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Notes

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[1] The Persians no doubt learned to use this style of garment during their life on the cold, windy steppes of Upper Asia, before they won their empire in the more genial south.

[2] The whole civilization of Athens was, of course, based on a climate in which artificial heat would be very little needed. A pot of glowing charcoal might be used to remove the chill of a room in the very coldest weather. Probably an Athenian would have regarded a climate in which furnace heat was demanded nearly eight months in the year as wholly unfit for civilized man.

[3] Working men often wore no himation, and had a kind of chiton (an exömis) which was especially arranged to leave them with free use of their arms.

[4] This robe was sometimes known by the Homeric name of peplos.

[5] Probably with almost all Greek garments the main use of the needle was in the embroidery merely, or in the darning of holes and rents. It was by no means an essential in the real manufacture.

[6] Actors, too, wore a leather boot with high soles to give them extra height—the cothurnus.

[7] "The chiton became the mirror of the body," said the late writer Achilles Tatius.

[8] No doubt farmers and artisans either wore garments of a non-committal brown, or, more probably, let their originally white costume get utterly dirty.

[9] Translated in Falke's "Greece and Rome" (English translation, p. 69). These quotations probably date from a time considerably later than the hypothetical period of this sketch; but they are perfectly proper to apply to conditions in 360 B.C.

A Day in Old Athens

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