Ancient Greece Most people in ancient Greece had dark hair and, as a result of this, the Greeks found blond hair immensely fascinating. In the
Homeric epics,
Menelaus the king of the Spartans is, together with some other Achaean leaders, portrayed as blond. Other light-haired characters in the Homeric poems are
Peleus,
Achilles,
Meleager,
Agamede, and
Rhadamanthys. while also noting the light hair of athletes at the
Nemean Games. Greek prostitutes frequently dyed their hair blond using
saffron dyes or colored powders. Blond dye was highly expensive, took great effort to apply, and smelled repugnant, but none of these factors inhibited Greek prostitutes from dying their hair. As a result of this and the natural rarity of blond hair in the Mediterranean region, by the fourth century BC, blond hair was inextricably associated with prostitutes. The comic playwright
Menander ( 342/41– 290 BC) protests that "no chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow". At another point, he deplores blond hair dye as dangerous: "What can we women do wise or brilliant, who sit with hair dyed yellow, outraging the character of gentlewomen, causing the overthrow of houses, the ruin of nuptials, and accusations on the part of children?" Greek authors associated light hair with northern peoples. The historian
Diodorus Siculus wrote that the
Gauls were tall, generally heavily built, very light-skinned, light-haired (
xanthoí), and not only naturally so, while also noting that "their children are usually born with grayish (
polia) hair, but as they grow older the colour of their hair changes to that of their parents".
Strabo observed that the Gauls were more light-haired (
xanthotriches) than the
Britons, while the
Germans were wilder, taller, and had lighter (
xanthotetos) hair than the Gauls.
Galen reported that peoples from cold, wet places, such as the
Illyrians, Germans,
Dalmatians,
Sarmatians, and
Scythians, had "reddish-fair" (
purrhas) hair, in contrast to those from hot or well-balanced lands, who had "dark" (
melaina) hair.
Adamantius, in his work based on the Greek physiognomist
Polemon, wrote that the Scythians and Celts could have "excessively light" (
agan xanthe) and "whitish" (
hupoleukos) hair.
Roman Empire During the early years of the
Roman Empire, blond hair was associated with
prostitutes. The preference changed to bleaching the hair blond when Greek culture, which practiced bleaching, reached Rome, and was reinforced when the legions that
conquered Gaul returned with blond slaves. Sherrow also states that Roman women tried to lighten their hair, but the substances often caused hair loss, so they resorted to
wigs made from the captives' hair. According to
Francis Owen,
Roman literary records describe several well-known Roman historical personalities as light-haired.
Juvenal wrote in a satirical poem that
Messalina, Roman empress of noble birth, would hide her
black hair with a blond wig for her nightly visits to the brothel:
sed nigrum flavo crinem abscondente galero intravit calidum veteri centone lupanar.
Roman historian Suetonius wrote that
Augustus (r. 27 BC – 14 AD), the first
emperor of Rome, had curly hair that was inclined towards golden (), which historian
Adrian Goldsworthy interprets as being either "slightly blond" or "brown rather than black". Suetonius also noted that
Nero's hair was
subflavum, and recorded a tradition that an ancestor of the
Domitii had his black hair and beard miraculously transformed to a
bronze-like color by the
Dioscuri, a trait reportedly seen in his descendants. In his Commentary on the
Aeneid of
Virgil,
Maurus Servius Honoratus noted that the respectable matron was only black haired, never blonde. In the same passage, he mentioned that
Cato the Elder wrote that some matrons would sprinkle golden dust on their hair to make it reddish-color. Emperor
Lucius Verus (r. 161–169 AD) was said to sprinkle gold-dust on his already light (
flaventium) hair to make it blonder and brighter. While
Sulla considered that "his golden (
khrusopon) head of hair gave him a singular appearance." The poet
Ovid mentions blond hair alongside various features of women that attract his desire: From an ethnic point of view, Roman authors associated blond and
red hair with the
Gauls and the
Germans: e.g., the poet
Virgil describes the hair of the Gauls as "golden" (
aurea caesaries),
Tacitus wrote that "the Germans have fierce blue eyes, red-blond hair (
rutilae comae), huge (tall) frames"; in accordance with
Ammianus, almost all the Gauls were "of tall stature, fair and ruddy".
Juvenal contrasted Roman and Germanic appearances, asking: "Who is astounded at the blue eyes of the
German, at his yellow hair, at his twisting its tufts into a moistened curl? Because, to be sure, this natural appearance is common to all of them."
Celtic and Germanic peoples of
the provinces, among the free subjects called
peregrini, served in Rome's armies as , such as the cavalry contingents in the army of
Julius Caesar. Some became Roman citizens as far back as the 1st century BC, following a policy of
Romanization of
Gaul and
Lesser Germania. Sometimes entire Celtic and Germanic tribes were granted citizenship, such as when emperor
Otho granted citizenship to all of the
Lingones in 69 AD. By the 1st century BC, the
Roman Republic had expanded its control into parts of western Germany, and by 85 AD the provinces of
Germania Inferior and
Germania Superior were formally established there. Yet as late as the 4th century AD,
Ausonius, a poet and tutor from
Burdigala, wrote a poem about an
Alemanni slave girl named
Bissula, whom he had recently freed after she'd been taken as a prisoner of war in the campaigns of
Valentinian I, noting that her adopted
Latin language marked her as a woman of
Latium yet her blond-haired,
blue-eyed appearance ultimately signified her true origins from the
Rhine. Further south, the
Iberian Peninsula was originally inhabited by
Celtiberians outside of Roman control. The gradual Roman conquest of Iberia was completed by the early 1st century AD. The
Goths, a Germanic tribe who played a central role in the
Fall of the Western Roman Empire through their conquest, were always described in ancient sources as tall and athletic, with light skin, yellow (blond) hair and blue eyes, The contemporary Greek scholar and historian
Procopius noted of the Goths: "they all have white bodies and fair hair, and are tall and handsome to look upon."
Medieval Europe '' ( 1480–1487), altarpiece in
International Gothic style by
Carlo Crivelli showing her with long, blonde hair Medieval Scandinavian art and literature often places emphasis on the length and color of a woman's hair, considering long, blond hair to be the ideal, as it was associated with
gold. In
Norse mythology, the goddess
Sif has famously blond hair. In the
Old Norse Gunnlaug Saga,
Helga the Beautiful, described as "the most beautiful woman in the world", is said to have had blond hair so long that it can "envelope her entirely". In the
Poetic Edda poem
Rígsþula, the blond man
Jarl is considered to be the ancestor of the dominant warrior class. The Scandinavians were not the only ones to place strong emphasis on the beauty of blond hair; the French writer
Christine de Pisan writes in her book
The Treasure of the City of Ladies (1404) that "there is nothing in the world lovelier on a woman's head than beautiful blond hair". In medieval artwork, female saints are often shown with long, shimmering blond hair, which emphasizes their holiness and virginity. At the same time, however,
Eve is sometimes shown with long, blond hair, which frames her nude body and draws attention to her sexual attractiveness.
Iseult was so closely associated with blondness that, in the poems of
Chrétien de Troyes, she is called "Iseult le Blonde". In
Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales, the knight describes the Princess Emily as blond in
his tale. In the older versions of the story of
Tristan and Iseult,
Tristan falls in love with
Iseult after seeing only a single lock of her long, blond hair. In fact, Iseult was so closely associated with blondness that, in the poems of
Chrétien de Troyes, she is called "Iseult le Blonde". In
Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales (written from 1387 until 1400), the knight describes the beautiful Princess Emily in
his tale, stating, "yclothed was she fressh, for to devyse:/Hir yellow heer was broided in a tresse/Behinde hir bak, a yerde long, I gesse" (lines 1048–1050). Because of blond hair's relative commonness in northern Europe, folk tales from these regions tend to feature large numbers of blond protagonists, although these stories may not have been seen by their original tellers as idealizing blond hair. Furthermore, it is noted that there is also a black-haired ideal of female beauty in northern Europe, as shown in plays like
Snow White and other forms of entertainment portraying black-haired
heroines. Similarly, Nordic
Skalds often glorified dark-haired women. During
the medieval period, Spanish ladies preferred to dye their hair black, yet by the time of the
Renaissance in the 16th century the fashion (imported from Italy) was to dye their hair blond or red.
Early twentieth-century often featured people with blond hair and blue eyes and other "Teutonic" traits, said to embody features of a "
master race". In 'Mark Twain and the American West', American novel writer
Willa Cather's depiction of Alexander the Great in '
Alexander's Bridge' was described as "embodying the ideal", a "large, strong man with broad shoulders and rugged, blond good looks". In
Nazi Germany, blond, stern-jawed men were seen as the masculine ideal as depicted in the films of
Leni Riefenstahl and other propaganda. Writer R. Horrocks noted that totalitarianism reached a ludicrous extreme in Nazi society, where "men were virile blond warriors, women were breeders, and gay men were killed in the death camps". The fact that many Nazi leaders, including
Adolf Hitler, did not possess these traits was noted with irony by the
Allies of World War II. The most famous joke on the subject asked:
What is the ideal German? Blond like Hitler, slim like Göring, masculine like Goebbels. . . . Senior curator at the
Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology Jon Røyne Kyllingstad has written that in the early twentieth-century
racialist and
supremacist thinkers promulgated the theory that human features such as blond hair and blue eyes were hallmarks of a "
master race". In the 1920s, the
eugenicist Eugen Fischer invented a hair palette called the
Fischer scale that he said could categorize racial typology—these typologies were abandoned after
World War II. Kyllingstad sees classification of race based on physical characteristics such as hair color as a "flawed, pseudo-scientific relic of the past". ==Modern cultural stereotypes==