ordained that at solemn feasts and sacrifices the young women should dance naked and sing, the young men standing around in a circle to see and hear them.  Aristotle says that in his time Spartan girls only wore a very slight garment.  As described by Pausanias, and as shown by a statue in the Vatican, the ordinary tunic, which was the sole garment worn by women when running, left bare the right shoulder and breast, and only reached to the upper third of the thighs. (M.M.  Evans, Chapters on Greek Dress, p. 34.)

Among the Greeks who were inclined to accept the doctrines of Cynicism, it was held that, while shame is not unreasonable, what is good may be done and discussed before all men.  There are a number of authorities who say that Crates and Hipparchia consummated their marriage in the presence of many spectators.  Lactantius (Inst. iii, 15) says that the practice was common, but this Zeller is inclined to doubt. (Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, translated from the Third German Edition, 1897.)

“Among the Tyrrhenians, who carry their luxury to an extraordinary pitch, Timaeus, in his first book, relates that the female servants wait on the men in a state of nudity.  And Theopompus, in the forty-third book of his History, states that it is a law among the Tyrrhenians that all their women should be in common; and that the women pay the greatest attention to their persons, and often practice gymnastic exercises, naked, among the men, and sometimes with one another; for that it is not accounted shameful for them to be seen naked....  Nor is it reckoned among the Tyrrhenians at all disgraceful either to do or suffer anything in the open air, or to be seen while it is going on; for it is quite the custom of their country, and they are so far from thinking it disgraceful that they even say, when the master of the house is indulging his appetite, and anyone asks for him, that he is doing so and so, using the coarsest possible words....  And they are very beautiful, as is natural for people to be who live delicately, and who take care of their persons.” (Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, Yonge’s translation, vol. iii, p. 829.)

Dennis throws doubt on the foregoing statement of Athenaeus regarding the Tyrrhenians or Etruscans, and points out that the representations of women in Etruscan tombs shows them as clothed, even the breast being rarely uncovered.  Nudity, he remarks, was a Greek, not an Etruscan, characteristic.  “To the nudity of the Spartan women I need but refer; the Thessalian women are described by Persaeus dancing at banquets naked, or with a very scanty covering (apud Athenaeus, xiii, c. 86).  The maidens of Chios wrestled naked with the youths in the gymnasium, which Athenaeus (xiii, 20) pronounces to be ‘a beautiful sight.’  And at the marriage feast of Caranus, the Macedonian women tumblers performed naked before the guests