The meaning of hair - Essay on ancient capillology

Description

The concern to highlight the ways in which hair is related to different aspects of Greek thought and life is at the heart of this book; at least, with the costume and other elements of appearance, and then with attitudes, posture, gestures to compose what the Greeks called the skhêma, (a notion that can be roughly translated today as "look"). It is because hair touches everything, from the material aspects to the ideological aspects; it is concerned and involves several disciplines: physiology, medicine, physiognomy, philosophy, politics, sociology, ethnology, religion, aesthetics and eroticism.
It is first of all a book against a too idealized Greek history, where all the soldiers are brave, where one does not expose a newborn child, where, apart from the marvelous hair of the goddesses and the heroes, the hairs are invisible, untraceable. It follows a book for a history without veils of the pilosity; more widely, to deepen the knowledge of this companion of the human one of which the ancient history took hold very late: the body.
However, this book does not pretend to go around the Greek hair, it is content to shed light on it from four angles which constitute as many chapters.