CHAPTER IX

WOMEN'S COSTUME

As to the evolution of feminine costume, I speak with the greatest diffidence. Homer's women wore the loose brooched peplos, with brooch, pin, clasp, and over it the _pharos_. Women of the later dark age and the Dipylon period apparently dressed otherwise. In the archaic period the brooched peplos, girdled at the waist, was worn; but I think that there was also a revival or survival of Aegean sewn and shaped bodices, jackets, and skirts. Lastly, historic Greece reverted to the Homeric peplos and _chlaina_.

The discussion is, inevitably, concerned with minutiae in details about which our actual information is far from being minute. We must therefore state here explicitly the conclusions to which we are led: namely, that neither the male nor female dress nor the armour described in the Epics was introduced, at any period, by the Ionians employed in any one of the four or five "recensions" which are postulated by certain critics, as in the "first _Iliad_" of Robert, and his "second, third, and fourth _Iliads_"[1] On the other hand, we contend that both the costume and the armour in Homer are of a single period, earlier than the Dipylon and barbaric Tirynthian age of art, while historic Greece from the middle of the sixth century began to revert to something like the Homeric type.

We must remember that hitherto no representations of Homer's people in the free art of the Aegeans have been discovered, and thence no light can be derived. When the crude art of Tiryns and, later (?) of the "Geometric" school of ornament comes into view (1000-800 B.C.?), the designs of men and women are childish. In painted vases which may represent the palsied decadence of the Aegean age, the human figures are simply absurd, still they are recognisably human; though in vases of what may be called the "dotted" style of outline, they have heads like birds, as on dotted bronzes of northern Italy in the Early Age of Iron. In the "Dipylon" style, again, as soon as human beings are represented, the heads of the men are like potatoes set on sticks; the torso is an inverted isosceles triangle, with the pointed waist for apex; and the naked legs are enormously thick in thighs and calves. The women's bodies also are often equilateral triangles; the parts below the waist are clothed in tight skirts, as a general rule; the breasts, when the bust is represented, are either bare, or clad in a very tight bodice, or are hidden by a hood which falls below the shoulders like a cape. In one Tirynthian fragment we see a stout lady in a "princess frock" tight, "of the Menzies tartan,"[2] and all of one piece; another design shows a waist no thicker than a broomstick[3] (figs. 8, 9). These costumes of women, in Tirynthian and Dipylon art, are un-Homeric and post-Homeric. I doubt if we find such female costumes as Homer apparently describes recognisably represented in Greek art till the sixth and fifth centuries.

This seems to be stated with unnecessary force, because, it may well be said, the meaning of the sentence turns on the words "_recognisably_ represented." How are we to "recognise," in art, costumes of which Homer gives us only brief verbal descriptions? Are we not deceived by the free and vivid style of Homer? All his human beings and gods come in such living forms before us, that we see the flowing, glistening garments of Nausicaa and Athene swaying with their motions. We can see nothing like this represented in Greek art till the late sixth century and onwards; because, it may be said, till that date Greek art is hard, prim, constrained, conventional,--in fact, archaic. It is therefore, we may be told, a kind of logical illusion which prevents us from recognising the costumes of Homer's women in Greek plastic art, till that art itself is beginning to attain Homeric freedom.

These considerations must be kept in mind. But another error is apt to be suggested when we read that the historic Hellenic costume, or that part of it styled "the Doric peplos," "is implied by the allusions of Homer," the view of the ingenious Studniczka.[4] The remark is illustrated by fig. 10, in which we see a lady in "a Doric peplos," though how Achaean women of Homer's time could wear the dress of the Dorians whom Homer ignores is not apparent. This graceful and breezy costume is, in fact, like what we suppose Homer to have had in his mind, and to have seen. But it is not in the least like the dress shown in the art which is immediately subsequent to his age, the art of Tiryns and of the Dipylon; and, as far as I can ascertain, it is not the costume displayed in the archaic art up to the middle of the sixth century. Archaic Greek female costume, however, has this much in common with Homeric and later Greek costume, that it essentially differs, often, from Aegean or Mycenaean dress.

In describing the contrast of styles between the pre-Homeric Aegean dress and the Homeric costume for women, Mr. Leaf says that the Mykenaean (Aegean) women wore "a close fitting bodice, sharply marked off from the full skirt..."; and though there were many changes of fashion in the Aegean world, this account holds good for its later periods. "The dress of Greek women in historic times is of a totally different kind. It is marked by simplicity and flowing vertical lines.... The peplos is, in fact, no more than a square woollen blanket ... taken up round the middle by a girdle and retained in its place on the shoulders by pins." The Aegean female dress, sewn and fitted, did not need pins or brooches, _περόναι, ἐνεταί, πόρται_.[5] On the other hand, "no pins or fibulae have been found among the remains of the Mykenaean prime," while they are common in the latter "lower city" below the acropolis of Mycenae.

Mr. Leaf therefore conceives that "during the prime of Mykene fashion was dominated by a non-Hellenic influence," perhaps Oriental. Bodices and separate flounced skirts were in, "but for some reason which we cannot expect to guess, fashion returned, at the end of the Mykenaean age, to the older and simpler dress" (the Homeric), "which held its ground till classical times."[6] The usual explanation is that the fibulae and the pinned peplos were brought in from the north by Achaean invaders; in the north the fibulae had long been common;[7] and that the style of costume persisted continuously into historic times, being the familiar classical Greek dress.

Now undoubtedly the fibula, and therefore the unsewn and unshaped female attire, did come in at the close of the Aegean or Mycenaean period in Greece; but, as far as I can interpret the art of very old Tirynthian and some Dipylon vases, there was an early post-Homeric period wherein women adopted the short hood-capes, the tight waists, the heavy skirts, and the princess frock.[8] This attire more resembles the Aegean than the Homeric and Hellenic. The "hood-cape" of Tirynthian art may conceivably be the κρήδεμνον, καλύπτρα or κάλυμμα of Homer; but if so, it reveals below it a waist of more than Aegean tightness, not the belted peplos. Such are the characteristics of Dipylon art, and of Tirynthian art which may have arisen before 900 B.C. It is hardly possible that if, in that age, women wore the loose Homeric peplos, the artists should have represented them with impossibly narrow waists, with the bosom fully displayed, and with heavy skirts. The women of this dark age, as far as art can enlighten us, had broken away from, or at all events are not wearing, the Homeric peplos.

This is, at least, my private interpretation of the Dipylon and the Tirynthian representation. But it is offered with diffidence, and is not shared by Mr. R. M. Dawkins, the Director of the British School of Athens. He "does not believe that the Dipylon women's dress is necessarily a tight one," and attributes the wasp waists to the limited skill of the early artist, thinking that if he had to draw a woman in a loose flowing dress he would still give her a tiny waist, because a small waist is one of the conspicuous points in the female figure. In the effort to give as much information as possible he would draw the small waist even if it were concealed by a loose dress. The primitive artist draws not from models, but from mental images.

There is much truth in this; for example, the ladies in a palaeolithic rock-painting[9] have very slim waists, clearly exaggerated, above skirts with a crescentine scoop at the bottom. But the primitive artist certainly draws under the domination of a convention which differs in different places. The woman whose figure is repeated in the clay disk from Phaestus[10] has no more waist than the stout person in a princess frock from Tiryns. The Dipylon artists may be continuing the Aegean convention of the wasp waist; though the designer of the princess frock is as candid as the Phaestos artist. Thus the reader must interpret the Dipylon waist as he pleases.

We next reach the "archaic" art of, say, the seventh to sixth centuries. The chief article of female dress, as described by Homer, was the peplos, "a square or rectangular piece of material which," like the men's outer mantle, "could be used for various purposes." It was fastened by pins or brooches (_περόναι, ἐνεταί_), and the _περόνη_ was sometimes a fibula or safety pin, the cover adorned by art, as in the case of the _περόνη_ of Odysseus (_Od_. xix.). But when (_Iliad_,