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And if that wasn’t bad enough, beauty was frequently a competitive sport [in ancient Greece]. Beauty contests – kallisteia – were a regular fixture in the training grounds of the Olympics at Elis and on the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos … My favourite such story has to be the contest in honour of Aphrodite Kallipugos – Aphrodite of the beautiful buttocks. The story goes that when deliberating on where to found a temple to the goddess in Sicily it was decided an exemplar of human beauty should make the choice. Two farmer’s daughters with amply-portioned arses battled it out. The best endowed was given the honour of choosing the site for Aphrodite’s shrine. Fat-bottomed girls clearly had a hotline to the goddess of love.

Bettany Hughes, Would you be beautiful
in the ancient world?
BBC Magazine
(10 January, 2015)