No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Extract
When we first began to read Homer we learnt with surprise that Zeus nodded with his eyebrows, and the expressiveness of the ancient eyebrow has been noted and, as I think, exaggerated by modern scholars. Ancient noses have, so far as I am aware, received less attention. The modern Englishman turns up his nose in contempt or disgust, and he produces with it the sniff and snort which denote similar emotions; otherwise it plays a somewhat passive part in our lives. We follow or are led by it; fail to see what is underneath it; poke it into things and pay through it; have it pulled, or bitten off; cut it off to spite our faces, or keep it to the grindstone; and we put our fingers to it—one, if we are sententious, to enjoin attention, more, if we have not been nicely brought up, in derisive contempt; but by itself it reacts little to our moods. The ancient nose was more responsive. Ironists wore the Attic or Socratic nose. Contempt, in Greek more specifically associated with the nostrils (μυκτηρισμός), derision, and disgust, were naturally at home there, but so were anger, distress, and terror. Mustard mounts to the nose of an angry Frenchman and Italian, and an Englishman, though he does not think of his nose in that connexion, may be conscious of a slight dilation of the nostril when he loses his temper, and according to Darwin the same effect may be produced by terror, but the evidence suggests that violent emotions produced in ancient noses sensations stronger than in ours and sometimes foreign to them.
Information
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1951
References
1 Cf. C.R. 58.38.
2 As Dante Inf. 25.44 acciocché il duca stesse attento, /mi pasi il dito su dal mento al naso, but this gesture is more familiar in modern Italy than in modern England.
3 A.P. 9.188, Luc. Prom. Es 1, Sen. Suas. 1.6.
4 This subject is dealt with at some length in Sittl, C.Gebärde d. Griechen u. Römer 14, 86 ff.Google Scholar I do not understand why Piiny should say (N.H. 11.158) quem noui mores subdolae inrisioni dicauere, nasus.
5 See Headlam on Hdas 6.37. In view of the ample evidence both Greek and Roman the absence of any mention of the nose in Seneca's elaborate description of the physical effects of anger (Dial. 3.1.4) is somewhat surprising. Leonardo in his recipes for the representation of emotions mentions dilated nostrils as a sign of pain but not of anger (Notebooks, ed. E. MacCurdy, 2.266, 270).
6 Od. 24.318 (Odysseus affected by Laertes's distress) 
A scholiast explains 
but the lover maltreated by Eros, who says at Anacreont. 29.7 
seems nearer death than tears.
7 Petron. 62.5. mihi anima in naso esse; stabam tanquam mortuus.
8 Cf. [Arist.] Physiogn. 1.66.14 
I cite this and other Physiognomic treatises by volume, page, and line in R. Foerster Scriptores Physiognomonici, and refer to that collection hereafter as S.P. The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise is held to be a combination of two Peripatetic works and to date perhaps from the 3rd cent. B.C. (Foerster, S.P. 1. xviiiGoogle Scholar, Ross, Aristotle 12Google Scholar, Ueberweg-Praechter, Gesch. d. Philosophie 12 1. 369Google Scholar). If so, it is by several centuries the earliest of the Physiognomonica.
9 Expression of the Emotions, 1904, p. 309.
10 See on this subject Oldfather, W. A. in Class. Stud. presented to E. Capps, 268.Google Scholar
11 2 Henry IV iv. 3.
12 See Bernoulli, Röm. Ikon. 1.Google Scholar Munzt. 3. Caesar is nowhere credited with a hooky nose in antiquity, but I do not know what passed for his likeness in Elizabethan times. For aquiline noses in Italy see Marx on Lucil. 942.
13 Adamantius, , S.P. 1.386.5Google Scholar
14 Notebooks, ed. MacCurdy, , 2.258.Google Scholar Leonardo's interest in this subject is made only too plain in his drawings: see Popham, Drawings of L. da V. pll. 133 ff.Google Scholar
15 Plat. Rep. 5.474 D; cf. Arist. Pol. 1309 b 23.
16 Hdas 4.67 
(v.l. or correction άνάσιλλος).
17 See, e.g., Ar. Eccl. 617, 705, 940, Plat. Theaet. 143 E, Theocr. 3.8, 11.33.
18 Xen. Symp. 5.6.
19 Cic. de fato 10 stupidum esse Socraten dixit et bardum quod iugula concaua non haberet: obstructas eas partes et obturalas esse dicebat; addidit etiam mulierosum, Schol. Pers. 4.24 cum ad Socratem ueniret ait ei ‘libidinosus es’: cf. Cic. Tusc. 4.80, Alex. Aphr. de Fato 6. Zopyrus's judgment of Socrates's collarbones would have been endorsed by later physiognomers: [Arist.] Physiogn. 1.62.12 
S.P. 1.364.31 412.5.
20 S.P. 1.66.13, 376.5, 429.6; 2.153.2, 203.17. Lavater, (Physiognomy, London 1866, p. 59)Google Scholar thought an open nostril a token of ‘sensibility which may easily degenerate into sensuality’.
21 Porph. Vit. Pyth. 13, Gell. 1.9.2; Gal. 4.798.
22 Gal. 19.530.
23 Epid. 2.5.1, 6.1 (5.128, 132 Littré).
24 S.P. 1.64.19.
25 ib. 66.2; cf. 2.152.24.
26 ib. 1.429.1.
27 ib. 2.227.16 
28 ib. 2.204.3 si nasus latus est, in medio ad simitatem inclinans, gloriosus et mendax est.
29 ib. 1.66.9, 376.4; 2.71.4.
30 ib. 2.227.18. Since snub noses were condemned and aquiline regarded with comparative favour, it may be asked why Σιμ- is a common, and Γρυπ- a very rare, element in proper names. Greek names however were bestowed in the cradle, and nearly all babies are snub-nosed, a fact for which a serious reason was given in antiquity (Arist. Prob. 963 b 15) and a facetious by Rabelais (1.40), from whom Sterne, (Tristram Shandy 3.38)Google Scholar borrowed it without acknow ledgment. Roman cognomina such as Nasica and Naso, like Γρυπός, the by-name of Antiochus VIII, were acquired by adults, but to the genuine names Γρυπός and Γρυπίων may be added 
and Ῥύνχων (Bechtel Hist. Personennamen 480).
31 Plaut. Capt. 647 macilento ore, naso acuto, corpore albooculis nigris, / subrufus aliquantum, crispas, cincinnatus. Philo, crates might therefore be thought to have worn the mask of the 
of Poll. 4.146. The latter however was 
In a very different connexion 
had been enumerated among the symptoms of mortal illness by Hippocrates (Prog. 2: 2.114 Littré), and so also Lucr. 6. 1193, Cels. 2.6—I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, as the hostess says of the dying Falstaff in Henry V. Galen (1.178, 18 B. 28) emphasises the point that unnatural sharpness alone is relevant in this connexion.
32 4.133 ff.
33 Two were sometimes represented in a mask, one on each side of the face: see Quint. 11.3.74, Bieber, Hist, of the Gk and Rom. Theater 182.Google Scholar
34 Cf. Dieterich, Pulcinella 34Google Scholar: Die verschiedenen Hauptformen der Nase sind für die Gestaltung der komischen Maske fast die Hauptsache.
35 On the characteristics of the ἄγροκος see Ribbeck, in Abh. Sächs. Ges. 10.1Google Scholar The conventional boor is likely to have been, like the bluff countryman in Eur. Or. 918, 
and a snub nose would contribute (n. 17 above). Cf. Theocr. 3.8, 20.6; also Chaucer's miller of Trumpington, (Reve's Tale 14)Google Scholar: Round was his face, and camuse was his nose.
36 Many reproductions of masks and actors will be found in M. Bieber Denkmäler zum Theaterwesen and History of the Gk and Rom. Theater, but attempts (the most recent by Webster, T. B. L. in Rylands Libr. Bull. 32.97Google Scholar) to identify those described by Pollux and to assign them to characters in extant comedies do not seem very conclusive. In view of the distinction drawn in pseudo-Aristotle above, I remark that in most of the male masks nose and forehead are separated by a marked depression, which is usually em phasised in the old men by the contraction of their brows in a frown or scowl.
The chorus in the Clouds, according to the scholiast (on 344), wore masks with big noses. Cyrano de Bergerac (not an unprejudiced witness) claimed that un grand nez est proprement l'indice/D'un homme affable, bon, courtois, spirituel, /Libéral, courageux; but those of the Clouds were no doubt intended, as the scholiast says, to be merely 
as long noses plainly are at Luc. Merc. Cond. 35, Cat. 43.1, and in many grotesque figurines.
37 Xen. Mem. 3.10. On Polygnotus as ἠθογράφος see Arist. Pol. 1340 a 37, Poet. 1448 a 5, 1450 a 27.
38 A.P. 5–178. APul. Met. 7.9.2.
39 Theocr. Ep. 11, an epitaph for the physiognomer Eusthenes, whether by Theocritus or not, seems Hellenistic and evidence for the continued existence of professional physiognomers.
40 1.638.
41 4.781, 786.