From Toga to Pallium

Now then. If being Roman is everybody’s safety, how is it that you are Greek to a considerable degree — and in points that do you no credit? Or if that is not so, then where in the world do provinces with a better upbringing get it from? Provinces that nature fitted rather for wrestling a hard soil by hard work — where do they pick up the pastimes of the Greek wrestling ground, pastimes that come to a feeble old age and labor for nothing: the smearing with mud, the rolling in sand, the athlete’s dry diet? Where does it come from that some of our own Numidians — men whose long hair is made longer still with horsehair plumes — learn to tell the barber to shave their scalp close and leave only the crown untouched? Where does it come from that shaggy, hairy men learn to teach the resin to strip their backside so greedily, and the tweezers to weed their chin so slyly? It is a marvel that all this goes on without the pallium! This whole Asiatic routine belongs with the pallium. What have you to do with an athlete’s refinements, Libya — or you, Europe — when you do not know how to dress for them? For really, what sort of thing is it to take up Greek hair-plucking rather than Greek clothes? [a]

A change of clothes comes near to being blameworthy just so far as what undergoes the change is not custom but nature. There is difference enough between the honor owed to the times and the honor owed to religion. Let custom keep faith with the times, and nature with God.

It was nature, then, that the hero from Larissa shocked when he turned himself into a girl — he who had been raised on the marrow of wild animals, which is where the make-up of his name comes from as well, since his lips had been strangers to his mother’s breast; he who had been brought up in a stony schoolroom by a trainer who lived among rocks and woods and was a monster besides. In a boy you would put up with a mother’s anxiety. But he was already grown hairy; he had already, in secret, given someone proof of his manhood — and then he agrees to wear the long flowing robe, to have his hair done, to look after his skin, to consult the mirror, to hang ornaments on his neck; made womanish even in the ear, by piercing, and the trace of it still shows on his statue at Sigeum.

Afterwards, of course, he turned soldier, because necessity gave him his sex back. The war trumpet had sounded, and weapons were not far to look for. Homer says, “Iron itself draws a man on.” If he had gone on with his maidenhood after that spur as well as before it, he might have got married into the bargain! There, then, is your change. A monster, I call him — a double monster: from man to woman, and presently from woman back to man. He ought neither to have given the truth the lie nor to have confessed the trick. Both ways of changing were bad: the one against nature, the other against his own safety.

It was still more disgraceful when lust, rather than a mother’s fear, transformed a man’s dress — and yet worship is offered by you, if you please, to the one you ought to blush for: that club-carrier, arrow-carrier, hide-wearer, who traded the whole proud inheritance of his name for a woman’s outfit. Such license was allowed in the hidden corners of Lydia that Hercules was prostituted in Omphale and Omphale in Hercules. Where was Diomedes now, with his bloody feeding troughs? Where was Busiris and his funeral altars? Where Geryon, three men in one? The club would rather have gone on reeking with their brains than be pestered with ointments. The old stains of the Hydra’s blood and the Centaurs’ on his arrows were rubbed away bit by bit with pumice — a stone that knows all about hairpins — while luxury sneered at the thought that shafts which had run monsters through might now be stitching a garland.

No decent woman, no heroine of any standing, would have risked her shoulders under the hide of such an animal without a long course of softening and smoothing and deodorizing — done in Omphale’s house with balsam and fenugreek salve, I hope; and I suppose the mane submitted to the comb as well — for fear her soft neck should take on a lion’s roughness. The gaping mouth stuffed full of her hair, the back teeth lost among her curls, the whole face outraged: it would have roared if it could. Nemea groaned, at any rate, if the place has a spirit of its own; for she looked around then and saw that she had lost her lion. What Hercules was like in Omphale’s silk, the description of Omphale in Hercules’ hide has already told you.

Then again there was the man who had once rivaled the hero of Tiryns — the boxer Cleomachus — who afterwards, at Olympia, melted out of his manhood by an unbelievable change: bruised inside his skin and out, fit to be crowned among the Fullers of Novius, and deservedly remembered by the mime-writer Lentulus in his Catinensians. Naturally he not only covered with bracelets the marks the boxing thongs had left, but also replaced the coarse roughness of his athlete’s cloak with some exquisitely woven stuff. About Physco and Sardanapalus I must keep quiet — men nobody would recognize as kings except for their eminence in lust. But I must keep quiet, for fear that even they start muttering about certain of your own Caesars, every bit as shameless; for fear that a dog’s persistence should be ordered to point out a Caesar filthier than Physco, softer than Sardanapalus, a second Nero in fact.

The force of vainglory works just as hotly toward a change of clothing, even where manhood is kept intact. Every passion is a heat; but once it is fanned into affectation, the blaze of glory makes it a fever at once. That is the fuel you see a great king seething on — a man second only to his own glory. He had conquered the Median nation, and was conquered by Median dress. He took off his triumphal armor and demoted himself into the trousers of the defeated. His chest, cut into relief by the scaly studs of his mail, he bared by covering it with a see-through fabric; still panting from the work of war, and going soft, he put the fire out with airy silk. The Macedonian’s spirit was not swollen enough unless his clothes were inflated too.

Except that philosophers, I believe, go in for something of the same kind themselves; for I hear there has been such a thing as doing philosophy in purple. And if a philosopher can appear in purple, why not in gilded slippers as well? For a man who affects Tyrian to be shod in anything but gold is not at all in keeping with Greek habits. Someone will say, “Ah, but there was another man who wore silk right enough, and put bronze sandals on his feet.” Fittingly so: in order that the hem of his Bacchic robe should make some sort of tinkle, he walked about in cymbals. But if Diogenes had been barking out of his tub at that moment, he would not have trodden on him with muddy feet, as the Platonic couches can testify; he would have carried Empedocles bodily down into the secret recesses of the Cloacinae, so that a man who had madly supposed himself a heavenly being might greet his sisters first, as one god to another, and human beings afterwards.

Clothes, then, that estrange a man from nature and from decency — let it be counted fair to stare at them, to point them out with a finger, to laugh them down with a jerk of the head. In the same way, if a man went about in a dainty robe trailing on the ground with all the softness of a Menander, he would hear the comic poet’s line turned on himself: “What sort of cloak is that madman ruining?” For now that the censor’s knitted brow has long since been smoothed out, as far as rebuke goes, everybody’s indiscriminate practice puts on show for us: freedmen in a knight’s dress, branded slaves in a gentleman’s, men of notorious disgrace in the dress of the freeborn, country clowns in the dress of townsmen, buffoons in the dress of lawyers, civilians in uniform. The corpse-carrier, the pimp and the gladiator trainer dress the way you do.

Now turn to the women. You have to look at the thing Caecina Severus pressed on the senate’s serious attention: married women in public without the stole. In fact the penalty laid down in the decrees of Lentulus the augur, for any matron who had discharged herself this way, was the same as for fornication — because certain matrons had been busily promoting the disuse of the very clothes that were the evidence and the guard of their dignity, on the grounds that they got in the way of prostitution. But now, prostituting themselves, so that they can be approached more easily, they have renounced stole and shift and headband and cap; yes, and the very litters and closed chairs in which they used to be kept private and out of sight even in public. And while one woman puts out the ornaments that belong to her, another blazes with ornaments that do not. Look at the streetwalkers, the meat market of the public’s lusts; look too at the women who take other women. And if it is better to turn your eyes away from such shameful sights of chastity butchered in the open, still, just glance sideways: you will see at once that they are matrons. And while the woman who runs a brothel airs her billowing silk, and comforts a neck filthier than her own house with necklaces, and slides hands that are party to every shameful thing into armlets — the sort matrons themselves would not have hesitated to appropriate out of the decorations awarded to brave men — and fits the pure white or pink shoe onto an impure leg: why do you not stare at outfits like those?

Or, again, at the outfits that falsely plead religion in support of their novelty? For the sake of an all-white dress, the distinction of a headband and the privilege of a helmet, some get initiated into the rites of Ceres. Out of an opposite craving for gloomy clothing and a dark woolen covering on the head, others go raving in Bellona’s temple. And the attraction of wrapping yourself in a tunic with a broader purple stripe and throwing a Galatian scarlet cloak over your shoulders is what makes Saturn appealing. When this pallium itself, arranged with stricter care, and sandals of the Greek pattern, are worn to flatter Asclepius — how much more ought you then to accuse it and go at it with your eyes as guilty of superstition, though of a superstition plain and unaffected! Certainly, once it clothes this wisdom that renounces the superstitions along with all their emptiness, then the pallium is beyond question a robe of majesty above every garment you dress your gods and goddesses in, and a priestly vestment above all the caps and tufts of your Salii and your flamens. Lower your eyes, I advise you, and respect the garment — on this one ground for the moment, without waiting for any other: that it renounces your error.

You say: “Still — must we really change like this, from the toga to the pallium?” Why: what if it were from a crown and a scepter? Did Anacharsis change any differently, when he preferred philosophy to the kingship of Scythia? Grant that there are no signs to prove your transformation is for the better — there is still something this dress of yours can do. [u]

Begin with how simply it is put on: it needs no tedious arranging. There is no need for a specialist to lay out its creased folds a day beforehand, then work them down to a more finished elegance, then hand the whole contrivance of the piled-up knot over to the clips to keep. Then at daybreak he must gather up with a belt the tunic that would have been better woven a moderate length in the first place; go over the knot again and put right whatever has slipped; bring one section forward on the left; then, having finished with the folds, draw the sweep of it back from the shoulders, where the hanging pocket is formed; and, leaving the right shoulder free, pile the rest on the left again, keeping back another set of folds like the first for the back — and so dress a man in a load. In short, I will keep putting it to your own conscience: what is the first thing you feel when you wear a toga? Do you feel clothed, or loaded? Are you wearing a garment, or carrying one? If you say no, I will follow you home. I will see what you hurry to do the moment you are across your own threshold. There really is no garment whose taking-off congratulates a man more than the toga’s does.

Of shoes we say nothing — instruments of torture that go with the toga, the filthiest possible protection for the feet, and a dishonest one at that. For who would not find it better to stiffen in cold and heat with bare feet than in a shoe with his feet tied? A mighty fortification for the tread the shoe factories of Venetia have provided, in the shape of soft boots. But nothing is quicker than the pallium — even a double one, like the one Crates wore. There is nowhere in it any compulsory waste of time in dressing, since its whole art is to cover you loosely. One throw of it round you does the job, and a throw that is in no way awkward: it covers the whole man at once. The shoulder it either leaves bare or wraps up; for the rest, it clings to the shoulder. It has nothing propping it up all round; it has nothing tying it round; it has no anxiety about whether its folds are keeping faith. It handles easily and rights itself easily; and when it comes off, it is not handed over to a cross until morning. If a shirt is worn under it, the torment of a belt is unnecessary; if anything is worn on the feet, it is the cleanest sort of work — or else the feet go bare, which is at any rate more manly than shoes. So much for the pallium in the meantime, so far as you have slandered it by name. Now, though, it takes you on over what it does as well.

“I owe no service to the forum, the voting ground or the senate house. I keep no fawning vigil; I stake out no platform in advance; I hover about no governor’s residence. I do not sniff at the water channels; I do not bow to the courtroom railings. I am no habitual wearer-out of benches, no wholesale overturner of laws, no barking advocate, no judge, no soldier, no king. I have withdrawn from the crowd. My only business is with myself — apart from that one care I have none, except the care not to care. The better life you would enjoy more in retirement than in public. “But you will run me down as idle. ‘We are to live for our country, for the empire, for our property.’ That is how people used to feel. Nobody is born for someone else, since he is bound to die for himself. At any rate, when we come to the Epicuruses and the Zenos, you give the name of wise men to the whole teaching guild of Quiet — men who have consecrated that Quiet under the name of the highest and the only pleasure. “Still, even I will be allowed to do the public some good, up to a point. From any boundary stone or altar at all it is my habit to prescribe medicines for morals — medicines that will do more for the health of public business, of states and of empires, than your labors do. In fact, if I go at you with the buttons off the foils: togas have done the commonwealth more harm than breastplates have.

“What is more, I flatter no vices. I give no quarter to lethargy, or to any lazy scab. I put the cautery to the ambition that made Marcus Tullius buy a round citrus-wood table for five hundred thousand sesterces, and Asinius Gallus pay twice as much for a plain table of the same Moorish wood — think what fortunes they set on a bit of mottled grain! — and Sulla have serving dishes made at seventy pounds’ weight apiece. And I am afraid that scale is a small one, when a Drusillanus — a slave of Claudius, no less — builds a serving tray weighing three hundred and sixty pounds: a tray the tables just mentioned could hardly do without, and one for which, if a workshop had to be put up, a dining room should have been put up as well. “I sink the scalpel just as deep into the inhumanity that made Vedius Pollio throw slaves out to fill the bellies of his lampreys. Delighted, no doubt, with a savagery nobody had thought of before, he kept land monsters that had no teeth, no claws, no horns; it was his pleasure to force his fish into being wild beasts — fish that were to be cooked straight afterwards, so that in their insides he too might get some taste of the bodies of his own slaves. “I will prune away the gluttony that made Hortensius the orator the first man with the heart to kill a peacock for food; that made Aufidius Lurco the first to spoil meat with stuffing and work it up with forcemeat to a bastard flavor; that made Asinius Celer pay six thousand sesterces for the meat of a single mullet; that made Aesopus the actor keep in his pantry a dish worth a hundred thousand, built out of birds every bit as expensive — all of them songbirds and talkers; that made his son, after a treat like that, bold enough to hunger for something still more sumptuous, for he swallowed pearls down, costly for their very name, I suppose so as not to have dined more beggarly than his father. I say nothing about the Neros and the Apiciuses and the Rufuses. I will give a purge to the filth of a Scaurus, the gambling of a Curius, the drunkenness of an Antony. And remember that these men, out of all the many I have named, were men of the toga — the sort you would not easily find among the men of the pallium. Who is going to clear out these abscesses of a state and drain them, if not a speech in a pallium?”

“It was with a speech,” says my opponent, “that you tried to persuade me — a most sage remedy.” “But even if speech is mute — blocked by an inability to talk, or else checked by shyness, since life is content with a philosophy that has no tongue at all — my very cut is eloquent. A philosopher, in fact, is heard as long as he is seen. The mere sight of me makes vices blush. Who is not hurt at the sight of his own rival? Who can bear to look with his eyes at the man he cannot bear to look at in his mind? Great is the benefit the pallium confers, when the bare thought of it makes bad character blush outright. “Let philosophy see to the question of her own usefulness; she is not the only companion I can boast of. I boast of other skilled arts of public use as well. Out of my stock are clothed the man who first teaches the shapes of the letters, the man who first explains their sounds, the man who first drills the beginnings of arithmetic, the grammarian, the rhetorician, the sophist, the doctor, the poet, the man who beats time for the musicians, the astrologer and the bird-watcher. Everything liberal in the way of study is covered by my four corners. “ ‘True — but all of these rank lower than Roman knights.’ “Well: but your gladiator trainers, and their whole disgraceful following, are led into the arena in togas. That, no doubt, is the indignity meant by ‘from toga to pallium!’ ” [ae]

So the pallium speaks. But I grant it a partnership with a divine school and discipline as well. Rejoice, pallium, and be glad! A better philosophy has thought you worth its honor, from the day you began to be a Christian’s clothing.