Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

CLOTHING

could be clearly seen through, as we can observe even at the present day in numerous monuments of plastic art—for instance, in the two magnificent female forms on the east pediment of the Parthenon.

For completeness we may remark that a décolletage of the reverse side was nothing unheard of ; at any rate a passage in the Satires of Varro! cannot well be differently explained, where in describing the costume of a huntress with her dress tucked up, @ la Atalanta, he says that she walks along with her dress gathered up so high that one could see, not only her calves, but almost her buttocks as well.

In the times that followed the Aegaean period the dress of the Greek women assumed a comparatively simple form. On the bare body the shirt-like chiton was worn, the form of which was throughout Greece essentially the same, except in Sparta (on the short chiton of Spartan girls, cf. Clem. Alex. Pedag., ii, 10, p. 258 (Potter)). There, girls usually wore no other article of clothing except this chiton, which ended above the knee and at the side was slit up high, so that in stepping along the entire thigh was exposed (dawounpides: showing the thigh; cf. Pollux, vii, 55). Not only did several authors agree in stating this, so that its truth cannot be disputed, but it is also confirmed by vasepaintings and other memorials of pictorial art ; it also becomes a positive certainty that elsewhere, although in Greece generally people were sufficiently used to the sight of nakedness, this costume of the Spartan girls was ridiculed. Hence they were called “ thigh-showers ”’, “‘ those with bare thighs ”’, and the expression “to dress in Doric fashion ” (dwpidsew : Eustathius on Iliad, xiv, 175) was used of those ~ who liberally bared a great part of their body ”. In gymnastic and bodily exercises Spartan girls also put off this single piece of clothing and appeared completely naked.

* Varro in Petronius (ed. Biicheler, 1895, p. 193, frag. ix) : non modo suris apertis, sed paene natibus apertis ambulans.