User:Cynwolfe/clothing of the Roman Empire



Clothing and personal adornment in the Roman Empire reflected the diversity of peoples under Roman rule. Contrary to popular perception, the clothing worn by Romans during the Imperial era ordinarily was dark or colorful. The most common male attire seen daily throughout the Empire as a whole would have been tunics, trousers, and cloaks. The toga was the distinctive national garment of the Roman male citizen, but it was heavy and impractical, worn mainly for political business and sacrifices, formal visits to one's patron, and court appearances. The study of how Romans dressed in daily life is complicated by a lack of direct evidence, since portraiture may show the subject in clothing with symbolic value, and surviving textiles from the period are rare—only a few tunics and cloaks, and no togas.

In a status-conscious society like that of the Romans, clothing, jewelry, and accessories gave immediate visual clues about the etiquette of interacting with the wearer. Wearing the correct clothing was supposed to reflect a society in good order. The jurist Ulpian (d. 228 AD) categorizes clothing on the basis of who may appropriately wear it: vestimenta virilia, "men's clothing," is defined as the attire of the paterfamilias, "head of household"; puerilia is clothing that serves no purpose other than to mark its wearer as a "child" (puer) or legal minor; muliebria are the garments that characterize a woman (mulier); communia, those that are worn "in common" and are not gender-specific; and familiarica, clothing for the familia, the subordinates in a household, such as slaves.

Tunic
The basic garment for all Romans, regardless of gender or wealth, was the simple sleeved tunic (tunica), made from two rectangles of fabric sewn or fastened at the shoulders and usually belted. The length differed by wearer: a man's reached mid-calf, but a soldier's was somewhat shorter; a woman's fell to her feet, and a child's to its knees. The tunics of poor people and laboring slaves were made from coarse wool in natural, dull shades, with the length determined by the type of work they did. Finer tunics were made of lightweight wool or linen. A man who belonged to the senatorial or equestrian order wore a tunic with two purple stripes (clavi) woven vertically into the fabric: the wider the stripe, the higher the wearer's status. Other garments could be layered over the tunic.

Toga
The Imperial toga, worn over a tunic, was a "vast expanse" of semi-circular white wool that could not be put on and draped correctly without assistance. Augustus required office holders and male members of his family to wear a toga for official appearances in public. In his work on oratory, Quintilian describes in detail how the public speaker ought to orchestrate his gestures in relation to his toga. In art, the toga is shown with the long end dipping between the feet, a deep curved fold in front (the sinus, "pocket") and a bulbous flap (umbo) at the chest. The drapery became more intricate and structured over time, with the cloth forming a tight roll (balteus) across the midsection in later periods.

Varro says that originally men and women alike wore the toga, but if this is historically true, it is reflected mainly by the wearing of the toga praetexta by both boys and girls who had not yet come of age. The praetexta had a purple stripe that signified the wearer's inviolability, and was probably, like the toga in general, a special-occasion garment. After weddings, for instance, "praetextate" children led the couple to their new home. When boys came of age, their rite of passage included taking off the praetexta and putting on the plain white toga virilis ("manly toga"). Roman girls only rarely depicted togate. A Roman girl would have stopped wearing the praetexta when she became a bride, whose attire for the wedding ceremony was determined in part by ritual custom and in part by wealth and taste.

The purple-striped praetexta was worn also by curule magistrates, and state priests conducting sacrifices. The use of the color purple or purplish-red, from murex dye, was regulated by law. Over time, emperors developed the habit of wearing an all-purple toga (toga picta), a privilege from which all others were barred, and which had been reserved mainly for censorsCHECK and triumphing generals during the Republic.

The basic toga represented civilian life in contrast to militarization. The Praetorian Guard put on togas in the city to give themselves a civilian appearance. For reasons that scholars continue to puzzle over, the only women who wore togas were prostitutes or others who had sexually compromised themselves. The wearing of the toga may signal that prostitutes were outside the social and legal category of "woman". These togas may have been made of a flimsy, "see-through" fabric, and were favored also by effeminate men or passive homosexual males.

The toga contabulata is a style found from the 2nd century onward. It appears on the Arch of Constantine in Rome and the base of the Obelisk of Theodosius in Constantinople. Probianus wears the contabulata on one side of the ivory diptych depicting him, and on the other a long tunic and the chlamys, a heavy Greek cloak.

While campaigning for office, a politician wore a toga made whiter by chalk (toga candida), which made him a candidatus, hence the English word "candidate." Although elections lost their importance under the rule of emperors, Christians began to use candidatus metaphorically in phrases such as "candidates for heaven" and "candidate for God", and to put on white garments after baptism. Under the Christian emperors, the candidati were a corps of imperial guardsmen who dressed in white.

Women's clothing


The characteristic garment of the Roman matron at the beginning of the Empire was a stola, a rectangular length of fabric draped over a tunic, but it quickly dropped out of fashion. Livia, the wife of Augustus, promoted his moral programme of cultivating the traditional women's arts of spinning and weaving, but by the time of Nero, most women with the money to do so bought their clothes, and production within the familia was aimed mostly at clothing slaves and other low-status dependents of the household.



Pallium
In the 2nd century, emperors and men of status are often portrayed wearing the pallium, an originally Greek mantle (himation) folded tightly around the body, in art requiring that the arms be held in a particular attitude. Later, women are similarly portrayed, as is the allegorical representation of Pudicitia, "Modesty". The Christian author Tertullian considered the pallium an appropriate garment both for Christians, in contrast to the toga, and for educated people, since it was associated with philosophers. Expressing decorum and piety, the pallium often appears in portraits for funerary, commemorative, and honorary monuments. By the 4th century, the toga had been more or less replaced by the pallium, a garment embodying social unity.

Trousers
Braccae, trousers, originally represented Gallic identity. When Julius Caesar admitted citizen Gauls to the Roman senate in the mid-40s BC, he had been accused of allowing "trouser-wearing" barbarians to usurp the institution's dignity. The practicality of braccae led Roman soldiers to wear them in northern climates, but in Roman art they continued to represent barbarians, particularly the Germanic peoples. In 397 under the emperor Honorius, as a panic overtook the Empire in the face of barbarian incursions, anyone who appeared publicly in the city wearing trousers faced severe legal penalties.

Dining attire
The synthesis or cenatoria was a colorful dinner ensemble that might be worn by any gender in an urban setting. It was a faux pas for a man to wear a synthesis as daytime attire, rather as if a modern-day lawyer wore a tuxedo to court. Paintings that show Romans semi-clothed at dinner are fictional or allegorical scenes, not real-life practice.

At banquets and some celebratory occasions, men and women wore wreaths of greenery or flowers.

Textiles
Wool was the most common fabric, and their pastoral origins were so important to the Romans that they celebrated the founding of Rome on the same day (April 21) as the Parilia, a sheepherding festival. Linen. Cotton was known as the "Egyptian fiber." See Coan silk in Horace (I think) and the Augustan elegists

Textile production was a major source of employment. Both textiles and finished garments were traded among the peoples of the Empire, whose products were often named for them or a particular town and catered to an upscale market. Cheap and mid-priced clothing tended to be produced locally, since shipping added to the cost. The Edict of Diocletian lists maximum prices for garments that carried particular "labels": the wool cloak called the sagum, made in Gaul, was priced at 8,000 denarii, while one from Africa cost 500. Fine linen tunics could cost as much as 20 times as those for poor people, with military tunics priced in the md-range.

Since clothing was expensive, many people of the lower classes would have worn patched and ragged garments. Centonarii were guild workers who specialized in textile production and the recycling of old clothes into pieced quilts, cloaks and saddle cloths.

CAH vol. 12 p. 421 ff

Head coverings and hairstyles
Upperclass men went bareheaded most of the time, while women kept their heads covered in public. Women and girls wore their hair up, according to tradition bound by headbands (vittae) woven from wool, though these are rarely seen in art except in depictions of freedwomen, for whom they may have represented respectability. At funerals, the custom of head-covering was reversed: men covered theirs, but women let their hair loose and left it uncovered.

Men conducted most religious rituals with a back fold or cowl of the toga drawn up over the head (capite velato); in art, this head covering is a symbol of piety (pietas). The pilos or pilleus, worn by free workers, was a rounded or slightly conical cap pulled onto the head. At the December festival of Saturnalia, the pilleus was worn as the "cap of freedom" by both slaves and their masters, to demonstrate the temporary egalitarianism of the holiday. Priests of Rome's oldest religious orders had ceremonial headgear.

Jewelry
A great deal of Roman-era jewelry survives, and jewelry is often depicted in art. Italo-Roman jewelry from the 1st and 2nd centuries "geometric shapes, linear decoration, and an interest in color." Hellenistic-Roman jewelry "a stylized naturalism of Hellenistic animal and human motifs." these catories are those of Barbel Pfeiler. In 3rd century, "opus interrasile (openwork), a stronger polychromy, and the piling up of colored stone in more massive pieces." As indicated by the Fayum mummy portraits, a woman of the 1st century might wear "one simple gold chain with a golden pendant (often a crescent) or one jeweled necklace." Earrings are simple, as with a single pearl or gold hoops, disks or balls. In the 2nd century, she might wear two or three necklaces, one of them set with colored semiprecious stones. Earrings might have a horizontal bar from which three or four sets of pendants dangle. In the 4th century, coins or medallions are set in more massive neck rings. Snake bracelets remained popular throughout all four centuries.

From the time of Tiberius, the wearing of a gold ring was granted to those who qualified as equestrians (third-generation freeborn, 400,000 sesterces).CHECK Around 197 AD, Septimius Severus gave the honor to all soldiers. By the 2nd century, married women wore a gold ring.

Augustus began the practice of wearing a signet ring that represented imperial authority, and later emperors sometimes gave rings as marks of imperial favor. Men's jewelry was mainly confined to rings, especially a signet ring; military awards, including the gold torque (torques or manxxxxxxx) and silver armlet (bracchalia); belt buckles and fastenings; and in late antiquity, medallions (orbiculi) attached to clothing. Underage freeborn boys, including the sons of freedmen,CHECK wore the bulla, a necklace with an amulet meant to ward off from malevolent forces and signalled that.

Footwear
Even footwear indicated a person's social status: patricians wore red and orange sandals, senators had brown footwear, consuls had white shoes, and soldiers wore heavy boots.

Studies in Ancient Technology on leather trade and shoemaking guilds

Personal grooming and cosmetics
xxxxxxx. An unkempt appearance might be meant to show off a philosophical disdain for artifice or superficiality. Seneca, however, advised men to cultivate a middle ground between a slovenly self-display that was ostentatious, and the overrefinement and effeminacy of depilating all body hair.

Fashion in late antiquity
Roman clothing styles changed over time, though not as rapidly as contemporary fashions. In the Dominate, clothing worn by both soldiers and government bureaucrats became highly decorated, with woven or embroidered strips, clavi, and circular roundels, orbiculi, added to tunics and cloaks. These decorative elements usually consisted of geometrical patterns and stylised plant motifs, but could include human or animal figures. The use of silk also increased steadily and most courtiers of the later empire wore elaborate silk robes. The militarization of Roman society, and the waning of cultural life based on urban ideals, affected habits of dress: heavy military-style belts were worn by bureaucrats as well as soldiers, and early medieval kings and nobles abandoned the toga and dressed in the manner of Roman generals.

Underwear and nudity
Erotic art shows women who are otherwise nude wearing a strapless bra (strophium). The famous "bikini girls" who appear on a mosaic from xxxxx wear a strapless bra or bandeau and fitted briefs. They hold various kinds of apparatus, and may be exercising, or training for or performing dance routines that are perhaps to be compared to rhythmic gymnastics. Men's underwear xxxxxxxxxxx. In Roman art, laborers are often depicted in a loincloth.

Attitudes toward nudity and its depiction changed under the Christian Empire, and even erotes (Cupids) began to be portrayed clothed. Nudity became a marker of "pagan" culture, and by the 5th century, female martyrs were sometimes depicted partially nude as victims of persecution. Among the upper classes, modesty about the body did not preclude a greater showing off one's status, wealth, and xxxxxxx <!--==History==

Rome had begun annexing provinces in the 3rd century BC, four centuries before reaching its greatest territorial extent, and in that sense was an "empire" while still governed as a republic. Republican provinces were administered by former consuls and praetors, who had been elected to one-year terms and held imperium, "right of command". The amassing of disproportionate wealth and military power by a few men through their provincial commands was a major factor in the transition from republic to imperial autocracy. Later, the position of power held by the emperor was expressed as imperium. The Latin word is the origin of English "empire," a meaning it began to acquire only later in Rome's history.

As the first emperor, Augustus took the official position that he had saved the Republic, and carefully framed his powers within republican constitutional principles. He rejected titles that Romans associated with monarchy, and instead referred to himself as the princeps, "leading citizen". Among the republican institutions preserved were the Senate, the people's assemblies, the magistracies that formed the hierarchy of political offices, and the public priesthoods. These institutions distinguished the reign of the Caesars from Hellenistic monarchy. The higher military commands, however, were awarded to members of the imperial family, establishing the foundation of the regime as military along with the principle of dynastic succession.

The reign of Augustus, lasting more than 40 years, was portrayed in Augustan literature and art as a new "Golden Age." Augustus laid out an enduring ideological foundation for the three centuries of the Empire known as the Principate (27 BC–284 AD), the first 200 years of which is traditionally regarded as the Pax Romana. During this period, the cohesion of the Empire was furthered by participation in civic life, economic ties, and shared cultural, legal and religious norms. Uprisings in the provinces were infrequent, but put down "mercilessly and swiftly" when they occurred, as in Britain and Gaul. The sixty years of Jewish–Roman wars in the first half of the 2nd century were exceptional in their duration and violence.

Augustus outlived a number of talented potential heirs he had hoped to succeed him, and the Julio-Claudian dynasty lasted for four more emperors. Under Tiberius, the attempt of the Praetorian prefect Sejanus to rise to supreme power was halted by the Senate in the guise of protecting republicanism. The Praetorian Guard responded to the excesses of Tiberius's successor Caligula by assassinating him and proclaiming Claudius, his uncle, as emperor. Claudius resumed Roman expansionism, conquering Britain and completing Roman encirclement of the Mediterranean. Nero, who acceded at the age of only 16, is portrayed in largely hostile sources as a self-indulgent tyrant driven to suicide by the opposition. His death created the power vacuum and militaristic jostling for supremacy known as the Year of Four Emperors (69 AD), from which Vespasian emerged as victor.

Vespasian became the founder of the brief Flavian dynasty, and during his reign and that of his sons Titus and Domitian the growth of the empire continued. Domitian increased the military profile of the emperor, leading troops himself in campaigns along the Rhine and Danube, increasing army pay, and appearing before the Senate in the attire of a triumphing general instead of the traditional toga that marked a civilian. Despite other measures that actually expanded republican mechanisms of governance, Domitian was murdered in a plot from within his court: according to the imperial biographer Suetonius, the Roman people were indifferent, the military grieved, and the Senate rejoiced. The Senate installed Nerva in his place.

The denial of the realities of monarchy and the preservation of republican institutions thus left Rome without constitutional principles of imperial succession, which remained unstable and ad hoc. Dynastic rule The insecurity of his own position seems to have caused Nerva to ally with

The Nerva–Antonine dynasty produced the "Five Good Emperors". Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and the philosophically inclined Marcus Aurelius. In the view of the Greek historian Dio Cassius, a contemporary observer, the accession of the emperor Commodus in 180 AD marked the descent "from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron" —a famous comment which has led some historians, notably Edward Gibbon, to take Commodus' reign as the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire. It was the first time in a hundred years that the rule of the empire had passed from father to biological son.

In 212, during the reign of Caracalla, Roman citizenship was granted to all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire. But despite this gesture of universality, the Severan dynasty was tumultuous—an emperor's reign was ended routinely by his murder or execution—and following its collapse, the Roman Empire was engulfed by the Crisis of the Third Century, a period of invasions, civil strife, economic depression, and plague. In defining historical epochs, this crisis is sometimes viewed as marking the transition from Classical Antiquity to Late Antiquity. The emaciated illusion of the old Republic was sacrificed for the sake of imposing order: Diocletian (reigned 284–305) brought the Empire back from the brink, but declined the role of princeps and became the first emperor to be addressed regularly as dominus, "master" or "lord". The state of autocratic absolutism that resulted is the Dominate, which endured till the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. Diocletian's reign also brought the Empire's most concerted effort against the perceived threat of Christianity, the "Great Persecution".

The unity of the Roman Empire was from this point a fiction, as graphically revealed by Diocletian's division of authority among four "co-emperors", the Tetrarchy. Order was shaken again soon after, but was restored by Constantine, who became the first emperor to convert to Christianity, and who established Constantinople as the new capital of the eastern empire. During the decades of the Constantinian and Valentinian dynasties, the Empire was divided along an east-west axis, with dual power centres in Constantinople and Rome. The reign of Julian, who attempted to restore Classical Roman and Hellenistic religion, only briefly interrupted the succession of Christian emperors. Theodosius I, the last emperor to rule over both East and West, died in 395 AD after making Christianity the official state religion.

The Empire began to disintegrate in the late 4th century as invasions overwhelmed the capacity of Christian Rome to govern and mount a coordinated defense. Most chronologies place the end of the Western empire in 476, when Romulus Augustulus was forced to abdicate to the Germanic warlord Odoacer. The empire in the East—known today as the Byzantine Empire, but referred to in its time as the "Roman Empire" or by various other names—ended in 1453 with the death of Constantine XI and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. -->