Appendix D | (to P. 170). Early Athenian Dress
Thucydides1637 quotes Athenian dress in the introductory chapters of his first book to illustrate his thesis that civilization and comfort are extremely modern things. He divides Athenian history from this standpoint into three periods, the first that when men went about armed, the second that of luxurious Ionic fashions, and the third that in which they reverted to simple or rational dress (μετρία ἐσθής). It is difficult to date the beginning of Thucydides’ second period later than the first half of the seventh century. At the time indeed when Thucydides wrote his remarks it was not very long since elderly men of the wealthy class in Athens had given up the Ionic dress. It has sometimes been maintained that the dress was always confined to old men, and that Thucydides implies that Ionic at Athens had been recently in full fashion. But the tone of the passage suggests rather the old gentleman who clings to the fashions of an earlier age. Already in the seventies of the fifth century B.C. the woman who typifies Greece in Xerxes’ dream is dressed by Aeschylus in Doric robes1638 and the monuments confirm the view which regards the Persian Wars as marking the change.
But that does not end Thucydides’ evidence. He speaks of fashions in Sparta as well as in Athens. The return to simple dress was started by the Spartans (μετρίᾳ δ’ αὖ ἐσθῆτι πρῶτοι Λακεδαιμόνιοι ἐχρήσαντο). This statement has two implications1639. The Spartans must have reverted to Doric costume before the Persian Wars, and previous to this reversion they must, like the Athenians, have worn some sort of Ionic costume. The importance of these allusions to Sparta seems scarcely to have been realized, no doubt because the controversy took shape before the excavations of the British School at Sparta had challenged many of the received views on the history of archaic Sparta. The very large finds of ivory and lead figurines of the seventh and sixth centuries1640 show that artistically at least the Spartans of that period were by no means the austere devotees of simplicity that they became in the classical age. Spartan simplicity in fact probably dates in large measure from the days of Chilon, the reformer of the middle of the sixth century1641. It is not improbable that the simple dress at Sparta came in with the simple life at just about this period. It is already implied for Spartan young women by the epithet φαινομηρίδες (showing the thigh) of the poet Ibycus, a contemporary of Chilon. There is nothing in Thucydides to discountenance the assumption of an interval of about fifty years between the beginning of simple dress at Sparta, and its adoption at Athens1642. The tyranny at Athens roughly covers this period, and standing as it did for material luxury, sufficiently accounts for the interval. Athenian luxury, at least in the matter of dress, is said by Thucydides to have started earlier than Spartan, and Spartan, if it went out in the middle of the sixth century, must plainly have come in considerably before that date.
The Ionic costume is said by Herodotus to be strictly speaking not Ionian but Carian1643. Eastern influence began to pass over from the Greek cities of Asia Minor and pervade the more progressive parts of Greece Proper early in the seventh century1644: so that once again this seems to be the most probable period for the assumption of Ionic dress at Athens.
The same date is arrived at by working forward from Thucydides’ first period, the age when men habitually went about armed. Thucydides is notoriously sceptical about the existence of the culture so familiar to us now under the names of Mycenaean and Minoan and it does not come into his three periods of Greek dress. The first of these is plainly the dark age that followed the downfall of Crete and Mycenae, the age of the Geometric pottery which about the year 700 B.C. began to make way for orientalizing styles. This is the period par excellence of dress-pins and fibulae as shown by archaeological finds1645, and the end of it, i.e. the beginning of the seventh century, would be the natural time for regulations curtailing or prohibiting their use.
Much has been made of the fact that Thucydides deals exclusively with male attire and Herodotus with female, and scholars who maintain that the Aeginetan disaster occurred towards the middle of the sixth century argue that in early Athens men would take the lead even in matters of dress1646 and that the early date implied by Thucydides for the male Ionic costume in Attica need not hold for the female as well. If the distinct dates were established beyond dispute the difference of sex might serve as an explanation. We have seen however that there is nothing in the words of Herodotus to justify a sixth century date for the adoption of Ionic costume by Athenian women.