age a decency in dress foreign to Rome during the first centuries of the Empire, and even to Greece in the most classic period. Ladies invested with garments of such tenuity as to reveal more than they conceal of their physical beauties, to the confusion of some contemporary Seneca, are not here to be met with in the streets;[1] the Athenian maiden, with her tunic divided almost to the hip, or the Spartan virgin displaying her limbs bare to the middle of the thigh, have no reflection under the piazzas of renascent Byzantium. A new modesty, born of Christian influences, has cast a mantle of uniformity over the licence as well as over the simplicity of the pagan world. In observing the costume of this time a modern eye would first, perhaps, note the fact that in civil life the garb of men differs but little from that of women. Loose clothing, which hides the shape of the body, and in general the whole of the lower limbs, is common to both sexes. Men usually shave, but a moustache is often worn; their hair is cropped, but not very close.[2] Head-gear is an exception, and so, for the lower classes, are coverings for the feet. A workman, an artisan, or a slave, the latter a numerous class, wears a simple tunic of undyed wool, short-sleeved, girt round the waist and reaching to the knees, with probably a hood which can be drawn over the head as a protection against the weather.[3] This garment is in fact the foundation*
- ↑ "Matronae nostrae, ne adulteris quidem plus sui in cubiculo, quam
in publico ostendant"; see Seneca, De Beneficiis, vii, 9; cf. Horace,
Sat., I, ii, 102:
Cois tibi paene videre est
Ut nudam, etc. - ↑ By a law of Honorius the Romans were forbidden to wear long hair (in 416), or garments of fur (in 397), such being characteristic of the Goths who were then devastating Italy; Cod. Theod., XIV, x, 4, 3, 2.
- ↑ See the lowest bas-reliefs on the Theodosian obelisk (Banduri, ii,
