In Ancient Greek and Latin, the word for “tattoo” was stigma.
Like its English equivalent, stigma had connotations of infamy and disgrace, a reflection of the
classical association of tattoos with slaves, criminals, and barbarians.
The tattooed barbarians best known to the Greeks were the Thracians, who lived north
and east of Macedon.
Thracian women – especially those of aristocratic birth – tattooed their arms and legs with
silhouettes of animals and patterned lines.
Mystified by this practice, Greek authors speculated that it commemorated the death
of the mythical bard Orpheus, who had been torn to pieces by Thracian maenads.
In the vast arc of steppes beyond the Thracians roamed the Scythians, another tattooed people.
The bodies of their chieftains, found frozen in the Siberian permafrost, display a dazzling
array of designs, from rearing stallions to fantastic beasts.
On the opposite site of the world known to the Greeks, the mummies of Egyptian women
from the Middle Kingdom period exhibit patterns of tattooed dots and lines.
Millennia later, Roman authors remarked on the Egyptian custom of tattooing children.
In Syria, worshippers tattooed their wrists with marks of devotion to the gods – a custom
so widespread that the author of Leviticus saw fit to forbid the Israelites from tattooing
themselves.
The Persians, by contrast, used tattoos as a punishment.
During his conquest of the Persian Empire, Alexander encountered an entire settlement
of Greeks who had been mutilated and tattooed on the orders of the king of kings.
A century and a half before, during the Persian invasion of Greece, Xerxes had a contingent
of his Theban allies tattooed.
Earlier, if Herodotus can be believed, he had ordered the sea itself to be whipped and
tattooed after a storm destroyed his bridge over the Hellespont.
Much though they despised such tyranny, the Greeks came to imitate the Persian custom
of penal tattooing, as we’ll see after a brief word about this video’s sponsor.
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Back to tattoos.
Before they encountered the Persians, the Greeks do not seem to have practiced tattooing.
But by the beginning of the Classical period, they had begun to tattoo fugitive slaves,
most often on the face or neck, with phrases like “stop me – I’m a runaway.”
Such tattoos became familiar enough to be referenced both in a ribald Hellenistic poem
– in which a woman summons a tattooist to punish her slave lover – and in the book
of Revelation, which describes the tattooed forehead of the Whore of Babylon.
The Greeks also tattooed prisoners of war, typically with the emblems of their captors:
Athenian soldiers seized in the wake of the disastrous Sicilian expedition, for example,
were tattooed with the horse of Syracuse.
Such tattoos were a mark of subordination: after defeating the Rhodians, Queen Artemisia
of Halicarnassus reportedly set up a statue of herself tattooing a personified city of
Rhodes.
Like the Greeks, the Romans tattooed slaves; one of Caligula’s many crimes was the tattooing
of freeborn men.
As in the Greek world, facial tattoos were most common.
When the main characters of Petronius’ Satyricon – a Roman novel – decide to disguise themselves
as slaves, they shave their eyebrows and draw fake tattoos on their foreheads with ink.
Constantine decreed that, since the human visage was made in the divine image, it should
not be defaced with tattoos.
This edict, however, seems to have been honored in the breach.
Even a half-millennium after Constantine, the Byzantine emperor Theophilus ordered 12
lines of (very bad) poetry to be tattooed on the faces of two monks who had defied his
prohibition on icons.
By the reign of Constantine, the Romans were also tattooing soldiers.
A late antique military manual mentions marking recruits with the insignia of their units,
and an imperial decree of the same era stipulates that all workers in arms factories be tattooed
to prevent desertion.
The practice continued for some time: a medical treatise from the following century defines
tattoos as marks like those placed on the hands of soldiers.
Former soldiers and freed slaves seem to have done everything they could to erase their
tattoos.
Medical texts outlined various methods, which usually involved pricking the skin and rubbing
the affected area with caustic substances.
Alternatively, tattoos could be covered with bandages or concealed by long hair.
There were a few Greeks and Romans, however, who were not ashamed of their tattoos.
The semi-mythical sage Epimenides reportedly had himself tattooed with lines from his own
poems.
Ptolemy IV, king of Egypt, was tattooed with ivy leaves as a mark of devotion to Dionysus.
And many early Christians, perhaps inspired by the penal tattoos of the martyrs, had their
arms tattooed with a sign of the cross or the name of Jesus.
A more expansive devotional tattoo, which praised Mani as a disciple of Christ, revealed
an African monk to be a heretic.
A tattoo might even betoken a miracle: when a tumor in Saint Macrina’s breast was suddenly
healed, a tattoo-like mark appeared on the spot.
Near the end of the sixth century, the emperor Maurice received a group of Turkish prisoners
at Constantinople, and was surprised to see that many had crosses tattooed on their foreheads.
When asked how they had acquired these marks, the Turks replied that a Christian had once
advised their tribe that the sign of the cross protected against the plague.
In this episode, with the cultural heirs of the classical Greeks admiring the tattoos
of a tribe that had replaced the Scythians, one feels that the ancient history of tattoos
had come full circle.
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Thanks for watching.