The art of Ancient Greece focused unashamedly on the naked body. Female nudity was treated discreetly but the unclothed male form was everywhere.
The show Defining Beauty at the British Museum investigates the Greek obsession with physical perfection - and the man in charge says there's an obvious parallel with people's desire today to look good at the gym.
Dr Ian Jenkins is the British Museum's expert on classical Greek sculpture. Yet even he finds it hard to explain exactly why the naked human form featured in the art of Ancient Greece in a way it didn't in other cultures of the same era.
"If you look at Assyrian culture or the Egyptians or the Cypriots they weren't at ease with the naked body - mainly the male body - in a way the Greeks were," he says.
"The same was true of Roman culture before it came under Greek influence. I don't think there's an easy explanation why.
"It may in part be the importance of culture in defining Ancient Greece at all. Apart from shared cultural values there was language and the recognition of the Olympian gods: those were the big unifying elements.
"So the focus on the body may have linked what was really a scattering of city states rather than a nation or an empire. Not all the artwork shows the body naked but a lot of it does. For the Greeks the body had almost entirely positive connotations: there was no shame."
