598 A Dissertation on Beards, [Dfcc. 



Submit to the dire shame of being shavM ? 

 By the dread goddesses, I'll not believe it !" 



There is a great deal more to the same effect, which I purposely abstain 

 from translating. Indeed I should not have quoted so much as I have 

 done, had I not been anxious to refute the universally-received opinion, 

 that Alexander the Great was the inventor of shaving. Chrysippus was 

 the author of this fiction. Atbenseus gave it currency and circulation in 

 his Dinner Philosophers ; and it has been regularly repeated, without any 

 examination into its truth, by every author, who has written on the beard 

 from his time down to the last written article on the subject in the Ency- 

 clopedia Britannica., The story has therefore gained some authority by 

 prescription ; but no prescription can stand against the facts which I have just 

 cited, and which, by-the-by, are by no means of an isolated description. 

 It is upon record, that Dionysius the tyrant, who died some years before 

 Alexander was born, taught his daughters the use of the razor, in order to 

 avoid the risk of exposing his throat to a republican barber. The Ephori, 

 on entering into office, regularly issued an edict, forbidding the Lacedae- 

 monians to nourish their beards ; whilst the Byzantines and Rhodians 

 absolutely inflicted punishment on those who did not shave them away. 

 There is also a story told of Phocion, which militates strongly with the- 

 probability of Alexander's claim to the original discovery of shaving. 

 Plutarch informs us, that, on some public occasion, Phocion called upon 

 an individual of the name of Alcibiades, who was distinguished for the 

 prolixity of his beard, to corroborate a statement which he had made. 

 To curry favour with the people, Alcibiades, instead of corroborating, 

 flatly contradicted it. Phocion walked slowly up to him, and taking hold 

 of his beard, as if to smooth it down, said, in the hearing of the assembled 

 people, " You should have shaved off this symbol of an honest man, 

 before you set up the trade of a shameless liar." That the fashion of 

 dispensing with the beard had become very prevalent in Greece in the 

 time of Alexander, seems probable from the obstinate attachment which 

 Diogenes, who loved to run counter to the vulgar, displayed to his own. 

 It appeared to him to be as ridiculous to deprive a man of his beard as a 

 lion of its mane and he wore his own, he said, that he might never forget 

 that he was a man, endowed with a thinking soul. He considered the 

 act of shaving as the outward expression of an inward willingness to over- 

 turn the law of nature, a notion, which explains his object in once asking 

 a smug-faced fop, whether he did not blame nature for making him a man 

 instead of a woman. The philosophers, who succeeded him, acted in 

 conformity with the same notion for several generations, after the rest of 

 their fellow-countrymen had renounced all barbal honours. A long beard 

 and a tattered cloak were the outward and visible signs of a lover of wis- 

 dom, even so late as the beardless days of Plutarch, who, in one of his 

 moral treatises, remarks, that something more than these two ingredients 

 is wanted to constitute a real philosopher. Lucian, in his Eunuch, 

 observes, that, if those who have the longest beards are the wisest 

 philosophers, he-goats are the wisest philosophers in the world. A 

 writer in the Anthology has embodied the same idea in a Greek epi- 

 gram, and hence arose the proverb, " I see the beard and cloak, but 

 wish to know where is the philosopher." It would have been well 

 for these soi-disant sages, if they had nourished their beards, for the 

 excellent reason of the old Laconian, who, when he was asked why 

 lie let his white beard grow to such a length, said, that it was in hopes 



