Programme & Abstracts :: Registration Details :: Accommodation

THE CLOTHED BODY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002

Glenys Davies, Edinburgh

What made the Roman toga virilis?

According to Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria XI,iii,137) the dress of the Roman orator (and all men of position) should be "splendidus et virilis". In this paper I shall be considering why the toga was thought of not only as the national dress of the Romans and an indicator of citizen status, but also as "manly" dress. In addition to literary references to the wearing of the toga I shall explore the depiction of the toga in Roman art (mainly sculpture - portrait statues and historical and funerary reliefs), contrasting its visual impact with that of other types of clothing (both male and female). The toga, I shall argue, gave added breadth to the figure (especially obvious when compared to the much narrower figures created by female drapery forms and men wearing Greek dress). It was also a means of showing the Roman aristocrat's control over his surroundings and his superiority by his suave control of his toga's complex folds: despite the practical difficulties of wearing the toga artistic representations seldom show the elite toga-wearer fiddling with it, or readjusting its folds. I shall argue that the toga was a form of dress whose significance was artificially maintained by the Roman (male) elite in the first and second centuries AD as a means of articulating their claim to superior status and a right to power: the toga signified not just Roman-ness but also the Roman elite's rightful control of the government of Rome. In this light I shall consider briefly the (at first sight) paradoxical tradition that the toga was also appropriate dress for prostitutes and adulteresses: this tradition ensured that whereas freedmen might express their new- found status by wearing the toga on tomb reliefs, women, however high their rank and de facto power, could not do the same.