Synesius, Eulogy of Baldness (3)

The Eulogy of Baldness shows Synesius' lighter side: he defends his baldness against the speech In Praise of Hair by the sophist-philosopher Dio Chrysostom ("tongue of gold").

The text is offered here in the translation by A. Fitzgerald. The green four-digit numbers are page numbers of the Migne edition.

Dio's Speech

[1] [1169] [Dio's In Praise of Hair]^note[One gets the impression that Synesius does not quote the full text of Dio's speech. For example, Dio missed a chance by not digressing upon the expression euplokamos, "with beautiful braids", when he describes Homer's praise of female beauty. The text appears to be too short and it has been argued that what we have is the product of careless copiist. However, the Byzantine scholar Photius, who was interested in Dio's oeuvre, does not know a speech In Praise of Hair, and it is not unreasonable to assume that Synesius polemizes against a speech he has first invented] "After rising in the morning and praying to the gods, as is my custom, I attended to my hair; I happened to be in poor health at the time, and it had been too long uncared for. The most of it had become knotted and entangled, as that which hangs about a sheep's legs, but much coarser than this, for it is tangled with fine hairs. The hair was accordingly uncouth and heavy to behold. And it was difficult to unravel; the most of it was torn out and subjected to a strain.

[2] Thus the idea came to me of praising those who make a cult of their hair, who love beauty, and give their hair great importance, and who not merely give it serious attention but even keep a sort of reed in the hair itself, [1172] with which they comb it when they are at leisure. And this is the most difficult thing; they guard against touching the earth with it when sleeping on the ground, for they have to place a small piece of wood under the head that it may be separated from the earth as much as possible; and they think much more of keeping their hair clean than of sleeping agreeably, for it would seem to make them fine looking and awe-inspiring, whereas sleep, however sweet, only makes them sluggish and careless.

[3] The Lacedaemonians, too, seem to me to be not neglectful of such a fact, as they came forward before the great and terrible battle at the time when they alone of all Greeks were to engage the king.^note[A reference to the battle of Thermopylae in 480, in which the Spartan king Leonidas and three hundred elite warriors fought themselves to death against the army of the Achaemenid king Xerxes. According to Herodotus (Histories 7.208), the Spartans combed their hair before they engaged. Unlike Synesius' Dio states, they were not alone: they were supported by Phocians and Thebans.] At that moment numbering only three hundred, they sat them down and dressed their hair.

[4] Again, Homer seems to me to consider such a thing worthy of the greatest care. It is not often that he praises handsome men for their eyes, nor does he think to make beauty evident most of all therein. He makes no encomium on