girdles.[1] A less numerous class of the community are male ascetics, celibates of a puritanical cast, who love to placard themselves by wearing scarlet clothing and binding their hair with a fillet;[2] also virgins devoted to the service of the churches, who are known by their sombre dress, black hoods, gray mantles, and black shoes.[3] Philosophers adopt gray, rhetoricians crimson, and physicians blue, for the tint of their cloaks.[4] To these may be added the courtesans who try to usurp the costume of every grade of women, even that of the sacred sisterhood.[5] Such is the population who usually crowd the thoroughfares and lend them a gaudy aspect which is still further heightened by numbers of private carriages—literally springless carts—bedizened with paint and gilding, and most fashionable if drawn by a pair of white mules with golden trappings. Such vehicles are indispensable to the outdoor movements of matrons of any rank;[6]
- ↑ Chrysostom, In Ps. xlviii, 3 (in Migne, v, 515); Sozomen, loc. cit., etc. Women's girdles were worn under the breasts.
- ↑ See Bingham's Christian Antiquities, vii, 1, and Racinet, Costume historique, iii, pl. 21. Read Lucian's Cynicus for a defence of a somewhat similar life on a different plane.
- ↑ Chrysostom, In Epist. Tim. II, viii, 2 (in Migne, xi, 541). Even these he rates for coquetry; cf. Bingham, op. cit., vii, 4, etc. See also Viollet-le-Duc (Dict. du mobil. fr., i, pl. 1) for a coloured figure which, though of the thirteenth century, corresponds very closely with Chrysostom's description. Formal costume, however, of the present day, political, legal, ecclesiastical, is for the most part merely a survival of the ordinary dress of past ages.
- ↑ Basil Presbyt. ad Gregor. Naz., Steliteut. Const. Porph., op. cit., ii, 52, p. 753, with Reiske's notes, p. 460.
- ↑ Cod. Theod., XV, vii, 11, 12; Cod., I, iv, 4(5); actresses (mimae = meretrices, no doubt) are forbidden to use this and other styles of dress which might bring women of repute into ridicule.
- ↑ Cod. Theod., XIV, xii; Chrysostom, De Perf. Carit., 6 (in Migne, vi, 286).
