roman forces.
Boudicca was married to Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni people of East Anglia. When the Romans conquered southern England in AD 43, they allowed Prasutagus to continue to rule. However, when Prasutagus died the Romans decided to rule the Iceni directly and confiscated the property of the leading tribesmen. They are also said to have stripped and flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters. These actions exacerbated widespread resentment at Roman rule.