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.
[Illustration: Fig. 8--Princess Frock: Tiryns--_By permission of John
Murray_, Schliemann's _Tiryns_, plate xxv. c]
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.
[Illustration: Fig. 9--Costume of Women--Tirynthian Vase By permission
of John Murray, Esq. Schliemann's _Tiryns_, plate. xvii. a]
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_,
v. 425) Athene mockingly tells Zeus that the wounded Aphrodite must
have scratched her hand, while caressing some Achaean woman, on her
_περόνη_, the term "_safety_ pin," or _fibula,_ does not apply. We
think rather of one of the long sharp stiletto-like pins found in
Egyptian deposits of from about 1450 to 1200 B.C. and also at Enkomi
in Cyprus, and at Sparta in the Orthia sanctuary from 900 to 500
B.C.[11] Fibulae of the same date also occur. These great pins had
ribbed handles, and below the handle was a perforation or a metallic
loop.[12] Now very long pins, also with ribbed handles, but without the
aperture in the middle, fasten the peplos of one of the Fates on the
Francis vase, which Mr. Evans dates in "the seventh century," but Mr.
Walters--from the characters in the inscriptions on the vase--dates
about 570-550 B.C.[13] The Spartan evidence for the pin and fibulae
covers the later range of dates.
[Illustration: Fig. 10.--Metope of Athene, Olympia _Photo: English
Photographic Co., Athens._]
Much turns on the date of the François vase, for many critics, with
Studniczka, consider that the costume of the female figures is like
that which Homer's women wear, and is a "Doric peplos." Thus Miss
Abrahams, in her Greek Dress (1908, pp. 29, 30) studies the arraying
of Hera.[14] Of her dress Homer says, χρυσείῃς δ' ἐνετῇσι κατὰ στῆθος
περονᾶτο: "And she fastened it _over her breast_ with clasps of gold."
"We gather from this passage," says Miss Abrahams, "that the garment
was fastened _on the shoulders_ by brooches or pins inserted κατὰ
στῆθος, which Studniczka rightly interprets as '_down towards the
breast_,' a method of fastening which is represented on the François
vase and elsewhere." "The material," Miss Abrahams goes on, "is drawn
from the back, and wraps over that which covers the front, _the pins
are then inserted downwards_, and hold the two thicknesses of material
together...."
But (see fig. 11) the pins are inserted _upwards_; we observe the
long ribbed head of the pin, of known form like that of the 1450-1200
B.C. pins of Egypt and Enkomi, stuck into the fabric above the right
breast. It penetrates the fabric, and passes upwards into a large
oval shoulder piece, perhaps the tail of the piece of cloth which
covers the decorated collar over the shoulder-joint. The Homeric
phrase "pins inserted _down towards_ the _breast_" does not indicate
this mode of fastening, which is _upwards from_ the breast. "A method
practically impossible--the pin would fall out," says Mr. Dawkins.
"If so, blame the artist." Neither the "overfold" (ἀπόπτυγμα) nor the
curious oval piece on the shoulder-joint (perhaps a portion of the
fabric) is mentioned by Homer. Again, when we read,[15] "the dress is
held into the figure by a girdle worn round the waist, over which any
superfluous length of material could be drawn, forming a κόλπος or
pouch," we must remember that in the dress on the François vase _there
is no superfluous material_. The dress ends just above the heels,
there is no "tunic-trailing"; as in Homer. A woman who drew her dress
up to form a κόλπος or pouch, would show much more of her legs than
was fashionable in the archaic period, and would destroy the collant
fit over the breast. The costume fits tightly to the bust; and in art
of 600-550 B.C. this is the rule. We see no women "with deep κόλπος
or pouch," whereas the nurse of Eumaeus could conceal three cups in
her pouch. Here, again, Mr. Dawkins thinks that the limitations of
the artist cause the absence of the _kolpos_. "He made any dress
look tight, because he could only draw his idea of the body and then
indicate dress on the body. The artist has two mental images, one of
the natural body and the other of the dress, and he could only carry
out his work by combining the two."
But I must reply that, in the François vase, we are far from the
"primitive" artist. The artist knows very well what he is about. He
draws short skirts and over the bust the dress is _collant_, because
that is the fashion. The painter no longer draws impossible waists,
they are in good proportion for girls. Moreover, artists of the same
period when they design a woman in a mantle do so in the modern way.
The bust is indicated; the mantle does not cover it, but covers the
waist, and no attempt is made to show what the artist knows is there:
he does not design what is not in sight. Even an Australian black
fellow drew what he saw, not what he knew was there, in sketches
of white ladies.[16] We must not explain the François vase by the
limitations of "primitive art."
[Illustration: Fig. 11.--The Fates on the François Vase--From Miss
Abraham's _Greek Dress_ (_J. Murray_)]
My impression is that in the eighth to seventh centuries women still
did, at least occasionally, wear a costume consisting, as in Aegean
times, of separate bodices and skirts. Thus in an archaic Corinthian
gold jewel we see an Ariadne naked from the belt upwards, beneath is
a skirt falling to the instep. Skirts were therefore separate, and
imply a separate bodice, if the upper body is to be covered[17] (fig.
12).
[Illustration: Fig. 12.--Ariadne, Theseus, and Minotaur From a
Corinthian Gold Ornament From _Arch. Ztg._., 1884]
The pouch is Homeric, but in art of 600-550 B.C. no woman, as far as I
have observed, has any "superfluous length of material," or, at least,
almost none draws it up through the girdle to form such a pouch as
we see on Miss Abrahams's fig. 10 (Metope from the temple of Zeus at
Olympia). The wearer could hide the family plate in her pouch, not so
the women of the Francois vase. Such a costume cannot be called, as a
rule, τανυπέπλος, or ἑλκεσίπεπλος, "trailing robed," like Homer's women.
Thus the Greek dress of the seventh to sixth century, when many artists
drew what they saw under no "primitive" limitations, is not Homeric.
Homeric female dress is loose and flowing, and trailing. Archaic Greek
female dress is tight, not flowing, not trailing. Historic Hellenic
female dress is loose, flowing, and trailing; it returns to the Homeric
type. In holding these opinions we are not, then, deluded by the
freedom of Homer's art; he insists on the _kolpos_, or loose fold which
makes a pouch, and on the trailing loose peplos; nor, at least in my
opinion, are we deluded by the stiffness of archaic art, which really
represents the brevity and tightness of the prevailing fashion.
Thus we cannot cite the François vase "in illustration of the Homeric
peplos."[18] The François dress is not trailing, nor is it pouched,
nor is it Homeric. A thick, round, embroidered collar with no apparent
breach in its continuity is either pinned or sewn over the François
peplos, and the overlap is tight enough to indicate the bust very
gracefully. Moreover, the costume of Athene[19] is not that of the
François vase (fig. 13). _Both_, I think, cannot be "the closed Doric
dress." Athene has a garment much more flowing than that of the
François dress; and, unlike that costume, it has a pouch, though her
dress falls rather lower than that of the François ladies; and she
has no thick collar, and no long pins thrust up from the breast.[20]
Athene's dress would be long and trailing, if it were not drawn up
through the girdle. By the date of the Olympian figure of Athene, Greek
female dress had moved back from the fashion of the François costume
towards that which Homer knew and described.
We now reach the strange story which Herodotus tells to account for the
alleged enforced change of Athenian women's costume from the peplos
fastened with long stiletto-like pins, as in the François vase (an
Athenian work of art), to the Ionic dress, which had no long pins.
The women, he says, slew, with their long pins, a messenger who bore
the tale of the massacre of their husbands; and the men therefore
compelled them to wear the Ionian linen chiton, which does not require
the _περόνη_, the stiletto pin.[21] The event was of the first half
of the sixth century; 568 B.C. is the date conjectured, which tallies
fairly with Mr. Walters's dating of the François vase made while long
pins were still fashionable. But if the wearing of Ionic costume were,
as Miss Abrahams supposes, one of the luxuries which Solon (594 B.C.)
tried to check, then we must date the François vase in the seventh
century. Yet the costume of the vase, with its expensive embroideries,
is much more "luxurious" than the linen Ionian chiton or smock. In any
case it is certain, from the dangerous long pins of, say, 1200 B.C. at
Enkomi and in Greek deposits in Egypt, that women wore these stiletto
pins five centuries before they did so at Athens, in, say, 620-560 B.C.
So Homer had his mind, when Aphrodite scratched her hand with an
Achaean woman's pin, on Achaean female dress, not on that of Athenians
of the seventh or sixth century.
[Illustration: Fig. 13.--Historic Greek Costume From Leaf's _Homer's
Iliad_ vol. ii. (_Macmillan & Co. Ltd_.)]
In short, Homeric female dress was not introduced into the Epics by any
"recension," by any interpolators of any post-Achaean date, as Pinza
argues that it was.[22] He supposes the Ionian female costume to be a
long linen smock with short sleeves.
Pinza argues that the costume of women in Homer "is wholly different
from that of Spartan ladies of archaic and classical times; and, on the
other hand, exhibits many analogies with the more antique linen chiton
with short sleeves, certainly of Asiatico-Semitic origin, as is proved
by the etymology of the name" (chiton).[23] He supposes the Ionian
costume of women, described as a long linen smock with short sleeves,
to be derived, through Phoenicia, from the Syria of, say, 690 B.C.,
citing Hebrew female captives in Layard's _Monuments of Nineveh_ (i.
plates 61, 83, and others). In plate 61 we see a tall female captive,
wearing a long garment, with a broad fringe over her head, and below it
another long garment with short tight sewn sleeves, and a broad border
which falls over the legs, leaving them bare from the calf. There are
no pins or fibulae visible; the upper garment hides the girdle, if
girdle there be. In plate 65 two figures of goddesses are carried, on
chairs, in a procession. They wear long sewn smocks, with sewn sleeves
ending above the elbows, and with very broad belts. The dresses end
above the ankle bones. They are far from being loose or trailing; no
pins or fibulae appear. The same costume, without any girdle, is worn
by two women in a kitchen: they seem to have bodices and skirts (plate
30). The sleeves have no small round brooches like the Ionian chiton,
which, like the Assyrian dresses, reached the feet (ποδήρης).
Miss Abrahams remarks that it is a mistake to suppose the Doric chiton
to have been always fastened by pins or brooches, the Ionic always
sewn on the shoulders (like those quoted from Assyrian monuments).
In many Greek works of art, a chiton, clearly Ionic, is not sewn on
the shoulders, but fastened down the upper arm by a series of small
brooches.[24] The Assyrian dresses often answer to the Ionic chiton
as thus described, but are _without any brooches_; and they are much
shorter than the Ionic chiton, which, as thus described, is always
longer than the height of the wearer; "the superfluous length is
drawn up through the girdle to form a _kolpos_, which varies in depth
according to the length of the chiton."[25] Not so in archaic Greek
art! In any case, the Ionic dress as described is much longer than that
of the Assyrian designs, has a kolpos, where they have none, and may
either be sewn, like them, over the shoulder, or, unlike them, may be
fastened over the upper arm with small brooches. Thus the Ionic, _as
described_, is not the same as the Syrian, when the Ionic has brooches;
nor is it, in my opinion the female costume of the Greek vases of the
seventh and early sixth centuries.
In Layard's plate 67 A, from the Assyrian monuments, we see two of the
captive women from Lachish kneeling and giving suck to their children.
Their smocks are tight, girdled, and reach the heels. The dress of
the upper woman has short sleeves on both arms, and the line where
it crosses below the neck is perfectly well marked. How the infant,
in these circumstances, reaches the natural source of nourishment is
a deep mystery. In the figure of the lower woman certain faint lines
appear to indicate that the dress has been opened at the centre of the
neck and drawn aside over one breast. In neither case is there any
trace of fibula, pin, button, or hook and eye, or loose hanging flap.
Pinza, however,[26] finds here an exact parallel to Hera's peplos in
_Iliad_, xiv. 175, "fastened over her breast with clasps of gold,"
that is, "fastened on the shoulders by brooches or pins inserted down
towards the breast"; and this, again, is said to be illustrated (as
above) by the François vase. In answer, it may suffice to look at the
two pictures, Layard 67 A and the Fates on the François vase. A simple
button and button-hole, as Pinza remarks, in the dress below the centre
of the neck, would, if withdrawn, do all that these Hebrew babies need.
A man may illustrate this for himself by opening his shirt at the
collar stud. The lower Hebrew woman might even be naked above the belt,
like the kneeling woman just beneath her, were it not for the line of
her dress across her neck. She has no sleeves. There is no sign of any
openings at the shoulders or _precisaménte come l' ἑανός della Epopea_.
These Assyrian designs do not, it seems to me, encourage the opinion
that Hebrew female costume of the date of Hezekiah, say, 690 B.C.,
was thrust into Homer about that period, at an Ionian "recension,"
and remained there unaltered by later "recensions."[27] The brooched
costume of Homeric women is not the sewn costume of the Assyrian art.
Other Hebrew ladies from Lachish wear the long piece of cloth over
their heads, falling to the top of the ankle, and under that a tight
smock of the same length. There is no girdle, the arms are bare, no
fibulae are shown.[28] As the Syrian female costume never shows brooch,
pin, or fibula, it certainly cannot be the origin of the Homeric or the
Doric peplos, or of the brooched historical costume of Hellas.
Meanwhile a mere untutored man who looks at the Fates on the François
vase thinks, I find, that the embroidered overlap is simply a short
jacket worn over the peplos, This appears to be an error. But I had,
as an amateur, come to the conclusion that the dress of the women
in archaic Greek art often consists of sewn bodice and skirt, or of
a tight jacket with a separate skirt, not of the peplos. Mr. Myres
had already expressed similar opinions as to the late survival (or
revival?) of that Aegean costume.[29]
Moreover, Mr. Walters, judging from vase-paintings, says, "The Ionic
costume is introduced about 500 B.C., but its vogue does not seem to
have lasted long at Athens."[30]
Perdrizet thought that the archaic costume more resembled the Mycenaean
(or Aegean) than the Doric style; while Mr. Wace (in the catalogue of
the museum at Sparta), Mr. Leaf, Mr. Dawkins, and others hold that the
archaic dress is merely a long chiton tied at the waist. This question
of the late survival, or revival, of non-Homeric Aegean female costume
is thus delicate and obscure, though I have little or no doubt that it
did in many cases survive or was revived.
The woman in the archaic sepulchral monument from Etruria (British
Museum) wears a short jacket, and a very brief skirt; and a woman in
a leaden figurine of Sparta wears only a girdle and a kirtle. She is
running, and has thrown off her jacket or bodice. An archaic Victory, a
terra cotta in the British Museum, wears only a very short skirt.[31]
The Ariadne of an archaic Corinthian jewel, in a belted skirt, with no
bodice, has already been cited.
Thus the evidence of art, in the dark period of, say, 900-700 B.C.,
inclines me to believe that women sometimes wore shaped and sewn
bodices and skirts, or jackets and skirts; sometimes a strait brooched
and girdled peplos, not flowing, not trailing, not Homeric; that there
was none of the Homeric uniformity of attire. Varieties of fashion are
not discordant with feminine nature.
[1] _Studien zur Ilias_, von Carl Robert, Berlin, 1901.
[2] The Menzies tartan is of white and pink checks, which the artist
renders lovingly.
[3] Schliemann, _Tiryns_, plate xvii. Studniczka, _Altgr. Tracht_.
[4] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 596.
[5] _Iliad_, v. 425, xiv. 180, xviii. 401.
[6] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. pp. 595-598.
[7] Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i. pp. 553-577.
[8] _Tiryns_, plate xvii.
[9] In northern Aragon.
[10] _Scripta Minoa_, vol. i. p. 282.
[11] _B. S. A_., vol. xiii. pp. no, 113.
[12] _Journal of the Anthrop. Institute_, vol. xxx., 1900, p. 203, fig.
2. Evans on "Mycenaean Cyprus."
[13] Walters, _History of Ancient Pottery_, vol. ii. p. 270.
[14] _Iliad_, xiv. 175 _et seqq_.
[15] _Greek Dress_, p. 30.
[16] Mrs. Langloh Parker, _Australian Legendary Tales_.
[17] See fig. 2 in Roscher's _Lexikon_, ii. 2. 3007.
[18] _Greek Dress_, p. 44.
[19] _Ibid_., fig. 10.
[20] Here, it must be said, Mr. Dawkins dissents, not seeing any
difference in the two costumes. I think that is because he supposes the
François artist not to be able to draw what he sees; for the dresses
seem, in fact, to me different.
[21] Herodotus, v. 87.
[22] Pinza, _Hermes_, 1909, p. 526.
[23] _Ibid._ pp. 527, 528.
[24] _Greek Dress_, p. 60.
[25] _Greek Costume_, p. 60.
[26] Pinza, _Hermes_, p. 538.
[27] _Ibid_. p. 526.
[28] Layard, _Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 152.
[29] _Proceedings British School of Athens_, vol. ix. p. 386, citing
the difference of colour, and we may add of decorative design, on
the part of the costume above, and the part below the girdle. This
difference could not always occur in a dress all of one piece. For
example, see the female figures incised on the fragments of a corslet
of bronze plates at Olympia (_Bronzen_, plate lix.). But this question
is _sub judice_; it is argued that the difference of pattern and colour
in upper and lower parts of the dress is a decorative caprice of the
artist, and corresponds to nothing that he saw in women's costume. It
is impossible to deny that Ariadne in the archaic Corinthian piece of
gold-work has come to see the Minotaur killed, wearing her skirt, and
leaving her bodice in her bedroom (Roscher's _Lexikon_, ii. 2. 3007,
fig. 2).
[30] _History of Ancient Pottery_, vol. ii. p. 200.
[31] Cf. _B.S.A._, vol. xii. p. 323, fig. K.