In an introduction dominated by the aggregation of wealth and power as the key principles of historical change, Thucydides' brief excursus into the sartorial stands out in high relief. Greekness did not fully distinguish itself from barbarism until the clothes came off. The Greeks' peculiar openness or lack of shame about the body seems to entail a coming-to-terms with sexual eros, although it is unclear whether nudity meant a sexual freedom hitherto unknown to barbarian peoples, and which most of them would have considered vice, or whether, as seems implied in self-congratulatory Greek art and literature, naked athletics was an arena in which Greeks demonstrated their self-control and the mastery of mind over body. Nor is it clear what nudity contributed to the full flourishing of the polis, that it should make an appearance not only in Thucydides' terse and elliptical reconstruction of the growth and progress of the Greek poleis, but also in Plato's theoretical account of the perfect polis, the Republic, in which complete justice requires that women as well as men strip naked and that the sexes exercise together.