THE CLOTHING OF THE ANCIENTS.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH.

———

BY WILLIAM DUANE, JR.

———

If the ancient inhabitants of the world had extreme difficulty in sheltering themselves from the severity of the seasons, they experienced much more in giving to their clothes the impress of art or industry. Consult Strabo; he will tell you that certain nations covered themselves with the bark of trees, fig-leaves or rushes, rudely intertwined. Often also the skins of animals were employed, without the least preparation, for the same end. In proportion as the barbarism disappeared which had been introduced by the confusion of tongues, they began to think of the wool of sheep, and to ask themselves if there were no means of uniting in a single thread the different pieces of this substance by the aid of a kind of spindle. Seeing their efforts crowned with success, “Let us now,” said they, “try to imitate the spider.” They did so; and, behold, as Democritus begs us to observe, the art of weaving invented! After that, the invariable custom which existed among the Jews, fifteen hundred years before Jesus Christ, of collecting the fleeces of their sheep at fixed periods; and great was the account which they made of it according to the testimony of Genesis (31, 19.)

The history, true or fabulous, of the web of Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, proves to us that wool was not the sole material to which they thought of applying the art of weaving. And do we not read in Pliny that “the cotton plant grew in Upper Egypt, that they made stuffs of it, and that the Egyptian priests made admirable surplices of it?” It is undeniable that garments of cotton and of linen were in use in the time of the patriachs; indeed Moses commands his people in the 22d chapter of Deuteronomy, “not to wear a dress of linen;” and the ancient Babylonians, as Herodotus informs us, (Book I.) “wore immediately over their skin a cambric tunic, which fell down to their feet in the oriental manner.” It was the same among the Athenians, according to Thucydides.

In the age of Augustus, many people had already arrived at great perfection in the manufacture of linen stuffs: it is the express assertion of the historian Pliny. “The Faventine cloth,” says he, “is always whiter than the Allienne cloth. That which they have designated by the word Retovine, is so exceedingly fine that its threads are as slender as those of the spider. I have myself seen a thread of Cumes hemp so thin that a great net made of this material could go through a common ring; and I have heard tell of a man who could carry on his back as much as was required to encircle an entire forest. The fine cambric, made of the linen of Byssus, is a product of Achaia; it was sold in old times for its weight in gold.” (Book 19.)

In the Egyptian Museum of the Royal Library of Paris, you may cast your eyes upon mummies, found in the catacombs of Cairo: the cloth in which they are wrapped is not at all coarser than the cambric of your shops; and yet it has been woven three hundred years. On this occasion it is not inappropriate to add that the art of weaving is still more ancient than that of embalming; which this answer of Abraham to the king of Sodom indicates: “I will not carry away a single thread of your wool,” said the patriarch to him, “lest you should say—I have made Abraham rich!” Elsewhere, Moses informs us that Abimelech presented a veil to Sarah; that on the approach of Isaac, Rebecca covered her face with a veil; and that when Joseph was appointed viceroy of Egypt, Prince Pharaoh covered him with a linen robe after having placed his own ring upon his finger. The Book of Job (the most ancient writing perhaps in existence) mentions a weaver’s shuttle, (chapter 7.) A thousand years before the Christian era, do you see, setting out along the desert, those messengers of the wise Solomon, going to procure in Egypt cloths of fine linen for the king, their master? Shortly after, the city of Tyre obtained great celebrity for the beauty of its fine linens; and Ezekiel dwells enraptured on the opulence of its merchants in the following terms:—“All the planks of thy vessels are of the fine fir tree of Senir, and their masts are of the cedar of Lebanon! For their sails thou hast employed the fine linen of Egypt, splendidly embroidered.” Do not suppose that all the sails of this period were of as precious a material as those of the Tyrians: like those of the Arabians of our days, they were generally composed of woven rushes.

The women commonly wore white dresses; besides, the ancients had early made rapid progress in the art of bleaching. They were all ignorant, as you may well suppose, of the expeditious process which the illustrious Berthollet has conceived, with the assistance of a hydrochlorate of lime or of soda; they knew, however, how to use other detersive substances to impart a shining whiteness to their stuffs. “There exists among us,” says Pliny, “a species of poppy, very rare, which bleaches linen cloth wonderfully; and yet, would one believe it? we have among us a crowd of people so vain that they have attempted to dye their linen as well as their wool.” In alluding in another passage to the sky-blue curtains of the Emperor Nero, he begs us not to forget that, despite of all the rich shades produced by dyeing, white cloth never ceased to enjoy the highest reputation, to such a degree that they conferred the title of Great on a person named Lentulus Spinter, who first conceived the idea of hanging white curtains around the places consecrated to the Olympic games. This same kind of stuff was spread upon all the houses of the Via Sacra, by order of Cæsar, the Dictator, who planning magnificent decorations, wished that they should extend from his residence up to the Capitol.

The basis of the hard soap of our days was undoubtedly known to the ancients. The natron or sub-carbonate of soda, which they collect in the channels of the Nile at the present time, was really gathered there in sufficient abundance in the first ages of the world. From another place, the man of Uz made use of it; for he makes ready in one of his chapters (Job, ch. 9.) to wash his clothes in a pit with bor or borith, a plant much esteemed on account of its alkaline properties. (You must not confound this with the boron of modern chemistry, which with oxygen constitutes the boracic acid.) Open the Sixth Book of the Odyssey; Homer will there shew you Nausicaa, and her companions, trampling their clothes with their feet to whiten them for an approaching marriage; the bard adds that the ladies knew perfectly well the property which the atmosphere possessed of assisting in the destruction of the only substance which imparts a greyish appearance to cloths. In alluding to this passage, Goguet affirms that all the linen and cotton garments were washed daily. An anecdote related by Apuleius in his book of “The Golden Ass,” goes to prove still more the attention which they formerly paid to the art of bleaching; “A wag,” said he to us, “being secretly introduced into the house of a merchant, came near being suffocated by the sulphurous gas which was given out by a bleaching machine in which he was hid.”

The ability of the ancients to bestow upon their linen, cotton^[2] and woolen cloths a brightness not inferior to that of the snow of their mountains, did not fail them when they had to dye them. More than three thousand years ago a cunning shrew, as Genesis informs us, (ch. 28.) fastened a scarlet ribbon around the hand of one of the children of Tamar: and Homer speaks to us in the part of his poem above mentioned, of the colored cloths of Sidon as admirable productions. Jacob made for his beloved son Joseph, “a robe of many colors,” and the king of Tyre sent into the palace of Solomon “a man skilful to work wonderfully in gold, silver, &c. and to produce upon fine linen the shades of purple, blue and crimson.” According to Herodotus, who wrote, as you know, four hundred years before Jesus Christ, some people of Caucasus washed in water the leaves of a certain tree, which yielded at length a brilliant color, with the aid of which they drew upon stuffs the figures of lions, monkeys, dolphins and vultures.

Among the brave knights who perished at Colchis, in the Argonautic expedition, there was one whom the historian Valerius Flaccus distinguishes by his painted tunic, at the same time that he expresses his admiration of the whiteness of the fine cloth which the hero also wore:

“Tenuia non illum candentis carbossa lini,

Non auro depicta chalymis, non flava galeri

Cæsaries, pictoque juvant subtemine bracæ.”

(Val. Flac. 6.)

Speaking of Colchis, it was there that the best materials for painting were formerly procured. Besides, if you will ascend in spirit to the days of old, you will perceive every year on the roads leading from Georgia to the principal cities of India, as well as to Dimbeck, an immense drove of two thousand camels, loaded with madder. Thence the red^[3] flowers were derived, of which Strabo speaks, which the nations dwelling on the borders of the Indus and the Ganges loved to spread upon their cloths. It is a particular worthy of remark that the Egyptians who constantly clothed the statues of their goddess Isis with linen and cotton drapery, never employed wool for that purpose, a substance which they hated so much that they did not permit the use of it, even in interments, as the 44th chapter of Ezekiel informs us. This aversion extended even to shepherds, for you may read in Genesis that every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians. (46.)

The purple of Tyre was known at an epoch exceedingly remote, and the dyers of Phœnicia surpassed in skill those of all the other nations of the east. This people came a thousand years ago as far as Great Britain to procure an enormous quantity of tin, a metal which has the property, or rather certain salts of it have, of augmenting the intensity of the principal red colors contained in many vegetable and animal substances. Upon this subject, we would advise you to run over, in the third book of Strabo, the interesting recital which he gives of the pursuit of a Phœnician vessel by a Roman bark, which wished to seize the tin with which it was freighted. It was in the neighborhood of the coast of Cornwall: the Phœnician, seeing the prow of the Roman near his stern, threw three-fourths of his cargo overboard, and steered right upon a sand-bank, where the enemy, as you may well suppose, did not think of following him. The Tyrians, astonished at the great opulence which their city attained, attributed to the gods the magic art of dyeing in purple. All writers, and especially Ctesias, physician to a king of Persia, who lived four hundred years before the Christian era, and Ælian, a contemporary of Alexander Severus, frequently allude to an insect, to which the Phœnicians were indebted for the superior manner in which they could produce an admirable scarlet. It was evidently the cochineal: and this little animal must have been at that time less rare than at present in Syria, India, and Persia, since the humblest classes frequently wore stuffs dyed with purple. It is not surprising that they knew not how to extract from the cochineal the most brilliant of all the known reds, the carmine, before which the vermillion grows pale, and which chemistry can procure for us, in our days, in great abundance; and you know that this little insect lives upon the cactus which grow in Brazil, in Mexico, at Jamaica, and at Saint Domingo.

The fashion of wearing silk was unknown at Rome, before the beginning of the empire. The rage for dressing in it was already so great in the time of Tiberius, that the emperor prohibited the use of it by a positive law. The Greeks also had a taste for it; and the cloak of Amphion was certainly of silk, for the historian Philostratus (Ion, Book I.) tells us that its color changed according to the different ways in which the light was reflected from it. Pliny gives us to understand that the gold stuffs of the ancients were not made as those of our time, of a thread of gold or silver, wrapped around a woof of silk, but that they were woven of gold deprived of all alloy: knowing this, he speaks of the manner in which the wife of Claudius dressed herself to attend a Naumachia or sea fight, in the following terms—“Nos vidimus Agrippinam—indutam palludamento auro textile, sine alia materia.” It is about fifty years since they extracted, by assaying, more than four pounds weight of pure gold from some old dresses which the fathers of the Clementine College, at Rome, discovered in an urn of basalt, buried in their vineyard. Tarquin, the Elder, was he, among the Roman Sovereigns who most usually wore dresses of gold.

From the time of Homer the Greeks wore black dresses for mourning. This bard shews us Thetis wearing, after the death of Patroclus, the blackest of her dresses. (Iliad, 24.) For many years the same usage prevailed among the Romans, but it was partly changed under the emperors, so that when Plutarch wrote, the women in mourning could wear nothing but white. Besides, we have a proof of it at the obsequies of Septimius Severus: “The image of this emperor,” Herodian tells us, “formed of wax, was surrounded on one side by a row of women in white, and on the other by the body of all the senators, clothed in black. At the death of the Empress Plotina,” adds the historian, “her husband Trajan covered himself with very black habits for the space of nine days.” The toga necessarily received as many shades of color as the other garments: but as to the form of this kind of robe it is impossible to decide. When Dionysius, of Halicarnassus, asserts that the toga presented the appearance of a semicircle (’ημικυκλος) he did not at all intend to describe its shape, but only the form which it assumed when worn upon the body. Strabo asserts that the military cloak with which the warriors clothed themselves had an oval form; and that among the Athenians it was often worn by the young people even in time of peace. The tunic, which was the principal part of the under clothing, was not generally used among the nations of antiquity, except the Greeks and Romans; all the Cynic philosophers disdained to make use of it. We know that Augustus put on as many as four tunics in winter. The name of this great emperor reminds us that it was in his reign, or thereabouts, that the Romans began to use table-cloths. Montfaucon believes that the greater part of them were of cloth striped with gold and purple. In France the ancient table-cloths were intended for collecting, after the meal, the smallest crumbs that were left, that nothing might be lost; and D’Arcy informs you that among our neighbors, the English, table linen was very seldom used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

As there exist in our days many nations, especially in the torrid zone, who do not wear hats, (a name by which we must understand every covering for the head, as its etymology plainly indicates,) so it formerly happened that the nations did not always think of making use of them. Thus one of the most civilized, the Egyptians, went bare-headed, according to the authority of Hesiod. Amongst the Orientals, and especially amongst the Persians, the turban was in great vogue; that of the sovereign was composed of a whole bale of muslin. It was from this last mentioned people that the Jews derived the turban. The hats of the Greeks must have had very large brims, to judge from the root of the word (πετασος) which designated them. The Romans granted to their freedmen the right of covering themselves with a kind of cap, which has been since adopted as the emblem of liberty. It is to a Swiss, residing in Paris, about the beginning of the fifteenth century, that we owe the first invention of felt hats. They were generally known at the close of the reign of Charles VII.: this monarch himself wore one at his triumphal entry into Rouen, in 1449. We read in Daniel that the worthy townsmen of that ancient city stood still as if petrified, so much were they astonished at seeing his majesty’s hat; the historian adds that its lining was of red silk, and that it was surmounted by a superb bunch of feathers. Before the period of which we speak, it is probable that the French covered their heads in the same way as the English, that is to say, with woven caps or rather with cloth and silk hoods.

The stockings of the ancients were made of little pieces of cloth sewed together. We cannot say with certainty in what country the stocking-frame was invented. France, England and Spain respectively claim this useful discovery. A short time before the unfortunate tournament, in which Henry II. lost his life, he put on the first pair of silk stockings ever worn. Five years afterward, we see in England, William Ryder presenting a pair, as a very precious article, to William, Earl of Pembroke. Ryder had learnt the method of making them from an Italian merchant.

Many persons probably know not that wooden shoes date from a very remote period; for the Jews wore them long before the age of Augustus. Perhaps they were not made exactly like the wooden shoes so common among the poorer classes in France; but it is not less true that this kind of covering for the feet was generally adopted among nearly all the people of Judæa: sometimes, however, we observe leather shoes among them; and the Jewish soldiers covered their feet with copper, or with iron. The shoes of the Egyptians were of papyrus; the Chinese and the Indians manufactured theirs of silk, of rushes, of the bark of trees, of iron, of brass, of gold or of silver, according as their fortune permitted, or their fancy dictated. At Rome, as in Greece, leather was the material which covered the feet of every one. The Roman women wore white shoes: the common people wore black: and the magistrates set off their feet with red shoes on solemn occasions. A thousand years ago the most powerful sovereigns of Europe had wooden soles to their shoes. Under William Rufus, son of the great Duke of Normandy, who conquered at Hastings, in 1066, a fashion was introduced into England of giving to the shoes an excessive length; the point which terminated them was stuffed with tow, and curved up on high like a ram’s horn. In the fourteenth century they thought of connecting these points with the knee, by means of a gold chain. Great must have been the surprise of the worthy Anglo-Saxons, on beholding this strange species of vegetation sprouting up suddenly amongst them! Some called to remembrance the history of the serpent’s teeth, which Cadmus sowed, whence a swarm of soldiers issued; others conceived that it was the costume of magicians; and little children sometimes, when going to bed, asked their mothers if there was no danger that their heads might be metamorphosed in the night into those of a horrible deer? Before leaving this paragraph upon shoes, we would call to recollection the antiquity of the art of the leather-dresser: open for that purpose the Iliad, and you will find in the Seventeenth Book, tanners preparing skins to make leather of them. This class of manufacturers composed, three hundred years ago, a very important body, since we possess the account of a furious quarrel which broke out, under Queen Elizabeth, between them and the shoe-makers. We are pleased to record here the perfection with which they manufacture leather at this date in the New World. In South Carolina, as well as in the state of Virginia, the Indian women are so skilful in this branch of industry that a single person can dress as many as ten deer-skins a day.^[4] Of all the transformations which are wrought in the arts, that of the animal substance into leather is, without doubt, one of the most curious. The process, by means of which they set about accomplishing it in old times, was the result of a calculation still more ingenious than that of changing two opaque bodies into a transparent body to make glass, for instance; or else two transparent bodies into an opaque body for making soap. Besides, you know that chemistry actually teaches us that leather is a real salt, a tannate of gelatine. This assertion was not uttered with confidence until M. Pelouze had extracted from tan in late years the tannic acid in a state of remarkable purity. Besides this, you may now explain a phenomena which is repeated at a great distance upon the ocean, at the time of some lamentable shipwreck. The journal which records for you the history of one of these sad events often tells you that in the last moment of famine, the unhappy survivors took to eating their shoes, and that life is sometimes prolonged by these means! Certainly, for the gelatine possesses nutritious properties, even when its peculiarities are stained with a thousand impurities, as is leather.

The subject upon which we have endeavored to present some observations, is so capable of being extended that a large volume in octavo would scarcely suffice to contain all the historical knowledge relating to it. But such a dissertation, carried out to the extent or with the exactness which it admits of, would only constitute at last a kind of catalogue or bare enumeration of the thousand modifications which human vestures have undergone down to our times. The memory of the reader would be unable to retain so prodigious a number of minute particulars, and the curiosity of his mind, fatigued by so many useless details, would be extinguished before finishing the third part. These changes have often, it is true, nothing for their object but the accessory and secondary parts of dress, as the following passage, which we meet with in the voyages of M. de Chateaubriand, seems to point out.

“One thing has at the same time struck me and charmed me; I have met in the dress of the Auvergne peasant the attire of the Breton peasant. Whence comes this? It is because there was formerly for this kingdom, and for all Europe, a groundwork of a common attire.” (Vol. 2., p. 296.)

In another particular also, men have always been constant, that they have never ceased to seek for the material to compose their clothing from the animals which the Creator has placed in their respective climates. It will probably be the same till the end of the world. It is thus that the nations under the temperate zone have recourse for covering to wool, because, being a bad conductor of caloric, it prevents the escape of it from their bodies. In the frozen zone the Russians, the Esquimaux, and the Greenlanders, clothe themselves in furs, a material which is a still worse conductor of caloric; while the natives of countries under the influence of the torrid zone, make their dresses of hair or horse-hair, whose conducting properties are in an inverse ratio to those of furs. It is worth remarking that the animals which in temperate regions are covered with wool or ordinary hair, are provided, when they inhabit countries really cold, with an under-fleece of very fine wool: it is the case with goats, sheep, dogs, horses, and Thibet cows.

If by a game of metempsychosis, you were enabled to return to existence two hundred years hence, what unheard of changes would you not see in the dress of individuals. Transport in anticipation your shade to a point commanding one of the public promenades of the capital; suppose yourself, for instance, on the top of the Vendôme Column, on a fine summer’s evening; you would, perhaps, perceive the dandies of the time strutting in frocks, whose leg of mutton sleeves are as voluminous as those of our sylphides at this day. Their hats, instead of being of beaver or of fur, have a similar shape to that which our ladies adopted in 1839. For the young folks a notched veil would be the prescribed mode; the men, of a certain age, would embellish their hats with a superb scarlet plume. As to the women, who will now dare to affirm that they will not then cover their heads with perukes à la Louis XIV. topped off with three-cocked hats, and that from their chin there will not descend a band à la procureur du roi? Extend your Pythagorean glance farther into the ages, and you will, perhaps, discover another part of mankind adding to their dress an enormous pair of wings! We may doubt that the gnomes, the sciences, will never render the attempt to make use of them more effectual than that of the son of Dædalus in old times; but in return, posterity may fly by another process, in case the æronauts can discover the secret of steering themselves in mid-air. Should this expectation be realised, we may then hear one of your future grand-nieces (who will be the belles of the noble Faubourg) say to her domestic on rising from her breakfast, “Ganymede! my balloon, with its boat; I wish to go dine to-day with my cousin, at Florence.”

Philadelphia, May, 1841.