The Toga and Roman Identity

Ursula Rothe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781472571557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

This book traces the toga's history from its origins in the Etruscan garment known as the tebenna, through its use as an everyday garment in the Republican period to its increasingly exclusive role as a symbol of privilege in the Principate and its decline in use in late antiquity. It aims to shift the scholarly view of the toga from one dominated by its role as a feature of Roman art to one in which it is seen as an everyday object and a highly charged symbol that in its various forms was central to the definition and negotiation of important gender, age and status boundaries, as well as political stances and ideologies. It discusses the toga's significance not just in Rome itself, but also in the provinces, where it reveals ideas about cultural identity, status and the role of the Roman state. The Toga and Roman Identity shows that, by looking in detail at the history of Rome's national garment, we can gain a better understanding of the complexities of Roman identity for different groups in society, as well as what it meant, at any given time, to be 'Roman'.

1

Introduction

In 390 BCE, after defeating the Romans at the Battle of the Allia, a band of Gallic forces moved south and sacked the city of Rome.¹ This event went on to play a significant role in the Romans’ sense of their own history, and centuries later the so-called metus Gallicus remained a central paradigm of military ideology and foreign policy.² But it is one later historical account of it that is particularly illuminating for the subject of this book:

At Rome the appropriate arrangements for defending the arx were complete, and the old men returned to their homes to await the arrival of their enemies with hearts that were steeled to die. Those of them that had held curule magistracies put on their stately robes (augustissima vestis), so that they might face death dressed in the symbols of their ancient rank and office … and, thus clothed, they sat down on ivory chairs in the middle of their houses.… [The Gauls] found the houses of the plebeians locked, but the halls of the nobles open; and they hesitated almost more to enter the open houses than those that were shut, so close to religious awe were they when they saw, seated in the vestibules, beings who, apart from the fact that their ornaments and clothing (ornatus habitusque) seemed more splendid (augustior) than could adorn human beings, appeared also, in the majesty of their countenance and the gravity of their expression, almost like gods.

Livy 5.41³

The augustissima vestis to which Livy refers is, of course, the toga, and the passage neatly encompasses all of the main themes in what is to follow. We are invited to admire, with the ransacking Gauls, the perfect image of the Roman elite man: stern, dignified and steeped in public duty. These attributes cannot be separated from the peculiar garment in which such a man was ideally clothed for most of Rome’s history, and the further details given by Livy make it clear that the men awaiting death by the Gallic sword took care to each dress in the garment to which they were entitled. Readers would have known this meant the ornate toga picta for those who had celebrated a triumph, and the purple-bordered toga praetexta – together with ivory chairs the insignia of high office – for the others. For the toga acted as both a vital tool for the expression of Roman status distinctions, and as a canvas for the constant status anxieties of an unusually fluid society. Along with gender and status, the passage also alludes to the role of politics in the mindset of the ideal toga-clad Roman man: the decision to make provisions for the defence of the Capitol and to return home to face certain death is a collective one. Finally, written as it was in the Augustan period, a time of consolidation of Roman ideas of imperial destiny, the passage deliberately contrasts the image of the stately Roman in his characteristic dress with that of the marauding barbarians who recognize his superiority. The toga was Roman and distinctive, but it was also the dress of an empire.

The purpose of this book is to explore the toga as a garment and symbol from its origins in Rome’s earliest history to its decreasing use and transformation in late antiquity; in particular, it focuses on its multifarious and constantly evolving meaning in Roman society, rather than merely on its form. It also serves to correct the recent scholarly tendency to see the toga as an elite garment of Italy that served only a symbolic role for most of Roman history by showing the role it played in the lives of provincial populations and the non-elite. The toga is like a prism that allows us to turn the light stream of Roman identity into a whole spectrum of different sub-identities, and the approach taken in this book is largely thematic in nature, drawing out the various strands and explaining how these served to make the toga the quintessential symbol of Romanness: its role in the formation and enforcement of (elite) Roman masculinity (Chapter 3), its use in the marking out and negotiation of status divisions (Chapter 4), its function in the political sphere (Chapter 5), and the myriad ways in which it was embedded in the development of provincial societies (Chapter 6). It is true that Roman culture does not easily allow for this kind of compartmentalization, and many cross-connections will be drawn as the discussion progresses; but it is only through a thematic perspective that it is possible to do justice to the many dimensions of the toga as a cultural instrument and symbol. The book begins with a preliminary discussion (Chapter 2) of the origins of the toga in Rome’s earliest history and of basic details such as its production and main draping styles. It only returns to a chronological focus in Chapter 7, which traces its evolution in late antiquity.

In terms of geographical scope, the first chapters look at Rome and Italy together, whilst the provinces are treated separately in Chapter 6. This could be viewed as an arbitrary, even retrogressive division, not least given the importance of the provinces in shaping Roman culture, the long history of Rome’s conquest of Italy and the enduring cultural diversity of the Italian peninsula that has been the focus of much recent work.⁴ However, at least to the Roman elite, Italy had come to be seen as an extension of Rome by the time of the late Republic and early Empire, the period to which most of our evidence dates and, as such, the main chronological focus of this book. Roman villa culture, both in reality and in the Roman imagination, wedded the capital to the Italian countryside in a way that simply does not apply to other provinces. And whilst as late as the middle of the first century BCE Cicero could state that town-born people like him possessed two patriae – their hometown and Rome (Leg. 1.5–6), he meant that one was by birth and the other by citizenship; only a century later Pliny quite naturally spoke of Italy as synonymous with Rome when he described it as the motherland of all other countries and races (HN 3.39).⁵

Why the toga?

The Romans were intensely preoccupied with personal appearance, and especially with dress.⁶ It is perhaps unsurprising, given the centuries of scholarship focusing on the great deeds, profound political struggles and courageous military feats of Roman statesmen, that the pettiness and viciousness with which those same statesmen often conducted themselves in relation to each other’s appearance is often overlooked. Take the following account by Polybius – a Greek living in Rome but surely reflecting the view held by his elite Roman friends – of King Prusias II of Bithynia meeting Roman delegates in the second century BCE:

This Prusias was a man by no means worthy of the royal dignity, as may easily be understood from the following facts.… [W]hen some Roman legates had come to his court, he went to meet them with his head shorn, and wearing a white hat and a toga and shoes, exactly the costume worn at Rome by slaves recently manumitted or ‘liberti’ as the Romans call them. ‘In me,’ he said, ‘you see your libertus who wishes to endear himself and imitate everything Roman’; a phrase as humiliating as one can conceive.

30.18, trans. Paton 1927

Prusias’ catastrophic clothing choices, whilst well-meant, earned him nothing but derision from his elite male Roman audience, and it is characteristic of Roman attitudes that it is this ostensibly trivial aspect of an important state event that made it into the history books.⁷ But it is within the Roman elite itself that we often find the snidest of sartorial commentary. When Cicero heard of Caesar’s victory over Pompey in the first triumviral war he is reported as saying he was surprised that Pompey could be defeated by someone who couldn’t even tie his tunic properly (Dio Cass. 43.43.5); and on Cicero himself Pliny is said to have commented that he wore his toga extra long to cover his varicose veins (Quint., Inst. 11.3.143). And if the ancient authors are to be trusted, such interactions could go beyond the barbed tongue: earlier on in the Dio passage cited above it is reported that Sulla was so annoyed by Caesar’s loose tunic that he nearly physically attacked him (43.43.4) and Macrobius would have us believe that the famous late Republican orator Hortensius once took a colleague to court for upsetting his toga in a narrow alleyway (Sat. 3.13.4–5). The imperial biographies would be incomplete – and less entertaining – without the accounts of the dress behaviour of individual emperors that are given in minute and dubious detail; and Suetonius himself wrote an entire book on dress – De genera vestium – which is sadly now lost, although we have fragments of it in other works.⁸ Satirists like Martial and Juvenal give us perhaps the most comprehensive, if comically exaggerated, insight into this mindset, and their works are replete with crushing remarks on the clothing of people around them.

But to see this fixation with appearance within the Roman male elite as merely a trivial diversion of a self-important class would, of course, be to miss the point. As Jonathan Edmondson has put it: ‘Rome was a culture of spectacle, and the spectacle of dress helped to emphasize some of its most important values.’⁹ Dress was a central issue in Roman society precisely because it was where fundamental distinctions like status and gender were expressed and negotiated: you were what you wore. It is no coincidence that the shape-shifting nature of such an archaic Roman deity as Vertumnus was symbolized in the variety of dress styles in which he could appear:

Clothe me in silks, and I will become a none too prudish girl:

and who would deny that, wearing the toga, I am a man?

Give me a scythe and bind my forehead with a wisp of

hay: you will swear that my hand has cut grass.

Prop. 4.2.21–26, trans. Goold 1990

It is due to the visual nature of Roman society and its peculiar obsession with dress that Latin is awash with sartorial metaphors: a woman who was respectable was ‘stolata’ (from a female garment called the stola), whilst ‘palliatus’ (from the Greek pallium cloak) was a synonym for someone of peregrine status and ‘caligatus’ (from the name for soldier’s shoes) for a soldier; to ‘put on the sagum’ (a military cloak) meant to prepare for war, whilst to ‘change one’s shoes’ meant to become a senator (‘calceos mutare’ from calcei senatorii, the special footwear of senators). The values and identities invested in dress items caused them to eventually stand alone for the things they represented.

Clothing could also hold immense power in real-life situations. In Roman law, if molested on the street, a respectable woman could only sue for injury if she was dressed as such (Dig. 47.10.15.15), and Suetonius relates an anecdot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Toga: A Brief History
• 3 The Toga and the Roman Man
• 4 The Toga and Social Status
• 5 The Toga and Politics
• 6 The Toga in the Provinces
• 7 The Toga in Late Antiquity
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright