THE CLOTHED BODY
IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002
Emma Stafford
University of Leeds
Viewing and Obscuring The Female Breast - Glimpses Of The Ancient Bra
In modern Western society female underwear is both a practical part
of everyday dress and a subject of fascination to the male viewer. The bra, in
particular, is the quintessentially female garment and carries layers of
meaning associated with the part of the anatomy it covers, the breast at once
symbolising maternal nourishment and providing a focus for erotic interest. In
the 1960s feminists were burning their bras as a symbol of emancipation from
male control; in the 1990s the notorious 'Hello boys' advert for Wonderbra
played on the idea of reclaiming the garment as a symbol of women's
empowerment. Such associations need to be acknowledged, as they are likely to
colour any modern investigation into the bra's historical forebears, but the
two extremes also demonstrate the bra's potential for reflecting broader social
trends.
Like so many other mainstays of Western Civilisation, the invention of this 'most significant item of female under-clothing' (Ewing 1978, 15) is attributed to the ancient Greeks. Our evidence is, however, surprisingly sparse - underwear of any sort is only rarely mentioned even in erotic literature, and most visual imagery presents the female form as either fully clothed or completely nude. We can get some idea of what was available from the very few instances in Greek art of semi-clad females - late archaic Lakonian bronzes where young girls wear nothing but the diazoma, the nearest equivalent to modern knickers, and Attic vase-paintings of Brauronian arktoi or Atalanta stripped for athletics down to their diazoma and strophion. The strophion is usually just a cloth band tied around the breasts, though one example has shoulder straps, resembling a modern bra [see image above]; the strapless variety can also be seen in a number of Roman representations, which will be adduced as parallels.
For a broader social perspective on the garment, however, more interesting still are representations of the processes of dressing and undressing - such scenes feature in Aristophanes and at least once in late Attic red-figure, and there is a Hellenistic statue-type of Aphrodite fastening (or unfastening?) her strophion. In this paper I shall address the question of the apparent absence of any kind of bra from most of our images of Greek women, as well as reviewing the evidence for the strophion's use. A consideration of the circumstances in which we do get to see this garment may go some way towards elucidating not only its practical application, but also what it meant to the ancient men who are inevitably our sources of information.