Still More About The Toga

In my last post, I briefly discussed Thomas McGinn's book about prostitution and Roman law, and how a statute from the reign of Augustus relating to adulteresses shed at least a little light on the link between prostitutes and the toga.  

Since I read McGinn's analysis, I've discovered two more scholarly works that address the issue from a different angle.  These works talk about the wearing of the toga by children--girl children as well as boy children.  The information they discuss from both art and literature suggests that the main thing that what the toga symbolizes--no matter what sort of person wears it--is the wearer's Romaness.  All other meanings may well arise from the context in which the toga is worn and the color, ornamentation, etc. of the particular toga involved.  

Lunula  (from Wikimedia Commons)

The earlier source I read is Lillian A. Wilson's book, The Roman Toga.  Professor Wilson's primary interest was to deduce the appearance and construction of the toga, particularly the basic toga worn by male citizens.  She accomplished this by painstakingly examining the appearance of Roman sculptures depicting toga-wearing males, then taking cloth, cutting and shaping it, and draping the results on volunteers until the drapes shown photographs of her volunteers matched the appearance of the drapes in the sculpture. By this means Professor Wilson showed that the shape of the toga was not rectangular, nor semicircular, but was roughly trapezoidal, and that the garment became more trapezoidal with the passage of time.  

As background information, however, Professor Wilson briefly discusses who wore the toga. She states:

Among primitive peoples generally there is little difference in form between the garments of children and those of adults. Doubtless from the beginning of its existence the toga was worn by boys as well as by men, but it is not until after the development of the sinus [a loop or pouch formed by a common method of draping the toga] that extant monuments tell us much about the dress of Roman children. On the Ara Pacis, we see children apparently from 4 to 10 or 12 years of age wearing togas longer and more cumbersome than those of their elders, and one of the children is a young girl. There are a number of extant statues in the round showing a similar toga on Roman boys. Literature furnishes positive evidence that the toga worn by these high born young Romans was the toga praetexta, or a toga with a purple border. (page 51; internal citations omitted)

The picture below shows the southern frieze from the Ara Pacis, including a little girl who, like her brothers, is wearing the toga.

Ara Pacis, south wall; the little girl is the second from the right in the front row.  (from Wikimedia Commons)

In Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture, (Jonathan Edmondson & Alison Keith, eds., University of Toronto Press, 2008),Kelly Olson's essay "The Appearance of the Young Roman Girl" takes a more detailed look at the evidence for what a Roman girl below the age of matrimony would have worn.  

Ms. Olson describes the various items such a girl would have worn, drawing upon Roman literature and artworks because relatively few sources address the subject of girls' clothing.  To make matters worse, the literary sources do not accord with the art source.  According to the literary sources, a young Roman girl would typically wear a tunica, a instep-length, sleeveless gown, a linen undergarment of unclear nature called the suppurus, a breast band called a strophium, wool bands called vittae binding her hair, a necklace with a crescent-shaped pendant called a lunula--and the toga praetexta.  Surviving sculptures do not depict girls wearing the vittae, and few images show the lunula or the toga praetexta, with the Ara Pacis reliefs being among the few exceptions.  Roman sculpture often was enhanced with painted details, and it is certainly possible that the sculptures that appear to show girls without lunulae or vittae originally had them painted on, or even that real lunulae or vittae would be tied onto the necks and heads of statues.  The toga praetexta, however, could not be painted on, and few surviving works of art (sculptural or otherwise) show the toga praetexta on little girls. Since the Ara Pacis reliefs appear to show the Emperor and his family (scholars debate which emperor it was, or even whether it was Agrippa's family and not the imperial family at all, but either way a high-born family was involved) at a public sacrifice, it may simply be that the children are wearing togas to emphasize their role as well-born, Roman children.

Ms. Olsen theorizes that most Roman parents would not have clothed their daughters in the toga but would have them wear Hellenic garments to display their own sophisticated tastes. However, another piece of information she derives from the literary sources suggests still another reason why girls might well have worn the toga praetexta sometimes:

Why children wore the toga itself is unclear, but the wool of the garment and especially its purple band (likely woven directly onto the toga) had a general apotropaic significance.  Persius described the purple stripe as the 'guard' of pre-adolescence (custos purpura, Sat. 5.30); in a declamation attributed to the rhetorician Quintilian, the colour purple is described as the one 'by which we make the weakness of boyhood sacred and revered.' (quo infirmitatem pueritiae sacram facimus ac venerabilem, [Quint.] Decl. 340.13).  It guarded the child and preventing [sic] him/her from seeing any bad omens, for instance.  More importantly, however, the costume served to mark off those citizen boys and girls who were to be shielded from obscenity or sexual contact. Thus Festus reports that impure words were not to be uttered in the presence of a child clad in the toga praetexta. Valerius Valentinus boasted in a ribald poem that he has seduced a puer praetextatus and a freeborn girl, which was used in court to undermine his authority as prosecutor. (pp. 141-142, emphasis supplied)

If the toga praetexta--the white toga with the narrow purple stripe--not only served as ritual protection but also symbolized that the child wearing it was too young to be involved in sexual matters--the apparent inconsistency between the literary references associating children with the garment and the lack of artistic images makes much more sense.  Perhaps it's not surprising that the toga praetexta does not turn up in portraits of young girls and does not turn up often in Roman art.  In the context of a portrait (likely painted in the privacy of her home) the need to wear protection from evil and from sexual assault may have been seen as unnecessary, resulting in a lack of portraits of togate girl children. On the other hand, if this "marking off" function was the real reason boys and girls wore the toga, the children likely would have worn togas only when they were out on display, so to speak, in public--as was patently the case with the Imperial children on the Ara Pacis relief.   Since female children in particular are seldom depicted in Roman artwork in public roles, that might suffice to explain the shortage of images of little girls in togas.  

The idea of the toga praetexta also suggests a possible answer to another question I've had. The toga praetexta was also worn by magistrates. Why on earth would a magistrate and a minor child both be entitled to wear the same garment?  Perhaps the ritual protection function is the answer.  Just a good Roman would want to protect his or her offspring from seeing evil omens, so Rome would also to protect its public officials from seeing evil omens--to avoid bringing evil down upon the City and its people.

The sources cited by Ms. Olson and Professor Wilson tend to confirm that the toga was not specifically symbolic of gender, but of being Roman. Moreover, Ms. Olson's discussion of the toga praetexta suggests that the real symbolism of the prostitute's toga lies in the fact that it was not white, but dark. Romans wore a dark drab toga, the toga pulla, for mourning. Perhaps prostitutes--and later on, adulteresses--were associated with the toga as mourning for their lost virtue. Yes, it's still only speculation, but it's speculation that fits better with the limited surviving evidence than my original thought that Roman prostitutes might originally had a sacerdotal function.

There are a few more interesting details about Roman girls' clothing that Ms. Olsen discusses that aren't relevant to the toga.  I'll comment on those in another post.

EDITED (6/14/2012) to clarify certain points and to correct the text to reflect the fact that the identity of the man shown with his family on the south frieze of the Ara Pacis is, and has been, in dispute by scholars. See the Wikipedia article on the Ara Pacis for more details.

Prostitutes, Roman Law, and the Toga

Woman wearing a yellow palla and white stola.

Since the last time I had enough time to post on this blog, I've read some interesting works that bear upon prostitutes and toga-wearing in ancient Rome, and the connections between those two things.

I succeeded in obtaining a copy of Thomas McGinn's Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law In Ancient Rome on interlibrary loan. Unfortunately, I did not get to read the entire book before I had to return it, which would have been useful as a way of making certain I correctly understood the context of McGinn's remarks about the association between prostitutes and togas. However, most of McGinn's comments about the toga fall into a single chapter, which I have read. They make an interesting contrast, both to some of the less academic sources I talked about in my last post on this subject and with my own conjectures.

McGinn largely ignores Victorian scholarship on his subject, focusing instead on the original texts and modern scholars' interpretations of them.  Because his interest is primarily in what light Roman law sheds upon the role of prostitutes in Roman society, McGinn discusses the toga only in the context of an Augustan statute that linked prostitutes and women convicted of adultery and effectively linked the wearing of a dark toga to both, even though McGinn does not believe that many women actually wore a toga by Augustan times. He suggests that the law was devised to attempt to enforce a level of virtue among Roman matrons by depriving them of their characteristic garment--the stola--as part of their punishment for misbehavior, and also by linking them to a garment associated with females of a lesser class (i.e., prostitutes):

Man wearing a toga.

Respectable women who were convicted of adultery had to abandon the stola in favor of the toga as part of the penalty. Previous to the law's passage, the toga had been associated only with prostitutes among adult women. The purpose of the garment was to provide a means of distinguishing them from respectable women in public. The notion that convicted adulteresses walked about in public clad in the toga may suggest that the relegatio imposed as a penalty by the law was only temporary in nature. ... All the same, we may ascribe a double purpose to the law's imposition of the garment on convicted adulteresses. It is said that the prostitutes' toga (and presumably that worn by adulteresses) was dark. This would set it apart from the toga worn by males as a badge of citizen status. There is more than a practical aim at work: the toga was to serve as a symbol, perceived and easily understood by the entire community.(emphasis supplied)  (p. 166)

In other words, according to Professor McGinn, the point of linking the toga to prostitutes or adulteresses was simply to distinguish them from decent married women. A dark toga, or for that matter any toga, is very visually distinct from the stola--the strapped overdress to which Roman matrons were entitled. (See the above images of the stola and the toga from the VRoma Home Page (http://www.vroma.org/)).

Why use a toga to make that stigmatizing distinction instead of some other garment?  Probably because of the confluence of two factors: 1) the toga symbolized Rome, and 2) decent adult women seldom wore it, at least by the time the statute of Augustus became law. I found some interesting information about the clothing of young Roman girls that indirectly confirms this view, which I plan to write about in my next post.

Who Is The Girl In That Toga?

For years, I had been hearing, usually as a throw-away line, the repeated claim that prostitutes in ancient Rome wore the toga. Implied (though not always stated) in this claim was the idea that they were the only female toga wearers.

Recently, I started thinking more seriously about this idea. I wondered what the support for it was, and whether it is true. In addition, I started to wonder why prostitutes were wearing the toga, and how the garment that represented a man's pride in his Roman citizenship somehow became transmogrified into a woman's badge of shame.

So I began attempting to gather information on both issues. First, I sought to confirm (or refute) the main point that prostitutes wore the toga. I started checking out websites first (because that was easiest). It soon became clear that most of them were simply repeating what they had heard from other third (or fourth or fifth) hand sources, without even providing any references for potential documentation, let alone any rationale. However, there are a few that are worth at least a brief examination.

Wikipedia's article on prostitution in ancient Rome says simply, "Female prostitutes were the only Roman women who wore the toga, a formal garment otherwise only male citizens were permitted to wear. This crossing of gender boundaries has been interpreted variously. Expensive courtesans wore gaudy garments of see-through silk." At the end of this passage is a citation to the following source:

Catharine Edwards, "Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome," in Roman Sexualities (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 81.

There is, interestingly, no reference to prostitutes in Wikipedia's essay on the toga itself. That article refers, albeit somewhat vaguely, to a fact I ultimately confirmed elsewhere; namely, that the toga was originally worn by male and female Romans alike. The web page on Roman costume created by Barbara McManus of the College of New Rochelle states this fact, but adds an odd conclusion that merely whetted my curiosity:

Although women had apparently worn togas in the early years of Rome, by the middle of the Republican era the only women who wore togas were common prostitutes. Unlike men, therefore, women had an item of clothing that symbolized lack of (or loss of) respectability—the toga. While the toga was a mark of honor for a man, it was a mark of disgrace for a woman. Prostitutes of the lowest class, the street-walker variety, were compelled to wear a plain toga made of coarse wool to announce their profession, and there is some evidence that women convicted of adultery might have been forced to wear “the prostitute's toga” as a badge of shame.

Another web article claims: "In the early republic, clothing for women was simple and indistinguishable from that of men. Both sexes initially wore plain woollen togas. This changed by the middle of the republic when distinctions in the clothing became clearer. The toga became an almost exclusively male garment. The only women who were allowed to wear it were prostitutes who had to wear rough woollen togas in public to advertise their trade."

This site, an on-line version which appears to be an online version of William Smith's A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, (John Murray, London, 1875), avers that "The Stola was the characteristic dress of the Roman matrons as the toga was of the Roman men (Cic. Phil. II.18). Hence the meretrices were not allowed to wear it, but only a dark-coloured toga (Tibull. IV.10.3; Mart. I.36.8)". Clearly, then, there are references in classical literature to the wearing of some kind of toga by prostitutes.  Professor Lillian May Wilson, in her landmark work The Roman Toga (originally published by Johns Hopkins Press, 1924), confirms this:

According to literary references, the toga in very early times was also worn by women as well as by men, and we shall see that the wearing of it by young girls was continued at least until about the beginning of the imperial period. But in later times the plain inference from literary passages is that the wearing of it was discontinued by women excepting those of the disreputable sort." (p. 27) (emphasis supplied).

Professor Wilson cites Juvenal (II, 68) and Martial (X, 52) for the statement I have quoted above. Unfortunately, I am no Latin scholar, and Google Translate makes a terrible hash of the relevant passages from Martial--so terrible that I cannot make anything useful enough of them to be worth quoting here.

In any event, there appears to be grounds in Roman literature for believing that all Romans once wore the toga, and when wearing the toga ceased to be customary for women, it somehow remained the custom to compel loose women to wear it.  That makes no sense to me. Why should a garment that was once worn by both sexes but ultimately was identified with men be associated with disgrace when worn by a woman? More precisely, why should the garment that symbolized Roman citizenship when worn by a man be forced upon a woman as a symbol of sexual disgrace?

Anne Duncan, in an essay published in Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (University of Wisconsin Press, February 6, 2006), suggests that the symbolism involved with prostitutes wearing the toga may relate to the fact that prostitutes, unlike decent women, were expected to act for themselves in the world--like men--and that this was the reason they continued to wear the toga after decent women had ceased to do so:

But why the toga, of all garments? It was not only because it signified that the prostitute had lusts more appropriate to a man.  Wearing the toga, the ultimate signifier of Roman citizen manhood, marked out the female prostitute as a public figure, while working both to naturalize and to privilege the customary garment of respectable Roman women, the palla. ... Respectable Roman women, while apparently not as secluded as women were (at least ideally) in classical Athens, did not go out in public unattended, and they did not conduct business in the public eye alone.  The female prostitute, on the other hand, made her living in the streets, or sitting in front of a brothel, or, if she was very unfortunate, in places like graveyards; she worked in the public eye, and she worked alone. She acted, in this way, more like a citizen man, out on business in the Forum, than a woman, tending to stay at home, or go out accompanied by servants/male guardians. (p. 270)

I wonder if there wasn't a slightly different reason why prostitutes retained the toga in republican/early imperial Rome. In the ancient world, prostitutes often were a kind of priestess. In Rome, citizen men also performed certain priestly functions for their households, typically while togated. Perhaps the Roman prostitute once had a similar function, which she discharged while wearing the toga, the ultimate Roman garment, and her association with the garment remained after her religious or ceremonial function had long since been discarded.

In my search, I learned that there is a book-length study of Roman prostitution: Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law In Ancient Rome, by Thomas A. J.McGinn (Oxford University Press, Jan. 30, 2003).  I intend to track down a copy of this book (by interlibrary loan, if all else fails), and see how Professor McGinn addresses the subject.  (The Google Books preview I link to above, sadly, omits most of the discussion of the wearing of togas by prostitutes.)  Hopefully, Professor McGinn will have mustered sufficient evidence to permit at least some reasonable inferences as to the answer to my question, as well as some more detail about what a prostitute's toga looked like.

EDIT:  (March 16, 2012)  I just put in a request to obtain a copy of McGinn's book by interlibrary loan.  Once I obtain and read it, I'll see where I go with this.  Possibly his bibliography will suggest a lead, or there'll be something in the text I don't know of yet that will give me a clue where to go next.  Thanks for all the wonderful comments so far!