491. History's Greatest Beards: From Egyptian Queens to Medieval Conquerors (Part 1)
48:02 Share

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Some of the best decisions we make in our lives happen unannounced.

Under pressure. I always love the story about Churchill when he became prime minister in 1914. It's all kicking off. The Germans are invading in the east. And he says that that night he went back home and he slept like a baby because the pressure that this was the culmination of everything he'd been planning for. And actually, he was at his best under enormous pressure. This is the moment that he lived for.

Dominic, lots of our listeners might have to cope with the pressure that comes from hiring. There is a smart, simple solution, ZipRecruiter. You can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com.

slash history. So employers, relax and let ZipRecruiter speed up your hiring. See for yourself. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com slash history right now to try it for free. Tom, that's the same price as a genuine smile from a stranger, a picture-perfect sunset, or a cute dog running up to you and licking your hand. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash history.

Zip Recruiter, the smartest way to hire. It's Stuart here. In Leap, I've discovered flowers and flames, the new floral facet, the YSL way. It's floral, but in the hottest way, and it's both luminous. It's really such a statement. It's a real ultimate freedom sensation. So Yves Saint Laurent. Sephora stores are everywhere you are. So just pop in when you need a brown lip to match your 90s playlist.

Are you a man or a woman? A man.

Very well then, adorn a man, not a woman. Woman is born smooth and dainty by nature. And if she is very hairy, she is a prodigy and is exhibited at Rome among the prodigies.

But for a man not to be hairy is the same thing. And if by nature he has no hair, he is a prodigy. But if he shaves his chin and plucks out his hairs, what shall we make of him? Where shall we exhibit him and what notice shall we post? I will show you, we say to the audience, a man who wishes to be a woman rather than a man. What a dreadful spectacle!

So Tom, that was... The wokest man in the Roman Empire. That was Epictetus. He's a philosopher, isn't he? He's having a dialogue. Stoic philosopher. His views about male grooming, beards, facial hair, and indeed gender more broadly, would be considered controversial today, I think it's fair to say. I think it would, but he's obviously reflecting the mores of the time. Yeah. He's a fascinating man. He was a former slave. He taught

the Emperor Hadrian, among other people. And he points to the way in which the topic of today's episode, namely beards and facial hair, it's about more than just fashion, isn't it? It's about more than grooming. It touches on all kinds of political and philosophical and indeed religious sensitivities. So a fascinating topic. It's bizarre how this topic opens up so many lines of inquiry. Public health,

masculinity the relationship between russia and the west all of these things are wrapped up in the beard absolutely so a great topic also of course i mean it is about fashion and maybe we should kick off just by what's your favorite kind of age of beards your top beards i think if you had to go back in time yeah and grow a beard where would you go i'd go to the 17th century

because I think there's a greater diversity of beards in the 17th century than any other period. So there's the Van Dyke, there's a beard which I'll be talking about called a swallowtail with two prongs. There's a spade beard for a soldier. There's creativity. I feel that with the late Victorians, it's just size. It's just an American approach to beards, sort of an emphasis on enormous quantity rather than quality. Yes. I think...

I think I'd go for Elizabethan. Would you? Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake. I like that. The beard of a sea dog. I think that's kind of happy medium and groomed, but there is the hint of sea dog as well.

So the beard of a man who, while bearded himself, enjoys singeing the beards of others. Exactly. Yeah. So that would be my choice. Good choice. That's a good choice. I like it. Thanks, Dominic. Thanks. Anyway, so just an interesting thing about beards before we get into the history. Yeah. Is that apparently top scientists don't really know what beards are for. Really? Because I always had a vague sense that beards were a remnant of our...

simian ancestry right but apparently not because apparently we actually started growing beards after we'd evolved from whatever it was we were before hold on no that's not plausible so there was a point where human beings were totally hairless yes well so bonobos i think which are our closest living evolutionary relative don't have beards they don't have hair around the mouth right

but we males do. Apparently, it's an evolutionary conundrum and it worried Darwin. Darwin's solution was that beards were kind of like the peacock's tail. They were designed to

attract females and thereby propagate the species. Because am I right in saying it's a mystery to evolutionary biologists or whatever they're called, why women don't have beards? It doesn't make any sense. Or more germanely, why men do have beards. So apparently the thinking is either that women are attracted to them because they're signifiers of health. So like long, lustrous hair on a woman. Right. Or they are kind of designed to intimidate. So like crests on a lizard or whatever. Yeah. Going up.

Or that they serve no purpose at all. Like the appendix of outward decorations. Not even like an appendix, because an appendix used to have a reason. Right. I saw Adam Rutherford, top scientist, when we were playing cricket together a couple of days ago, and I asked him. And he shed no light on it. It is apparently an evolutionary mystery. So, interesting. Yeah. But as we will see, the question of what beards signify, people have had views on this throughout history. And I think when we go through beards in history, we're going to be focusing on...

They're kind of the Mediterranean, the Near East, Europe, rather than other areas of the world. Ho Chi Minh's beard will not make an appearance. No, because I don't really know much about them. I mean, Native Americans don't really have beards at all, do they? Sitting Bull didn't have a beard. Crazy Horse, you can't picture them with a beard. I can't even imagine. Custer. Custer had a Van Dyke beard.

Yeah, and that guy, General Terry, who didn't go to the steamboat. He had a monster. But I respect Custer that he went for the grooming over the just, oh, let's just grow it. Yeah, I do. I think it was a tendency among late 19th century American presidents and indeed British men of letters to just assume that size meant masculinity or something. Because what Custer got, it's a cavalier beard.

And it's all about, you know, Rupert of the Rhine dashing around with cavalry and ending up dead. Yeah, like Hester. So good on him. Anyway, let's go right back to the beginning and look at the cradles of civilization in the western half of Eurasia, which goes to the Near East and Egypt. And in both those civilizations, what you see is that the beard is interpreted as being a kind of symbol of strength.

of aggression, of command, and so it's associated with warriors, with fighters, with people who sit in judgment. Shaved chins, and indeed shaving more generally, becomes a symbol of purity and closeness to the divine, and so it's associated with scribes and priests. So it's not as though shaving or having a beard, either of those are seen as negatives. Both of them have positive connotations.

but they're representative of the different classes of person that emerge in urban centres. For kings, this obviously represents a challenge because you want to embody both. A king wants to be a warrior, but he also wants to be close to the gods.

There are different solutions to this problem are discovered in the Near East and in Egypt. So in Mesopotamia, a king of Sumer called Shulgi, who's on the throne around 2000 BC, he has a tremendous wheeze, which is in some of his statues, he's shown as a bearded warrior. And in others, he's shown as a kind of shaved priest. So he has the best of both worlds. He has his cake and eats it. And Tom, that sense of the beard equaling masculinity on the one hand, martial prowess

us, and then on the other, shaving and a clean face being pure, clean, spiritually clean. Clean cut. Yeah, clean cut, disciplined, maybe a sort of asceticism, an austerity, a kind of moral austerity. That runs right through the centuries, indeed the millennia. Yeah, and it's amazing when you trace it through, as we'll be doing. But I think in Mesopotamia, kings do end up kind of portraying themselves as bearded.

So the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, you think of the portrayals of Persian Kings. They're very kind of long, a bit like the beard that our producer Theo had until the weekend when he shaved it off. He did, especially for this podcast. Which I regret because he could have woven ribbons into it and adornments like the Persian Kings did. He'd look lovely. Yeah, he'd look really, really good.

You can see how completely associated with royal authority the beard is. There's a wonderful story told by the Greek historian Theseus, who's talking about an ambitious eunuch who is conspiring against his master, the king. He has a woman in the court make him a false beard and moustache so that he will have the appearance not just of a man, but of a king.

I guess that's kind of interesting because it suggests two things. The first is that maybe one of the reasons for keeping eunuchs in the court of Mesopotamian kings, Persian kings, is precisely to emphasise the hirsute quality of masculine majesty. Obviously there's an entire cottage industry in these courts of women making beards and moustaches.

Well, as we'll see, there were people who did that and made a lot of money from it in the 1960s. Male order mustaches were a thing. Well, there's nothing new under the sun, is there? No. Just on the eunuchs. If you're a eunuch, are you incapable of growing a beard? I think it depends on when the operation happens. Okay. I don't know if we have people who are experts in that. Maybe they could let us know. If there are any eunuchs listening to the podcast, you'd like to get in touch. Well, eunuchologists. But obviously, I mean, one of the reasons for castrating eunuchs

boys is to prevent them from growing beards. So that they stay clean shaven right the way through. And hence that thing about purity. Presumably there's a belief that they're somehow more pure? No, because it's seen as cheating. Oh, okay. Fair enough. So that's Mesopotamia. We've done that.

So let's move on to Egypt, which of course is the other great centre of early civilisation. And there you have the same thing, because there's a massive premium on shaving in Egypt. Bodily purity is huge, and it's not just priests who really go all in. I mean, they shave completely over their body, shave their head and everything, but nobles do as well. And so that's why they will wear the wigs, you know, the famous wigs that everyone will have seen on the tomb illustrations.

And essentially, the only person who wears a beard in Egypt is the king, is Pharaoh.

But he gets around this idea that he wants to portray himself as being pure as well by making it clear that the beard is very obviously a false one. It's got a chin strap, hasn't it? It's a chin strap beard. Yeah, exactly. And it's shown on the kind of the portrayals of kings in tombs or whatever or statues. And that's why it works for Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh who presents herself as a male pharaoh. The artificiality of the beard is,

to an Egyptian, I think, wouldn't have seemed as discordant, perhaps, as it does to us. Because they're used to people wearing full-speards, so the fact that she's wearing one is not so peculiar. Yeah. And I think it really matters precisely because that association of complete bodily smoothness and its association with divinity is so strong in Egypt. So when Herodotus goes to Egypt, he's astounded

by the smoothness of Egyptian priests. He writes, "Priests will give themselves a full body shave every other day. This is done to prevent them from sheltering lice or any other vermin while they minister to the gods." It's very Herodotian that he would focus on the lice. That sense that you can't go in teeming with lice when you're offering sacrifice to the gods. That's what's going on. But it does point to the way in which actually not just the Greeks but also

the Jews as well, the two peoples who've been most influential on the course of Western history, they do have slightly different attitudes to beards, well actually very different attitudes to beards. So looking at the Jews first, what's distinctive about them I think is that they enshrine the beard

as a symbol of purity. So, I mean, that's like circumcision. It becomes a marker of the distinctiveness of the Israelites, the Jews, whatever. And that's almost certainly, surely, defining themselves against their superpower neighbours. So doing the opposite. Yes. Merely to make themselves distinctive. And then that gets stuck. They get stuck with it.

Yeah, well, they get stuck with it or they've been told to do it by God. And so therefore they cleave to it as a marker of their divine election. I mean, two ways of putting it. And that's something that gets in the long run inherited by Christians. We look at Christians actually have quite ambivalent attitudes to beards, but Muslims definitely not.

because they are enshrining Muhammad as the last in a long line of patriarchs that you get in the Bible. And so it's taken for granted that Muhammad was bearded. I mean, there's actually, I don't think, a single mention of beards in the Quran. But the idea that Muhammad is bearded, it appears in the hadiths and in the lives of Muhammad. And so that's why to this day, so many Muslim men

are bearded, and particularly those who are kind of going back to the original sources. But going back to the Jews in antiquity, their hairiness creates a massive point of tension with the empire that succeeds the Persians in ruling them, which is that of Alexander the Great. Right. I thought we'd come to Alexander. Because I think there's a case for saying that in the history of the beard, Alexander the Great is perhaps the single most influential figure. Totally is. And the reason for that...

is that before Alexander, so in Greece, in the classical period, I mean, the Greeks loved a beard as well. So you think of Zeus, a mighty beard, absolutely emblematic of his role as king of gods, Heracles, the strongest of the heroes. I mean, he has a big beard and there's clearly quite a strong sexual dynamic to this. So in Aristophanes, the great

comic writer in Athens in the fifth century. Men who shave or don't have beards at all are seen as kind of comically effeminate, and he's always making jokes about it. And it must be influenced by the practice of pederasty in Athens, that beards are the emblem of the older active partner in that kind of relationship. And a smooth chin is emblematic of youth and of kind of relative degree of passivity in the relationship. So it kind of eroticizes it.

There isn't the kind of theological dimension that you get in the Near East to it, but philosophers also tend to be very keen on beards. Actually, the beard is always the emblem of the philosopher. Aristotle, his theory on beards is what underpins Epictetus' take on it. What generates a beard

is the hot fluids that men as opposed to women have and particularly dominic semen so the more semen you have yeah the bigger the beard but of course the more semen you have the likely you are to have sex and the more you have sex the likely you are to be bald so cranky well what is that yeah yeah but um this

This is a theme that runs through the history of the beard because as we'll see in the second half, people believe this well into the early modern period. This business about heat, fertility and beards is a long running theme. Well, because as we'll see, it feeds into medicine as well. Yes. So Hippocrates and then Galen.

And this then goes into the kind of the bloodstream of medieval attitudes to this and the Renaissance and so on. So very, very influential take on beards. But at the same time, you do also have, I think, the sense that you get in other ancient cultures that a smooth chin can be an expression of the divine, but a kind of subversive, discordant...

unsettling form of divinity. Apollo, Hermes are often portrayed as gods without beards. The combination of youth and power is unsettling to the Greeks. Likewise with Achilles, the great Greek hero at Troy, he is disguised as a woman, as a girl, and Odysseus discovers him by

Going to this place where he's hidden with all the girls and he's got a great sack full of jewellery and so on, but with a sword. And Achilles reaches for the sword and kind of draws it out and this reveals that he's actually who he is. So off he goes to Troy. So the shaven face is unearthly.

Is that it? It's slightly unsettling. Yes, unsettling. And actually you get it the other way around. So Herodotus has this wonderful report of a priestess of Athena at a place called Pedassa, which is just outside Halicarnassus, today's Bodrum, where Herodotus came from. And she, whenever danger threatened, would always grow a beard. So this was a kind of long-range crisis.

You'd go and see whether she'd sprouted some whiskers or not. And if she had, you'd batten down the hatches. But I think that sense of the strangeness, the potential power, the eeriness of someone who is very, very powerful and indisputably a great warrior.

Choosing to portray himself as smooth-chinned is what Alexander is about because it's scrambling people's cultural expectations in Greece. So his father, Philip II, king who builds the Macedonian war machine, big beard, masculine, wants to look like Zeus, I assume, or Heracles. Alexander, on his coins...

is always clean shaven, isn't he? And his statues. Yeah. I mean, I think he's young, isn't he? That's the difference. So Philip is, you know, he's mature. He can play Zeus. He's grizzled. Alexander, because he has inherited the throne at a very young age, he's making an advantage of it. Hmm.

He's portraying himself, I mean, above all as Achilles. Achilles is his great role model. But there is also a sense of the younger generation of Olympians. Like Apollo or somebody. Yeah. And just to say that there were alternative theories about this that were proffered in antiquity. So Plutarch, he advances the theory that Alexander ordered his men to shave off all their beards. So it wasn't just Alexander doing it. All of them were because he was worried that the enemy would reach out and grab them. I think that's such obvious nonsense.

I mean, you're dissing Plutarch. I love Plutarch, but I don't think it's plausible. A, that no general would have thought of this before or B, that no general

that the having or non-having of a beard would really make the difference in the battle against the Persians. Because it's a kind of just-so story, isn't it? Yeah. And clearly Plutarch, who's an antiquarian, I mean, he completely recognises the fact, the scale of how different Alexander's look is relative to all the great generals who had gone before him, all of whom were bearded. And he's kind of clearly looking around for an explanation, as I guess, you know, the Greeks were generally. And I think that that's reflective of just how transformative Alexander

Alexander is. It's something that does seem to people looking back as kind of puzzling and extraordinary and needing an explanation. But I think the explanation is pretty clearly that Alexander is portraying himself as a distinctive kind of God. Right. Because almost every ancient ruler that we can think of before Alexander, every single one has a beard pretty much. And they would presumably, even if they couldn't really grow a beard, they would portray themselves with a beard anyway, because they want to look

strong powerful like Hatchett said yeah or they'd have fake beard but Alexander is genuinely transformative completely which is why I think you know he is in the history of the beard he is the number one he's the number one and if you want to know more about this there's a brilliant children's book isn't there yeah there is that touches on this very issue and which may inspire young readers when they grow up to grow a beard

No, to shave. Oh, sorry, to shave, yes. Yeah. They won't want to look like Darius or Bessus. They'll want to look like Alexander. Or Baguaz, the eunuch.

I don't think that's a terrible role model for young readers. Well, this is the perils of writing for children, isn't it? It is. It is. So on that bombshell, listen, we'll take a break and let's return after the break, Tom, because I am very interested in Roman beards and I know there's nobody better to dispense wisdom on that topic than you.

This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Searching for your next car? Don't settle, thrive. At CarMax, it's easy to shop online or in person. With upfront pricing and tools designed to help, finding a car you love has never been easier. Plus, you can sell or trade in your current vehicle with an online offer in minutes. No strings attached. Start shopping now to find a car you'll love at CarMax.com. CarMax, the way it should be.

This is what you do when you've just found that statement handbag on eBay and you want to build an entire wardrobe around it. You start selling to keep buying. Yep, on eBay. Over that all-black everything phase, list it and buy all the color. Feeling more vintage than ever? It's out with the new and in with the pre-loved. Next thing you know, you've refreshed your wardrobe basically without spending a dime. Yeah, eBay. The place to buy and sell new, pre-loved vintage and rare fashion.

Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. For

♪♪♪

Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking beards. Tom, we got up to Alexander, the single most important person in the history of the male face, and now we turn to the Romans. Now, I'm showing my ignorance here. I'm guessing like 99% of the listeners, when I think of the Romans, if I'm not thinking of Hadrian or somebody who's been self-consciously Greek, then I'm thinking of very sort of very clean-shaven men, men who...

shave so closely because that's part of their kind of republican austerity and distinguishing themselves from the um the astute luxuriance of eastern decadence am i right well i think that to begin with the romans have the traditional association of beards with martial valor and in fact with with republican virtue there's a famous portrait bust that is supposed to be of

Brutus, the man who expelled the monarchy and established the Republic. I mean, in fact, it probably isn't, but it's telling that that association is made by later generations. That the man who establishes the Republic in Rome is felt, you know, people clearly feel should be bearded. There's a story that is told about the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC, where the Gauls have broken into the city.

And the senators, rather than fleeing, have chosen to sit in state in the Senate House. They're in their robes, they have their staffs, and they are sat there with their tremendous flowing beards. And the ghouls break into the Senate House and they are struck dumb with awe at the spectacle of this incredible array of distinguished looking men.

And they're not sure whether they're statues or flesh and blood. And so one of them goes up to a senator and tugs on his beard. And as we'll see, the tugging on a beard is traditionally seen as a mortal insult. And so the senator reaches up with his staff and hits the Gaul. And the Gaul responds by drawing his sword, hacking him to death. And all the Senate are massacred. I mean, that is one of the versions of the story. And it's dependent on the assumption that

senators in particular, and the word senator derives from Senex, the Latin for old man, that they would have beards and that the beard would be an emblem of their authority and their prestige. So obviously later on in Roman history, there are enormous fans of Alexander. So Pompey the Great, you know, does his hair like Alexander's and wears Alexander's cloak or claims to. So after Alexander's death, did they...

Does the news of his clean shavenness reach Rome and they all rush to copy it? Or how does that work? I mean, you say that the Romans are fans of Alexander. I think it's more ambivalent than that. Alexander is Greek and Roman.

The Romans always have a degree of cultural cringe towards the Greeks, but they do also feel contemptuous of them. They are the rising power. They end up conquering the Greeks. There is a sense, the moment that the example of Alexander's clean-shaved face starts to percolate westwards into the Roman sphere of influence, it generates a kind of culture war

Because those who adopt the Alexander style of shaving immediately associate themselves with an enthusiasm for Greek culture. And those Romans who maintain a fondness for the beard are casting themselves as traditionalists, as people who don't go in for that kind of nonsense. So the fun thing there is that's a total reversal of what happens later on under the empire, which is the thing that is better known, which is when Hadrian has his beard and he's seen as being very Hellenophile. Yeah. And I think,

It's telling that the first Roman who really goes in for this, he's cast as a kind of fashion victim, as someone who is succumbing to the style, to the pleasures, to the potentially un-Roman way of doing things that the Greek cities in Sicily have to offer. Because he's been campaigning there. He has obtained a

barber and he brings this barber back with him to Rome rather in the way that later on Romans who go to Asia Minor when they've conquered that will bring back celebrity chefs with their talent for Greek fine cooking. And so it generates a kind of culture war

And the person who, according to Pliny, writing about it much later, is the first to shave daily, which is a kind of massive extension of this mania for clean shaving, to do it daily, I mean, absolutely extraordinary, is Scipio Africanus, who is the man who defeats Hannibal, Rome's greatest general, is often associated with Alexander the Great because of his generalship, is clearly also the

kind of making play with that sense of Alexandra's divine. Scipio is viewed with deep suspicion by

conservative critics. And he eventually ends up kind of being, you know, he goes into forced retirement because the Republican strain in Rome is so suspicious of what his clean-shaven chin suggests that he's, you know, they worry that he's planning basically to make himself into an Alexander, make himself into a king. Oh, Greggie, I was about to say he could get away with it because of his martial record, but clearly he couldn't.

But I guess it's symbolic, isn't it? I mean, he's not forced into exile because he shaves every day. But it's all part of the package. Right. You know, the Romans don't want overweening military figures because that threatens the security of the Republic. Right. And a guy who has defeated Hannibal, who then clean shaves himself every day. Yeah.

He's symbolizing the way in which he's a threat. I guess it's a little bit like if a British politician, if somebody, you know, if Robert Jenrick, who is standing to be leader of the Conservatives, appeared with a sort of toothbrush moustache. Yes, exactly. That would raise eyebrows, wouldn't it? I think it would. And if he said, oh, it's perfectly innocent, it's just...

So at what point do the Romans start shaving? Because they do start shaving. Well, they do. I mean, they're doing it because it's fashionable and because it's a strong look and because Greek culture is very influential and because that's the definition of a culture war. You have conservatives and you have people who are experimenting with the new options, the new opportunities that Rome's conquest of the Mediterranean is opening up. And I would say that by the first century BC, so the age of Julius Caesar and Pompey, who, as you said, famously clean-shaven,

Beards are still a feature.

of upper-class life. So you do have people who maintain them. By this point, they're kind of becoming hipster beards. So they're styled, they're trimmed. Cicero himself is clean-shaven, but he calls those who have these hipster beards the beni barbati, the well-bearded, those who are finely groomed, those who are finely trimmed. And increasingly, the point at which you have your first shave actually comes to be seen as the marker of

masculinity, of becoming mature, of becoming a man. So in a way it's kind of the reversal because classically, of course, your first beard, that shows that you've become a man. But to get rid of the beard by the time Nero, for instance, makes a great palaver of it, the emperor in the first century AD. Do you have a golden box or something? Golden box. He presents it, takes it up to the Capitol. It's all kind of great cheering and everything. And Nero has been a

So the busts of him, the beard runs under his chin and then stops under the chin. He's got a terrible beard. I quite like it. I quite like it. I think it's quite good. If you saw somebody like that, if somebody served you in a coffee shop with that beard, I think you'd be unsettled.

Well, have you seen the wax work, you know, the model of him based on the... Yes, the 3D thing. I mean, he looks very, very sinister. Anyway, so either you're clean shaven or it's groomed and trimmed and styled. Yeah. And the corollary of that is that unkempt beards increasingly become the kind of the marker of a plebeian status.

And it reflects the fact that actually, which we haven't really talked about until now, that having a shave is an enormous palaver. You need very, very sharp razors and you need someone who is competent to shave you. And the risk of being kind of nicked- Yeah.

There's no antiseptic or anything. It's exceedingly dangerous. As we will see in the next episode, Tom, because already it's very clear this is going to be a two-episode story. This is a risk running right into the 20th century. A shaving cut can literally mean death. Yes. And that's why for the Romans, a tonsil, a shaver, is analogous to a celebrity chef. Because you want nothing but the best. You're putting your life in the hands of this slave.

So it needs to be really, really good. And most people, of course, can't afford that, but they can go to the tonstrina, so the kind of the public barbers. And the barber there has a role analogous to a barber surgeon in kind of medieval or early modern times. They will extract teeth as well as do your shaving, cut your hair, trim your fingernails. Their skill is incredible.

what it's all about. And the more skill you have, the better you will be. So by the end of the first century AD, beginning of the second century AD, beards in the Roman world are massively out of fashion.

And the person who then reintroduces it, so in antiquity, probably second only to Alexander in his influence on beardology, is Hadrian. And this is because of his enthusiasm. Well, have I made this up? Is it his enthusiasm for Greece or is he trying to cover up an unpleasant skin complaint? So the idea that he had terrible acne has always been a popular one, for which I think there's no evidence at all. I think Hadrian is like Alexander, is brilliant at self-promotion and...

He is appealing to those who admire philosophy. So we heard he's a student of Stoic philosophers. And so by doing that, he is signaling his enthusiasm for those philosophical traditions that precede Alexander.

The beard is also, as we said, it's kind of a plebeian marker, particularly of the legionaries. So by wearing a beard, he's casting himself as the friend of the legions when he goes on his tours of the frontier, and as a philhellene, a lover of Greek culture, when he's going on his tours of Athens and Alexandria. So it's kind of brilliant marketing. And it becomes very influential. So the emperors who follow him, Marcus Aurelius most famously,

I mean, they are all wearing beards and they're all doing... Marcus Aurelius is very into his kind of Stoic philosophy, very into this idea that a man properly should have a beard because it's an expression of the hot fluids and the semen in his body. And this is the age when Galen, the great medical writer, is reviving those Aristotelian traditions and using it to

offer as a kind of scientific proof the physical superiority of men over women. So nature, Galen argues, doesn't give women beards, and this then proves that they lack the nobility of character that a man has. But also, this is the age of, I mean, Rome's under great pressure on the frontiers.

It's an age of kind of Balkan soldier emperors, isn't it? Yes. Djokovic type. Yeah. Strong men. A new strong man every six months. And they all have beards by and large. I mean, the beard is part of the package. Again, because they are marking themselves out as soldiers. Yeah. Up until the third century, the legati, the commanders of the legions,

They are doing it. They are civilians. They are noblemen. They are people who are climbing up the ladder of advancement. And so a military command for them is like a consulship or a quaestorship. But from the third century onwards, such is the strain that the empire is coming under.

that to mark yourself as permanently a soldier, someone who is not part of the kind of aristocratic civilian tradition, you know, it's a reassurance to people, you know, the emperor is someone who knows what he's doing. And likewise, when at the end of the third century, going into the fourth, you start to get a measure of stability. And then the empire is really very strongly stabilized under Constantine the Great, which

Constantine shows himself as shaved because he's essentially saying, you know, we're back to the golden age. We're back to an age of peace. We're back to an age when civilians are in charge. But then his nephew is Julian the Apostate. He wants to turn back the clock to a pre-Christian Roman empire. Famously, he's a great man for a beard, isn't he? Oh, he loves a beard. Yeah. So he goes to Antioch.

which is full of clean-shaven types, and they all jeer at him. Julian's furious about this, and he writes a satire called The Mizo Pogon, The Beard Hater, where

where he goes all in. He condemns his critics in Antioch as effeminate, terrible, completely lacking the hot bodily fluids that a real man should have. And he's very keen to see beards restored to their rightful place as he sees it. But as with his paganism, this is really the last hurrah of traditional Hellenic beard enthusiasm. Because even now, I equate paganism

paganism with beards which is strange actually because the only pagan I know is Ronald Hudson

who's been on our podcast. He doesn't have a beard. But he does have kind of long hair. Long hair, doesn't he? All right, let's talk about Christianity. So Constantine the Great, he's a tremendous point to move to Christianity. So Jesus, you and I were discussing this before the podcast. You corrected me and said, because I believe that Jesus was clean-shaven. No, he wasn't. Because I imagine Jesus looking very much like me. But this is wrong, you tell me. Wrong.

And Jesus actually had a beard, because I always thought the beard was a kind of medieval innovation. So it is true that the earliest portrayal of Jesus, which comes from a villa in Dorset, shows him as clean-shaven. Case closed. That for several centuries after that, so up until the fifth century really, he is almost by default shown as not having a beard.

This isn't because, as is often said, that Christians want to kind of associate Jesus with Apollo or some god like that. It's not about that. It's because he's the emperor of heaven. So just as Constantine is showing himself clean-shaven, he's the ruler of a united, peaceful world. So Christ, as the emperor of heaven, has to be clean-shaven. He's in the dimension of the holy, of the divine, of the angelic.

But of course, while also being divine, he's also human. The famous church in Ravenna built by Theoderic, the Ostrogothic king who was Arian and so had dodgy views on the relationship of the divine and the human in the figure of Christ. On there, Christ is shown with bearded humans and he is shown as being clean-shaven. Then he's shown among angels following the resurrection, and there he's shown bearded. Obviously, it's a way of saying,

He's simultaneously human and divine. And even though Theoderic is viewed as heretical by the Romans who recover Italy under Justinian, Justinian is fiercely orthodox.

those mosaics remain. And so it is expressive of this notion that Christ is both, you know, he's simultaneously human, simultaneously divine. He's simultaneously bearded and clean-shaven. So it's going back to Shulgi, the Sumerian king who has himself shown in exactly that way. It's dealing with the fact that, you know, a great king

And I suppose Christ, for a Christian, is the greatest of all kings. He has to be shown as both. And how do you do that visually? Now, of course, it's true that by the sixth century, the image of Christ as bearded is starting to become conventional. So it's starting to appear on icons. And I think there's two reasons for that. One of them is that there is a description of Christ as bearded in

in the Bible, but it doesn't come in the New Testament. It comes in the Old Testament, where the prophet Isaiah is giving this portrayal of the suffering servant, as it's called. It's a prophetic vision that Christians assume is a portrayal of Christ. And in that, Isaiah is giving voice to the suffering servant. And

The suffering servant says, they plucked out my beard. And this is interpreted as being part of the tortures that Christ undergoes during his passion before he's being nailed up on the cross. So that offers biblical sanction for his having a beard. I'll be honest, I don't find that conclusive, but some people may. Well, let's just say that by the sixth century, people are starting to find that conclusive. And you can take it up with the church fathers. I will do.

But I think the other way is that they are doing what the Egyptians did with the pharaohs, showing them as simultaneously, trying to portray them in a way that evokes a sense of being clean-shaven while having a beard. And perhaps it's telling. I mean, I don't know. It probably isn't. But it is interesting that the kind of the classic...

early example of this comes from St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, so very close to Egypt, where the beard is, it's not a kind of Zeus-like beard. It's a closer beard. It's a shorter beard. And that, I guess, is the image of Christ that people would have to this day. That's how he's portrayed. It's not a kind of massive, great... It's not Karl Marx's beard. It's not a Karl Marx, it's not a W.G. Grace beard. No. It's a kind of shorter beard. Yeah. Beard of a West German footballer at the 1982 World Cup.

That's the kind of beard it is. Okay, I'll take your word for it. So you might think that that would provide Christians with a kind of model, if it's good enough for their Lord and Saviour, why wouldn't it be good enough for them? And I think that in the Orthodox world, so the Eastern regions of the Roman Empire and then Christians under Islam, that association of godliness with a beard continues. So Greek Orthodox priests to this day have beards.

It's different in Latin Christendom because there, the connotations of beards and lack of beards becomes much more complicated and kind of bound up with all kinds of developments through the early Middle Ages and into the high Middle Ages. And I wonder whether one of the reasons for that, so the association that comes to develop there of beards,

being clean-shaven with godliness isn't influenced by the Viking raids. Really? The fact that the Vikings are kind of so unapologetically pagan and hairy that monks in particular, but also priests, come to associate beards with the savagery of the heathen. That's interesting, because I was reading a book about the Vikings, which I know you've read as well. It's called Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough, who's been on this podcast, and she talks a lot about combs and about Viking hair.

The Vikings shaved their heads at the back and then had these kind of floppy new romantic fringes. And wore beards. And wore beards. And the Anglo-Saxons had moustaches and had longer hair and obviously saw the beard as...

unsettlingly alien. So I wonder about that. And certainly by the early ninth century, so this is pretty early on into the Viking age. So it's issued by Louis the Pious, who was the son of Charlemagne in the early ninth century, that throughout Frankish lands, beards on monks are kind of legally forbidden, that monks should be clean shaven. And

This generates, obviously, a kind of sense of fashion. People who want to display their Christian zeal start to shave. So there's a Muslim traveler to Rome a few decades later, after Louis the Pious has brought in this dictate, who is appalled at how clean-shaven everybody in Rome is. He sees this association of hairlessness with godliness correctly, I think, as contrary to Christian as well as to Muslim tradition.

This is then further sharpened by the great revolutionary moment in medieval history, which of course, you know, by King Charles' head, is the 11th century, the Gregorian Reform,

What Gregory VII and his fellow reformers are trying to do is to usher in a great process of purification that will embrace the entirety of the Christian people. For Gregory, the people who have to do this are not just the monks, it's the priests as well. Gregory is very keen on the idea that priests should also be clean-shaven.

and what he always does when he introduces a kind of radical reform – so it's the Gregorian reform that is also demanding that priests as well as monks be celibate – he's always kind of saying, "This is the way it was always done. This is the venerable tradition of the church going back to the beginning." It's reinventing history. Yeah, exactly. He's rewriting history. He's kind of foregrounding what is quite a radical reform, quite a radical idea back in the roots of time. And so in the 11th century,

this association of purity with a clean-shaven chin becomes

absolutely embedded. It's not just priests who are taking this up. You talked about the Anglo-Saxons having moustaches. If you think of the Bayeux Tapestry, the Normans are clean-shaven. The fact that they are clean-shaven is emblematic of the role that they are playing as the cutting edge of this reformatio, this process of reform that Gregory VII is embodying. So again, the way in which beards and

and mustaches and shaving them off or keeping them are expressive of a kind of cultural identity. You see it really, really strongly in this most turbulent of all the centuries of medieval Christian Europe. And as you intimated at the start of this episode, it does kind of take you back to the beginning, to that kind of Sumerian Egyptian idea that being shaved

brings you closer to the dimension of the holy. Well, Tom, that is a theme that will run right through our next episode. But also, you've very brilliantly queued up what will be the great theme of that episode. And actually, in some ways, the theme of our entire engagement with history. And that is the question that's hung over this podcast.

from the very earliest days, should Englishmen have beards? So we'll be back to discuss that. We'll be discussing Peter the Great, the Crimean War. We'll be talking about Shakespearean beards, the Beatles and beards. Hipsters. Why Churchill didn't have a beard. We'll be addressing these and other questions in the next episode.

If you want to listen to that episode, Tom, what could people do? They could go to the rest is history.com and sign up there. Of course. That's what they could do. They could absolutely do that. I don't think we ever mentioned that before, but that is what they can do. Yeah. And all that stunning bombshell. Goodbye. Bye-bye. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for girl, four for a boy.

Britain's number one fiction podcast. I'm looking for Sherlock and Cole Limited. That's us. Can I help at all? My son, my son is missing. An epic ten part adventure. I'm Sherlock Holmes. What do you do, Sherlock Holmes? What's a 14 year old boy in Hounslow doing with this diamond? Would you like to know? I mean, well, yeah, obviously not.

Then follow me. From an iconic Conan Doyle novel. You know, that's Mary. It's Mary Morstan. Once you eliminate the impossible... Put your hands on your head! Feast out! OK, OK. ..whatever remains... Sherlock? ..no matter how improbable this must be... Sherlock, no! ..the truth. Sherlock and Co. from Goalhanger. The Sign of Four.

Begins 8th of October. Available wherever you get your podcasts.