Professor Alastair Blanshard says one of the things he loves most about the Ancient Greeks is “they refused to ever agree on anything”.

We can bizarrely – with enough training and food supplements – make ourselves look like a Greek statue and I think the Greeks would have found these efforts rather absurd.

“Someone would always have a better idea, so there’s always these rival views,” he says.

Professor Blanshard is the inaugural holder of the Paul Eliadis Chair of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland and has dedicated his life’s work to the Ancients – more so the Ancient Athenians, the after life, beauty and notions of eroticism, and – as a whole – its impact on Western and contemporary society.

A trip to Greece as a youngster sparked his interest in the classics. He says as a young boy he was in wonderment of the Parthenon, of the sculptures and coming from a country like Australia, to be surrounded by the antiquities of a culture filled him with unbridled bewilderment. Growing up on Greek myths, and stories of the Greeks, played an important role in his early education.
For the past decade or so, Professor Blanshard has been travelling to Greece – ever since he was a graduate student.

“I love keeping in contact with my Greek colleagues and I love Athens as a city,” he says. “For me it’s important to understand what it means to be an Ancient Greek, the distances they travelled; what they can see.” He says by visiting the Hellenic Republic, he can stay abreast of the latest discoveries, of what’s happening in museums and to keep in touch with colleagues in Greece.

He has written three books: “Hercules: A Heroic Life”; “Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity”; and “Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome in Film”.

“It’s their intellectual bravery,” he says about the Ancient Greeks that he admires. “It’s the fact that they refused to cower down to any one tyrant but also this idea that no matter how bad things are we need to examine, to question every side,” he says.

“They are not prone to the kind of hysteria that we see in modern society; it’s this intellectual bravery and freedom and the constant questioning – there is no person or such status that shouldn’t be questioned and there is no idea that has received such consensus that it’s above examination, and I think that’s really important.

Professor Blanshard, who studies the Ancient Athenian’s closely, says they were one of the first cultures that really sat down and tried to articulate what it is that we stand for, what are our values, what’s most important to us, what are the values our society needs.

“For me, it’s the birthplace of Greek philosophy; that self examination both an examination of you as an ethical human being and what your beliefs are, but also what you as a community regard as important.

“And Athens was the first place that dealt with that in a depth that is practically unrivalled and so for them things like a strong commitment to notions of freedom, to personal autonomy to the right of freedom of speech, and the fact that politics should be open to all and that every citizen has within them the capacity to do so. That’s an extremely important Athenian virtue.”

At the moment, the professor is looking into notions of beauty, desire and the body in Ancient Greece, and recently gave a lecture to launch the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria’s Greek History and Culture Seminars with the topic “Explorations of Beauty and Desire in Ancient Greece”.

“When we talk about the Greek legacy we always focus on things like democracy and philosophy and the contribution to mathematics and the sciences, but I think for me, the really important thing is the Greeks also gave us the abdominal six-pack so I’ve been very interested in that and why it was that the Greeks came to elevate the body to such an important position.
“It’s also important for us to know that the Greeks were only too aware that these fabulous bodies they created in sculpture and the arts were fantastic and unattainable, they were something to be admired but they weren’t necessarily something you spent your life training yourself for.”
He adds that the Ancient Greeks wouldn’t understand modern society’s obsession with “steroids and anorexia” as they had a “very healthy relationship with these bodies”.
“[The Ancient Greeks] realised they were gorgeous but they were also unattainable and I think that’s something we need to bear in mind.

“We live in a particularly interesting moment, at the moment for example if you are a young man you can consume protein thanks to protein shakes, and this is historically unparalleled as we have never been able to consume protein in such a concentrated state as we can do so now. We can bizarrely – with enough training and food supplements – make ourselves look like a Greek statue and I think the Greeks would have found these efforts rather absurd.”

Beauty and body – like all things in Ancient Greece – was a contested notion. He said some decided that the secret to a beautiful body was through proportions and that was an extremely influential move to define beauty in proportions of the body. For example, a person height should be ten times the size of their head, or if you stretch out your arms, it should be equal to your height, or that your palm should be the width of your four fingers. Then some would argue that the notion of a beautiful body should be a body that encapsulates notions of the elements like water and fire.

A genre of story that was popular in the time of the Ancient Greeks was telling tales of those people who fell in love with statues. Stories of people breaking into temples to make love to statues, people totally besotted and crazy about statues, gave us two ideas – one that people may go insane with falling in love with statues; with the notion of beauty. But the other always lurking behind the essence of beauty for the Ancient Greeks was a strong notion of eroticism.

“Once you decide the most beautiful object in the whole world can be the body then you are inevitably inviting a certain kind of erotic colouring to the notion of beauty. There’s a lot of erotic association as part of being human, they make their notions of beauty as desirable human form of beauty.

He says that’s the great key to the success of Greek notions of beauty – eroticism. And what makes it interesting to think about is that this culture, from thousands and thousands of years ago, shares the same notion of beauty as we do today.

“In theory, each culture creates its own notion of beauty whether it’s mid-African lip plates or those extended neck rings or the Mayans who flatten foreheads or the Chinese who bound feet, so each culture in theory should develop its own notion of beauty,” he says.

“But the bizarre thing is we and the Ancient Greeks- although separated by thousands of years, with different social and economical cultures and political structures – nevertheless share the same notion of beauty and I am interested in why the Greek notion of beauty has been so successful and I think it’s because it has built into it that strong notion of desire.”

For more information on the GOCMV’s Greek History and Cultura Seminars visit www.greekcommunity.com.au