In Praise of Baldness

Contents

Reading pages: 175–207 · 208–238

1. 175Synesius explains that Dio Chrysostom's Encomium of Hair would shame any bald man, for nature makes us all want to be beautiful.
2. 176Synesius tells how his hair fell out like an army ravaging a countryside, leaving him bald in front; he blamed the gods.
3. 177In his grief Synesius questioned providence: he was chaste, yet even mothers and sisters favour handsome men.
4. 178Synesius had come to terms with baldness until Dio's speech renewed his grief, like the crab that joined the Hydra against Heracles.
5. 179Synesius addresses a bald friend who is proud of his baldness and offers to recite Dio's speech from memory.
6. 180Synesius quotes the opening of Dio's speech: combing his neglected, matted hair, Dio was moved to praise those who love long hair.
7. 181Dio's speech continues: lovers of long hair comb it constantly and sleep on wooden headrests to keep it clean.
8. 182Dio notes that Homer praises his heroes for their hair: Achilles, Menelaus, Hector.
9. 183Dio concludes that Homer honours hair in men, and in Zeus above all, more than in women; Synesius now prepares his reply.
10. 184Synesius judges Dio clever but empty, and resolves to answer him by praising baldness, the finer subject.
11. 185Synesius will reply plainly, without Dio's rhetorical preludes, for he is a farmer and huntsman, not a rhetor.
12. 186As a countryman, Synesius will argue his case with plain facts, not polished speeches.
13. 187Synesius begins his argument: hair is dead matter; beasts are covered with it, while man, who has a higher life, keeps it only in a few places.
14. 188Hair is at war with intelligence: man is the most hairless and wisest animal, the sheep the woolliest and stupidest; Plato's bad horse is shaggy-eared and deaf.
15. 189The noblest parts of the body, the senses, are hairless; so the bald man, as man is the noblest animal, is the most divine thing on earth.
16. 190The wise have been bald; Apollonius, a wonder-worker rather than a sage, is no exception that counts; Dionysus's followers are shaggy.
17. 191Amid the shaggy Bacchants, bald Silenus alone stays sober and is Dionysus's tutor, honoured by Zeus.
18. 192Silenus restrains the young Dionysus's madness; wits and hair never dwell together, as Socrates knew.
19. 193Socrates prided himself on looking like Silenus; hair flourishes in thoughtless boyhood and departs as wisdom arrives with age.
20. 194Mind and hair displace each other; Synesius begins a Neoplatonic explanation: matter, the lowest and most manifold being, entwines itself about divine seeds.
21. 195As grain sheds stalk and husk when the fruit ripens, so the head, the fruit in which mind dwells, sheds its hair.
22. 196A bald head, its husk of hair winnowed away, is a ripe fruit and a temple of God where mind dwells.
23. 197Baldness is an initiation; Egyptian priests shave even their eyelashes, and the naturally bald man is akin to God.
24. 198The visible divine bodies are bald spheres, and the world-soul received the sphere, the most perfect shape, from its maker.
25. 199Individual souls imitate the world-soul by dwelling in heads, little spheres; a wise soul chooses a bald, perfectly spherical head.
26. 200The bald head, like the sphere of heaven, is a little world; Homer and Phidias gave Zeus long hair, but the visible god in heaven is a sphere.
27. 201Poets and sculptors please popular opinion, which prizes externals like hair; telling the truth about the gods would have cost Homer dearly.
28. 202Egyptian priests show the people animal-headed images but keep the true images of the gods, spheres, hidden in sacred caskets.
29. 203The Egyptians show Asclepius bald, the Greeks long-haired; truer images of the gods come from Egypt, whose priests even converse with them.
30. 204Comets, "long-haired stars," are not true stars but short-lived flares below the moon; true stars are perfect spheres.
31. 205Comets portend disaster and perish; true stars never perish and are spheres, so the bald are the most godlike of men.
32. 206The bald are called "little moons"; the fully bald are suns; Homer's suitors mocked the bald Odysseus, who would kill them all.
33. 207Light, which bald heads give off, is akin to the gods; hair belongs with shade and darkness, as Archilochus's line on hair as a shade shows.
34. 208Shade is darkness, as night and thick forests show; baldness belongs to the bright gods, and it is also healthy.
35. 209Physicians remove hair to cure diseases of the head and body, since the head governs the body's health; the bald are healthier.
36. 210A bare skull, hardened by sun and weather, resists disease, as Homer's mountain-grown, wind-nourished spears are the strongest.
37. 211The bare head is like hardy mountain timber, the hairy one like soft marsh wood; the battlefield of Cambyses and the Egyptians offers proof.
38. 212Herodotus found the Persian skulls thin from wearing caps and the Egyptian ones hard from going bareheaded in the sun.
39. 213Synesius's servants are a test of skulls; a bald showman in the theatre takes blows, boiling pitch and smashed jars on his head.
40. 214Synesius could match the showman's feats, but his baldness is chiefly a safeguard: if he ever fell into poverty, it would earn him a living.
41. 215Hair weakens its wearer and so does not suit men; law and nature both show that long hair is not a mark of manhood.
42. 216Custom about men's hair varies, but women always cherish their hair and are never naturally bald; baldness belongs to men.
43. 217Baldness is nature's goal for men, to be helped by the razor; the Spartans combed their hair before Thermopylae, and all died.
44. 218Hair even grows on corpses; Dio cites the doomed Spartans but forgets Alexander's men, who shaved before winning at Arbela.
45. 219Ptolemy's story: a Persian seized a long-haired Macedonian by the hair and killed him, and soon the Persians were routing every long-haired soldier.
46. 220Alexander had his army shaved and won; hair makes no one fearsome, as the soldiers' helmets show.
47. 221The terrifying helmet is a bronze bald head; Homer's Achilles says the Trojans fear the gleam of his helmet, not his hair.
48. 222Achilles' long hair, like his anger, belonged to his youth; had he lived he would have become bald and a philosopher, as Socrates mellowed with age.
49. 223Socrates grew bald and gentle; Achilles' bald forefathers and divine kin show he too would have gone bald, so Dio's quotation proves nothing.
50. 224Dio cut the line short: Athena seized Achilles from behind, which proves he was already bald in front.
51. 225Dio found nothing good to say of hair; he clings to Homer, cutting some lines short and citing others that Homer never wrote.
52. 226Hector, whose statue at Ilium shows him close-cropped, rebuked Paris for his cultivated hair, so Dio's claim about Hector's hair is false.
53. 227Synesius denies that Homer gave Hector long hair: Hector himself mocked Paris as a dandy.
54. 228Homer's epithets for Menelaus describe rather than praise; Dio ignored Homer's many fair-haired goddesses.
55. 229Homer praises Hera's hair at length, which Dio passed over; but Synesius will not concede that any heavenly being is long-haired.
56. 230Without Homer and the Spartans Dio's speech has nothing left; Synesius's speech has shown baldness divine, natural and good.
57. 231Hair belongs with the irrational; long-haired men are adulterers, like Homer's Paris, who steal a wife's affection, worse than a captor in war.
58. 232Adultery, the vice of the long-haired, ruins houses and cities and caused the Trojan War; worse still are those who sell themselves.
59. 233The effeminate are all hair-dressers; elaborate curls betray a secret vice, as the skin betrayed Pherecydes' disease.
60. 234Synesius cites an ancient proverb, "no long-haired man who is not …", leaving the obscene ending for the reader to supply.
61. 235The proverb is an oracle of truth confirmed by long use; Dio's speech proves rhetoric a cosmetic art, as Plato said.
62. 236Dio's praise will encourage the dissolute; baldness instead supplies priests, teachers, generals and the wise.
63. 237Painters portray the vicious with long hair and the wise as bald; Synesius dedicates his speech to philosophers and priests.
64. 238Synesius ends: any credit belongs to his subject, any failure to his own plain speech; may the speech benefit many.