Herodotus' History is the original history by the first historian in our American-European, Judaeo-Christian culture. It has some interesting tidbits. The English Patient, one of the best movies of all time, features a character who carries a dog-eared, leather-bound copy of Herodotus with him everywhere he goes. That character uses it as a scrapbook, a place for small keepsakes and notes. I thought I'd read some of it; more of it than I ever read in college as an undergraduate majoring in Classics (Greek and Latin languages, history and culture, such as mythology, poetry, drama, and epic), since reading Herodotus in undergraduate Greek, even for a Classics major, is dry and slow going.
Herodotus makes a blunt statement about nakedness and people's attitudes toward it: "For among the Lydians, and indeed among the barbarians generally, it is reckoned a deep disgrace, even to a man, to be seen naked."
Barbarians, he says. Anyone who didn't speak Greek was a barbarian. A barbarian was any kind of foreigner. As the word has descended to us in English, barbarian means something more like Conan the Barbarian, if not literally him (hopefully you read the comic book or at least saw the movie(s) with Arnold) and it retains the notion of foreigness [Note: look how typically English is the irregular spelling of "foreign," with the silent "g" and the redundant "i" (or "e", depending how "foreign" sounds to you)).
Barbarians consider it a deep disgrace to be naked, he says. He says this in an offhand comment while telling an anecdote. The implication is that I, Herodotus, think it's OK to be naked. We, the Greeks, think its OK, right, guys? Who's reading this history, anyway? Greek boys exercised and played in a gymansium, which basically means "place to exercise naked," kinda like "the gym" to an American, but with less clothing and no women. Greek fine art featured the human body in what we now call "classical form," i.e., the form you've seen in Greek statues or, perhaps more likely these days as Classical studies are marginalized by popular education, pictures of statues by Michelangelo, which look Greek in style because, of course, the entire Renaissance in which Michelangelo worked and lived was a "re-birth" (RE + NAISSANCE, as in the English word, "nascence") of classical ideas and attitude (at least as projected by post-Medieval Italians).
The Bible, on the other hand, has Adam and Eve discovering their "nakedness" and being, apparently, intuitively ashamed at it after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in Eden (which miraculously expands their consciousnesses, opening their minds to the principle of Taoist philosophy symbolized in the Yin and Yang icon).
Herodotus is cool because he shows that it's perfectly human, apparently not instinctively or intuitively "wrong," to be naked. A different take than you might get on the news or street today, with Janet Jackson's breast supposedly popping out (how many people actually saw a breast? I didn't bother to download it, and only saw blurred repeats of it on TV news at the time) and half of America in an uproar about how it might corrupt our chlidren or unleash demons.
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