They were pretty goddamn gaudy by our modern standards. Here's a few more examples of them in their original "glory...
but this helm has really good stats I swear
Even though those marble statues and busts have been, well denuded of their original flamboyance for thousands of years, ultraviolet analysis has revealed what time faded and chipped away: That the Greeks and Romans had an appalling sense of color palate... that to them, the louder and gaudier, the better.
This does fly in the face of pre-modern - and even modern - asthetic... that which has judged the classic standard of beauty to be that of Purest White. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, for instance, wrote in the 18th century: "The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well [...] Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Color should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not [color] but structure that constitutes its essence." In other words, color might sometimes be a minor aspect to beauty, but more often simply masks its pure Platonic "True Form" which is borne out in pure marble white. If you want a legendary cinematic example of "less color is more" ideology in practice - go watch Spielberg's Schindler's List. Purity is the absence of distractions like color, much like true beauty is that of makeup and artifice washed away... clean, pure, holy. Your can see it everywhere you might wish in later adoption of the assumed Greco-Roman style: from Michelangelo, to Napoleon, to Honest Abe... pure white is just how we do.
Yet, UV analysis indicates, it was quite the opposite. The Greeks and Romans were all about making their divine figures and august leaders as circus-clown vibrant as they possibly could. It is really intriguing to think how our own conceptions of beauty and form might have been influenced and fundamentally changed from what they are... had the conception of "gaudy=great" survived the classical period... a timeline where if we thought of "noble history" we imagined a baby-pink Julius Caesar clothed in canary-yellow toga.
