They had plenty of merchant relationships across millennia with Africa and the East so they were pretty aware of other skin colours, but ancient Greece was always homogeneous. In text, they look like they were pretty indifferent to it.
But we know what they thought of as beautiful in women, and that’s from their statues of Aphrodite, which don’t have different characteristics from the general population.
Most mixing came up long after, during their occupation from the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s (and until 1800). That’s when racist slurs about darker skin started and led to the somewhat uniform skin tone of today.
That’s a myth though because DNA tests has shown Greeks have very little Turkish dna. Funnily enough it’s the other way around. People saying Greeks are not Caucasian probably have a skewed sense of the demographic. Greeks can range from extremely fair to olive but certainly not sub Saharan.
If you actually study Ancient Greece, the material culture and literary sources all say that the beauty standards for women was light skin- being pale was a sign of wealth since it meant a woman didn’t have to work outdoors. All ancient depictions of Helen of Troy thus make her pale skinned if they described her colour.
6
u/Able-Swing-6415 13d ago
Also plenty of cultures had fair skin as a beauty ideal or still have like India. Not sure about ancient Greek. Hell maybe they loved black skin.
Either way "the most beautiful person in the country" usually doesn't look like everyone else.