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Klearchos
01-31-2008, 19:02
Hail

Pehaps many will find this info unnecessary but I think the ancient greeks skin color was darker than presented in EB.
The soldiers, the sailors and generaly the men of action, were under the mediterrenean sun all day so all of them had kinda bronzed skin... Being pale was actually a bit effeminate!!
The first one who used the word "white" to describe someone was Herodotos, and he used it to describe the Persians in the battle of Thermopylai!!!
Do you consider to change that in EB 2?

(I know , I know, I'm a detail freak!:wall: )

Cheers!

Long lost Caesar
01-31-2008, 21:10
the PERSIANS were white? :dizzy2:
as for your idea i agree, i think the greeks could do with a bit of tanning. after all, they DO have some of the best beaches :laugh4:

Turnus
01-31-2008, 21:19
Remember also that the Persians wore a greater amount of clothing to protect them from the sun than did the Greeks, and that they did not appear naked or semi-naked in public. I indeed recall a passage in Xenophon's Hellenica (do not have it with me) in which a Greek commander, on capturing a town in Asia Minor, shows to his troops the locals of the area without their garments, revealing their pale complexion and thus demonstrating to the Greek soldiers that the eastern barbarians do not engage in athletic exercises and are therefore inferior to the Greeks in military prowess.

Watchman
01-31-2008, 21:29
the PERSIANS were white? :dizzy2: Well - they were of northern steppe ancestry or thereabouts. Fairly light-skinned by all accounts, and as Turnus says tended to go more thoroughly clothed (largely for climate-related reasons I'd imagine; I understand the Near Eastern uplands can be very cold in winter, and conversely in the warmer seasons you'll want to avoid sunburn).

Klearchos
01-31-2008, 21:47
And I also remember reading somewhere that the Athenian troops in Sicily, during the Syracusan Campaign, lost morale when they replaced their commander with on with pale skin.:wall:

Copperknickers
02-02-2008, 11:12
I wouldn't trust the Greeks on colour descriptions, they thought the sky was bronze, which even without having a colour for blue is a long way off by our account.

antisocialmunky
02-02-2008, 19:31
But copper corrodes blue green doesn't it?

Strategos Alexandros
02-03-2008, 13:25
I wouldn't trust the Greeks on colour descriptions, they thought the sky was bronze, which even without having a colour for blue is a long way off by our account.

I've read somewhere that their colours were more in terms of brightness than colour, for example a broze sky would mean bright blue.

Abokasee
02-03-2008, 14:20
I've read somewhere that their colours were more in terms of brightness than colour, for example a bronze sky would mean bright blue.

Maybe it orginally sayed: Bronzed sky, as in when you get a redish sort of sky, but over time, the 'd' went missing


As for the colours of the greeks, it should be small variety, but definatly white-ish body armour,