Naked Warriors

 Naked Warriors

Remember the movie 300?  It was about the ancient Greek king Leonidas of Sparta and his band of 300 men fighting the Persian army in the pass of Thermopylae.  Some critics thought the movie was too gay, because Leonidas and his soldiers wore nothing but little black shorts.  Good thing those critics didn’t see this 1814 painting of Leonidas at Thermopylae by the French painter Jacques-Louis David.

Did the Greeks really fight naked?  Let’s look at art from the time of the actual battle of Thermopylae (480 BC).  On the left is a Spartan hoplite, or foot soldier, from a vase of that period.  The hoplite is wearing a breastplate and greaves, in addition to his helmet and shield, but he’s otherwise naked.  On the right is a Persian seal showing a Persian king killing a Greek hoplite.  The king is clothed; the hoplite is naked save for his helmet, shield and greaves.

Some say that soldiers were portrayed nude because of a Greek artistic convention called the “heroic nude”, but they didn’t really fight nude.  But other Greek art depicts some soldiers clothed and some nude, and the “heroic nude” idea fails to explain the Persian art.  A simpler explanation is that some Greek soldiers actually were nude.

Fast forward to 312 BC.  More Greek soldiers fighting Persians.  This is a detail from the Alexander sarcophagus in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, which is decorated with scenes from the life of Alexander the Great.  The Greek soldier is completely naked except for his helmet and shield.  The Persian soldier is clothed.

Other ancient soldiers fought nude, too.  This Roman sarcophagus from c. 170 AD depicts Romans fighting Celts.  Here the Romans are clothed but the Celts are naked.  Roman historian Polybius describes a battle where a group of Celts called Gaesatae fought completely naked to intimidate their Roman opponents (it didn’t work).

In 1415, at the famous battle of Agincourt, the English longbow archers defeated the French army.  Many of the English archers were naked from the waist down, because they were suffering from dysentery, which made it more practical not to wear pants.  In Shakespeare’s play Henry V, King Henry gives a speech to his troops before the battle of Agincourt.  I think if the actors playing the troops were naked from the waist down, a lot more people would go to see that play.

Since none of the paintings of the battle show the half-naked archers, we offer instead this shot of Ray Liedtke by Russ Warner.

We may deplore Rudyard Kipling’s glorification of British imperialism, but he did know how to tell a good story.  This is an 1896 illustration by Archibald Standish Hartrick for Kipling’s story The Taking of Lungtungpen, in which some British soldiers in Burma strip to swim across a river and, encountering the enemy on the other side, fight and win the battle completely naked.  Fictional but entertaining.

Even in modern times, soldiers sometimes fight naked, though not always by choice.  This classic photo was taken in 1944 by Horace Bristol, a Navy photographer who was assigned to a PBY (seaplane) that was rescuing a pilot who had been shot down off Rabaul in the South Pacific.  In the photographer’s words:

“…The Japanese were shooting at him from the island, and when they saw us they started shooting at us. The man who was shot down was temporarily blinded, so one of our crew stripped off his clothes and jumped in to bring him aboard. He couldn’t have swum very well wearing his boots and clothes. As soon as we could, we took off. We weren’t waiting around for anybody to put on formal clothes. We were being shot at and wanted to get the hell out of there. The naked man got back into his position at his gun in the blister of the plane.”