Everything Changes Its Dress

Men of Carthage — always the first men of Africa, made noble by ancient memories and fortunate by present ones — I am glad your times are prosperous enough that you have both the leisure and the appetite to sit in judgment on clothes. These are the easy years of peace and full granaries. Blessings come down on you from the empire and from the sky. [a]

All the same, you too once wore your clothes — your tunics — in another shape, and they had a name for it: skill in the weave, harmony in the color, right proportion in the cut. They were not wastefully long down the shins, not indecently short at the knee, not stingy at the arms, not tight at the wrists. Without so much as a belt to break the folds into sections, they stood on a man’s back in a clean square. Over them went the mantle, square as well, thrown back across both shoulders, closed at the throat in the bite of a brooch, and left to rest where it fell. You can still see the same garment on the priests of Aesculapius, the god you now call your own.

Your neighbor, the sister city, once dressed her citizens the same way, and so did every place in Africa where Tyre has settled. But when the urn of the age was shaken and the lots came out differently, and God favored the Romans, the sister city changed of her own accord, and hurried about it: she meant to greet Scipio in Roman dress before his ships were even in her harbor — precocious in her Romanizing.

With you it went otherwise. First came the injury that turned out to be a benefit, since it spared you an endless old age without bringing you down from your height. Then Gracchus and his foul omens; then Lepidus and his rough jokes; then Pompey and his three altars; then Caesar and his long delays — until Statilius Taurus raised your walls and Sentius Saturninus spoke the words that made your founding official. And so, with harmony lending a hand, the toga was offered you.

Look what a journey that garment has made. From Pelasgians to Lydians, from Lydians to Romans — all so that it could come down off the shoulders of a loftier people and wrap itself around Carthaginians. And now you find your tunic too long, so you hitch it up on a dividing belt; and the surplus of your smooth new toga you carry by gathering it fold on fold. Whatever else your rank or your office or the season puts on you, the mantle — the one garment every class and condition among you used to wear — you have not merely forgotten. You laugh at it.

For my part I am not surprised, since there is older evidence of how badly you forget. Take the ram. Not the one Laberius means when he writes:

but the beam-like engine that does military service battering down a wall. Nobody had ever hung one before, and Carthage — dread Carthage,

is said to have been the first in the world to swing it, copying the driving force of her machine from the bad temper of the animal that settles its quarrels with its head. Then, when the country’s fortunes were down to their last breath and the ram had gone over to the Romans and was doing its brave work against the walls that had once been its own, the Carthaginians stood there dumbfounded, as though the thing were new and foreign to them. “So much can the long stretch of time alter.” And that, in a word, is why the mantle is not recognized either.

Let me draw my material from somewhere else now, so that Punic pride need not blush, or grieve, in the middle of Romans. Changing her dress is, after all, nature’s whole standing occupation, and the world we live in does it without stopping. [j]

Anaximander can see to it if he thinks there is more than one world; and so can whoever thinks another lies out in the country of the Meropes — the story Silenus poured into Midas’s ears, which were, it must be admitted, well shaped for even bigger fables. Even if Plato is right that there is a world of which ours is only the image, that one too would have to change; because if it is a world, it is made of different substances doing different work, on the pattern of what a world is here — and it will not be a world unless it is exactly as a world is. Things that are various and yet tend toward one are made various by changing. It is precisely their taking turns that binds the quarrel of their differences into a treaty. So every world will exist by change: its body built out of differences, its balance kept by turns.

At any rate this lodging of ours keeps shifting its shape, and that is plain to eyes that are shut, or as Homeric as you like. Day and night take turns. The sun varies by its stations through the year, the moon by its phases through the month. The stars, distinct in their crowding, now let something drop and now bring it back. The vault of the sky is bright with clear weather one hour and grim with cloud the next; or the rain comes down in a rush, with whatever else it brings along; then a light sprinkle; then the brightness again.

The sea has a poor reputation for honesty. One moment the breezes rock it evenly, and the calm gives it the look of an upright character, an even temper; the next it is heaving with mountains. And if you look at the earth, who loves to dress for the season, you would very nearly deny she is the same earth: you remember her green and you are looking at her yellow, and before long you will see her gray with frost. As for the rest of her ornament, which part of it is not exchanged for something else? The high ridges of her mountains come down in slides, the veins of her springs go dry, the beds of her rivers silt up.

There was a time when her whole globe was made over, drowned under all the waters at once. To this day seashells and tritons’ horns are living abroad on the mountaintops, eager to prove to Plato that even the heights have been under waves. Then, when the water drained away, her globe was made over again — a different shape, and yet the same. Even now she changes here and there wherever a place is damaged: when among her islands Delos is no longer there to be seen and Samos is a heap of sand, and the Sibyl is shown to be no liar; when the island in the Atlantic that matched Libya or Asia for size is looked for and not found; when a flank of Italy, cut through to the middle by the shattering charge of the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian, is left behind as Sicily; when that one whole stroke of severance flung the warring seas back on each other and gave the water a new vice — no longer spitting wrecks out, but swallowing them.

The mainland suffers too, whether from above or from within. Look at Palestine. Where the Jordan settles the boundary lines there is a huge waste, a bereaved country, land good for nothing. There were cities there once, and thriving peoples, and the ground gave its crops. Then, since God is a judge, godlessness earned itself a rain of fire. Sodom’s day is over, Gomorrah is gone, everything is ash, and the sea beside it, no less than the soil, is living out a death of its own. Such a cloud came over Etruria and burned down her old Volsinii — enough to teach Campania, and the snatching away of Pompeii taught her more, to keep her eyes on her own mountains. But may there be no more of it. I would rather Asia had no further cause to worry about the ground’s appetite, and that Africa had done her trembling once and for all before the chasm, and paid for it with the treacherous swallowing of one single camp.

A great many other such losses have altered the fashion of our globe and shifted particular places in it. Wars, too, have taken enormous liberties. But it is as tedious to run through disasters as to run through the turns of kingdoms and show how often they have changed, from Ninus son of Belus onward — if Ninus really did hold the first kingdom, as your own old pagan authorities claim. Your pens do not usually travel back past him. With the Assyrians, perhaps, the records of measured time begin to open. We, who read the divine histories as a matter of habit, have the whole subject from the birth of the world itself.

For the moment, though, I prefer the cheerful examples, since cheerful things are subject to change as well. Whatever the sea has washed away, the sky burned down, the earth undermined, the sword cut down, comes back at some other date by the turn of compensation. In the earliest days most of the globe was empty and unlived-in, and where a race had seized a piece of it, it existed for itself alone. And so at last the earth, understanding what she owed, decided to weed and thin her own abundance of people — packed tight in one place, deserting their posts in another — so that from them, as from grafts and cuttings, peoples might be planted from peoples and cities from cities across every region of her globe.

Migrations were made by the swarms of the surplus. The overflow of the Scythians fertilizes the Persians; the Phoenicians pour out into Africa; the Phrygians give birth to the Romans; the Chaldean seed is led out into Egypt and later, moved on from there, becomes the Jewish people. In the same way Hercules’s descendants go and occupy the Peloponnese for Temenus; Neleus’s Ionian companions stock Asia with new cities; the Corinthians under Archias fortify Syracuse.

But there is no point appealing to antiquity when our own lifetimes are in front of our eyes. How much of the globe the present age has made over! How many cities the threefold power of our present empire has produced, or enlarged, or restored! While God favors so many Augusti at once, how many populations have been moved elsewhere, how many peoples brought to heel, how many orders of society put back in their old splendor, how many barbarians disappointed! Our globe really is this empire’s beautifully kept estate: every poisonous root of hostility dug out, every thorn and briar of secretly clever friendship pulled up entirely, and the place itself more delightful than the orchard of Alcinous or the rose garden of Midas. So you praise our globe for its changes. Why then point the finger at a man?

Animals change their shape instead of their clothes. Not that the peacock has no clothes: he has plumage, and of the choicest kind — the bloom of his neck deeper than any purple, the sheen of his back more gilded than any border, the sweep of his tail longer than any train. Many-colored, other-colored, changing-colored; never itself, always another, and yet always itself when it is another; in a word, as changeable as it is movable. [v]

The snake deserves a mention too, though not in the same breath as the peacock. He too changes completely what was allotted to him — his hide and his age. When he feels old age creeping through him, so they say, and it is true, he squeezes himself into a tight place; he crawls into the cave and out of his skin at the same moment; and, shaved clean on the spot, he leaves the cast-off behind him the instant he is over the threshold and uncoils in a new youth. He throws off his years with his scales. The hyena, if you watch, keeps a yearly sex, male and female by turns. I say nothing of the stag, who is the witness of his own age, and who eats a snake and then sickens with the poison — into youth. And there is also

Pacuvius’s tortoise, you think? No. There is another small animal the verse fits: extremely moderate in size, but enormous in name. If you have never seen one and you are told about a chameleon, you will at once imagine something huge with a lion joined onto it. Then you come across him — usually in a vineyard, his whole bulk sheltering under one vine leaf — and you laugh out loud at the outrageous nerve of the name. There is not even moisture in his body, though far smaller creatures have fluid in theirs.

The chameleon is a living skin. His little head starts straight off his spine, since he has no neck, so bending back is hard work for him; but for looking about him, his eyes shoot out — or rather they are two turning points of light. Dull and tired, he barely lifts a foot from the ground and drags it forward in a daze: he demonstrates a step rather than takes one. He is always fasting and never faints. He feeds with his mouth open. He chews the cud by heaving like a bellows. His food is wind. And still the chameleon can carry out a complete change of himself, and that is his whole accomplishment. His own color is properly one color; but the moment anything has come near him, he blushes. To the chameleon alone has it been granted, as our common saying has it, to play with his own hide.

All that had to be said so that, properly prepared, we could arrive at man. Whatever beginning you allow him, he came out of his maker’s hands naked, at any rate, and unclothed. Afterwards, without waiting to be given leave, he helped himself to wisdom by grabbing at it early. Then and there he hurried to cover in advance what, in a body so newly made, modesty had no call yet to cover, and he put fig leaves around himself for the time being. Then, driven out of the country he was born in because he had sinned, he went into the world dressed in skins, the way a man goes to the mines.

But that is inside knowledge, and it is not everyone’s to have. Come, let us hear it from your own stock instead — the stock the Egyptians tell, and Alexander digests, and Alexander’s mother reads. It concerns the time of Osiris, when Ammon, rich in sheep, comes to him out of Libya. Mercury was among them, they say, and being delighted with the softness of a ram he happened to stroke, he flayed a small ewe; and while he kept working at it, drawing the thread out finer and finer as the give of the material invited him, he wove it into the shape of the old net he used to join together out of strips of flax. You, however, have preferred to hand the whole management of wool-work and the arrangement of the loom to Minerva — although the harder-working shop was Arachne’s.

From then on there was material in plenty. I say nothing of the sheep of Miletus, or Selge, or Altinum, or the ones that made Tarentum and Baetica famous, with nature for their dyer. I am pointing out that bushes supply you with clothing, and that the grassy stems of flax lose their green and turn white in the wash. And it was not enough to plant and sow your tunic; you had to draw your wardrobe out of the water as well. The sea produces fleeces too, since the brighter shells with their mossy wool furnish a hairy fiber. And it is no secret that the silkworm — a sort of small worm — brings back safe and whole the fleecy threads that she draws out through the air, stretching them more skilfully than the sundial webs of spiders, and then devours. In the same way, if you kill her, the threads you wind off are at once alive with vivid color.

So the ingenuities of the tailor’s trade, added on to this abundance of material and following it up — first to cover the human race, with Necessity leading the way, and afterwards to decorate it as well, and to puff it up, with Ambition following behind — have brought out the various forms of clothing. Of these forms, some belong to particular nations and are not shared by the rest; others are universal, being useful to everybody. This Mantle, for instance: Greek rather than Latin though it is, it has by now found a home in Latium in the language. The garment came in with the word. And so the very man who used to sentence Greeks to be thrown out of the city, and who learned their alphabet and their speech only when he was already advanced in years — Cato himself — did the Greeks no less a favor with his mantle-like dress when he bared his shoulder during his praetorship.