Think of the Greek or Roman body, and what might come to mind is the chilly perfection of a marble sculpture. The Apollo Belvedere, for example: a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, rediscovered in the Renaissance, installed in the Vatican by Julius II, regarded as “the miracle of art” by 18th-century German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
In Exposed, Cambridge classicist Caroline Vout takes a very different approach. The bodies she considers are fallible and fleshy; they are sticky, malodorous and unpredictable. Some are disabled. Some are enslaved, abused or exploited. (There is a particularly sobering passage on the law code of Gortyn in Crete which, in the fifth century BC, recorded that if a free man raped a free woman he was fined 1,200 obols. For the rape of an enslaved woman the fine was 1 obol – or 24 if she was a virgin.)
