)
"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.
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