Bathing in athletes’ sweat
Just as they are today, athletes and sporting superstars were seen as heroes and celebrities in Ancient Greek society. The best would have been household names; the men of Athens would want to be them with them. However, the Greeks took hero worship to a whole new disgusting level. Rather than collecting posters or autographs, they preferred something more intimate, and nothing was more intimate than the bodily fluids of their heroes.
However, this wasn’t some weird fetish. According to the prevailing beliefs of the time, the gloios produced by a sportsman or athlete had medicinal properties. So, what was in this curative mix? Well, it was mainly sweat. However, it also included the oils athletes covered themselves in before getting to work in the gymnasium. Once their workout was over, specially-employed gloios-collectors would go around the changing rooms scraping the skin of the naked athletes. They would collect these scrapings and bottle it all up, ready to be taken to market.
The special medicine was marketed as a cure-all for general aches and pains. Quite simply, by rubbing gloios all over your own body, you could enjoy some of the youthful vigor of the young men it came from. While this may seem a preposterous belief to us today, the Ancient Greeks certainly believed in it. In fact, bottles of sweat were sold throughout the Ancient world and markets close to the best gymnasia would do a roaring trade, especially after public games.
For the athletes themselves, in the days before corporate sponsorship deals or TV money, selling sweat was a nice little earner. Well, that and selling their whole bodies to wealthy women (but that’s a different story altogether). At the same time, gyms themselves would cash in on their users’ bodily fluids and would often scrape their walls and floors for extra goodness. Indeed, there’s historical evidence of gyms inviting companies to bid for their bottles of sweat, a sure sign that this was a big market in Ancient Greece.