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Everyday Life in Ancient Greece and Rome (Part 6)

sandwichbillPosted for Everyone to comment on, 5 years ago9 min read

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Many a Roman’s last tribute to his dead wife on her tombstone included, among the catalogue of her virtues, this evidence of her true Roman nature, ‘She worked with wool’. It was a tradition that the Greeks did not emphasize as much as the Romans. When Augustus sought to revive the tarnished virtues of old Rome, he made a point of wearing tunics and togas made at home by his wife Livia, aided no doubt by her slave women. Most Roman ladies by that time rarely had a spindle in their hands, nor did they spend much time standing at the loom. Like Greek ladies centuries earlier, they either left such jobs to their slave girls or bought woollen and linen tunics, togas, stolae and mantles from the fullers or the drapers. The great change in this direction began with the sudden influx of wealth and slaves into Rome during the 2nd century BC. New materials too, cotton, silk and dye-stuffs came upon the Roman scene.

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Spinning was done in the home by the women of the house, unless they had slaves to do the work for them. This 5th century Greek oinochoe, shows a housewife dressed in peplos and chiton, drawing thread from a distaff held in her left hand image source

Alexander the Great and his troops are supposed to have first encountered oriental silk on his great raid into India. The ingenious Greeks had however discovered a substitute for themselves by using the cocoon of the bombyx, a grub found on oaks and ash trees in the island of Cos. Then Coan silk met competition from the looms of other Greeks, who succeeded in making true silk from the mulberry silkworm, but the result was never as good as the fabric made of Chinese silk, the vestis serica, because, unlike the Chinese, the Greeks had never discovered how to unwind the cocoon. Silk always remained a great luxury and as late as the 3rd century AD, Diocletian in his desperate effort to fix prices of everything allowed as much as three pounds weight of gold to be paid for one pound of silk.

To distinguish between a Greek and a Roman by his or her clothes isn’t easy to the casual eye of a museum visitor looking at ancient marble statues. Yet to the people of antiquity the difference was at once apparent. Both Greeks and Romans had to spin raw wool or flax into thread and then to weave it into cloth. Having made a length of cloth web they just draped it round the body and fastened it, if at all, by large metal fibulae, or safety pins. In this way were made the Greek chiton and Roman one-piece tunic, the Greek peplos and himation and the Roman stola and toga. Simple as they seem, himations and togas required a lot of raw material, all patiently spun and woven by hand and they were by no means cheap. A good himation would cost more than the wages of a working man for a month.

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The Greek chiton, worn by both men and women (though the men's version was shorter), consisted of a single oblong piece of cloth. One arm went through a hole and the two top corners were fastened together by a clasp at the shoulder. The open side was normally sewn together below the hips and the garment was gathered at the waist by a girdle. Other distinctive garments such as the peplos and himation were worn over the chiton. image source

The basic garment was the chiton or tunic, tied round the waist with a belt. Greeks had no other underclothes but some Romans had a loin cloth and Roman women had a bust support, sometimes of soft leather. Children and slaves went about in tunics although little boys and girls of good families may have had smaller versions of the himation or toga and stola of their parents for special occasions. These longer, vaster outer garments were the distinctive national dress of the Greek and Roman people. Clumsy as they were, togas had to be worn by all free Roman citizens in the City. They were glad to shed them when they got home or were in the country.

Ladies were allowed freedom in the use of colour, as time went on, but men’s togas in Rome were uniformly white, for colour had an early religious significance, especially the scarlet and purple bands on the togas of priests and magistrates and on those of young boys, a pleasant reminder of the Roman ideal that young boys must be treated with the greatest respect.

In cold weather extra tunics might be worn. Augustus suffered so much from the cold that he sometimes wore four at once. Heavier capes of various styles and sizes and of a thicker weave were also used in bad weather. Soldiers on a campaign would also use theirs as a blanket at night. None of these articles of clothing were waterproof unless much more of the natural grease was left on the wool by cleaning methods available to the fullers than we use today. Successive visits to the fullers would in time soon remove any such protection, so shelter in heavy rain was much more of an imperious necessity in the ancient world than it need be now.

The fullers’ business thrived in ancient Rome, for it was a badge of poverty to go about in a dirty toga or stola. Cleaning methods, without soap were primitive by our standards, but they seem to have done the job. Potash, nitre and fuller’s earth, an alkaline clay, were the main materials, supplemented, it is said, with human urine from the public lavatories. Clothes were then rinsed in water and exposed to burning sulphur to bleach them. The fuller’s job, treading out the wash barefoot in such liquid mixtures and exposed to poisonous sulphur fumes was not one for the squeamish.

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A fuller at work in Roman Gaul. His job was to clean the cloth after it had been woven and remove the natural grease that still remained in it. He supports himself on the rails of a square tank and treads the cloth with his bare feet in a mixture of water and fuller's earth, an alkaline clay. Behind him, on a beam supported on brackets, another piece of material in drying image source

Clumsy and awkward as first attempts can be to don and wear either himation or toga with grace and ease of movement, they undoubtedly achieved an elegance that has hardly since been equalled. Artists and sculptors down to quite recent times long sought to lend to some of their sitters the dignity and distinction of the timeless garb of classical Greece and Rome.

Most accounts of Greek and Roman weaving stop short of giving some account of the rich and lavish wall-hangings, curtains, pictorial ceremonial robes and the humble but essential tents and ships’ sails. All have perished, but occasional reference in ancient writings testify to the excellence they sometimes attained.

Splendid draperies were woven for the statues of goddesses which were painted in bright colours and lavishly clothed in the way that images often are in Roman Catholic churches today. Those annually provided at a solemn festival for the glorious gold and ivory figure of Athena in the Parthenon at Athens, the creation of the famous artist Phidias, were exceptionally fine and famous. So were the curtains and hangings in that wonderful temple. In heroic days time, energy, industry and wealth were lavished upon cult objects of this sort rather than upon human beings, however distinguished they may have been in public life. Those Greeks who could afford shoes or boots in the country had them made to measure. For centuries the custom of walking barefoot, especially indoors, persisted. Socrates kept up the habit, but by the 4th century he was already somewhat singular and shoemakers began to prosper and to create, especially in the Hellenistic period, attractive alternatives to the simple sandals with their cork or wooden soles that still sufficed for the great majority.

 

A late 5th century BC 'pelike' jar, used for keeping wine, found at Rhodes. It depicts a boy being measured for new shoes. The cobbler cuts around his foot on a piece of leather. In Roman times it became the custom to commemorate a man's trade by a small relief on his tomb image source

Romans are usually depicted with sandals of very various types or with more elaborate leather footwear. From early times, social distinction was indicated in Rome by the style and colouring of shoes ; patricians for example, wore small half-moons on theirs to distinguish themselves from 'plebeians' while the scarlet shoes of the two Consuls marked them off from everyone else. Scores of small cobblers’ booths were to be found in the City, working half in the street and they specialized, to be able to turn-out heavy country boots, elegant town shoes, simple sandals or slippers. The guild of Rome’s slipper-makers alone had 300 members.

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A relief on a Roman Sarcophagus of a cobbler and spinner. The cobbler cuts his leather, two pairs of finished boots behind him. Such industries were mostly carried-out in small one-man shops, though in Roman times at least a certain degree of specialization had been reached. Some concentrated on heavy boots with nails, others on women's shoes and others on slippers. image source
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