The World of Homer
period in Greece; but, as far as I can interpret the art of very old
Tirynthian and some Dipylon vases, there was an early post-Homeric
period wherein women adopted the short hood-capes, the tight waists,
the heavy skirts, and the princess frock.[8] This attire more
resembles the Aegean than the Homeric and Hellenic. The "hood-cape"
of Tirynthian art may conceivably be the κρήδεμνον, καλύπτρα or
κάλυμμα of Homer; but if so, it reveals below it a waist of more than
Aegean tightness, not the belted peplos. Such are the characteristics
of Dipylon art, and of Tirynthian art which may have arisen before
900 B.C. It is hardly possible that if, in that age, women wore the
loose Homeric peplos, the artists should have represented them with
impossibly narrow waists, with the bosom fully displayed, and with
heavy skirts. The women of this dark age, as far as art can enlighten
us, had broken away from, or at all events are not wearing, the Homeric
peplos.
This is, at least, my private interpretation of the Dipylon and the
Tirynthian representation. But it is offered with diffidence, and is
not shared by Mr. R. M. Dawkins, the Director of the British School
of Athens. He "does not believe that the Dipylon women's dress is
necessarily a tight one," and attributes the wasp waists to the limited
skill of the early artist, thinking that if he had to draw a woman in
a loose flowing dress he would still give her a tiny waist, because a
small waist is one of the conspicuous points in the female figure. In
the effort to give as much information as possible he would draw the
small waist even if it were concealed by a loose dress. The primitive
artist draws not from models, but from mental images.
There is much truth in this; for example, the ladies in a palaeolithic
rock-painting[9] have very slim waists, clearly exaggerated, above
skirts with a crescentine scoop at the bottom. But the primitive artist
certainly draws under the domination of a convention which differs
in different places. The woman whose figure is repeated in the clay
disk from Phaestus[10] has no more waist than the stout person in
a princess frock from Tiryns. The Dipylon artists may be continuing
the Aegean convention of the wasp waist; though the designer of the
princess frock is as candid as the Phaestos artist. Thus the reader
must interpret the Dipylon waist as he pleases.
We next reach the "archaic" art of, say, the seventh to sixth
centuries. The chief article of female dress, as described by Homer,
was the peplos, "a square or rectangular piece of material which,"
like the men's outer mantle, "could be used for various purposes." It
was fastened by pins or brooches (_περόναι, ἐνεταί_), and the _περόνη_
was sometimes a fibula or safety pin, the cover adorned by art, as in
the case of the _περόνη_ of Odysseus (_Od_. xix.). But when (_Iliad_,
v. 425) Athene mockingly tells Zeus that the wounded Aphrodite must
have scratched her hand, while caressing some Achaean woman, on her
_περόνη_, the term "_safety_ pin," or _fibula,_ does not apply. We
think rather of one of the long sharp stiletto-like pins found in
Egyptian deposits of from about 1450 to 1200 B.C. and also at Enkomi
in Cyprus, and at Sparta in the Orthia sanctuary from 900 to 500
B.C.[11] Fibulae of the same date also occur. These great pins had
ribbed handles, and below the handle was a perforation or a metallic
loop.[12] Now very long pins, also with ribbed handles, but without the
aperture in the middle, fasten the peplos of one of the Fates on the
Francis vase, which Mr. Evans dates in "the seventh century," but Mr.
Walters--from the characters in the inscriptions on the vase--dates
about 570-550 B.C.[13] The Spartan evidence for the pin and fibulae
covers the later range of dates.
Much turns on the date of the François vase, for many critics, with
Studniczka, consider that the costume of the female figures is like
that which Homer's women wear, and is a "Doric peplos." Thus Miss
Abrahams, in her Greek Dress (1908, pp. 29, 30) studies the arraying
of Hera.[14] Of her dress Homer says, χρυσείῃς δ' ἐνετῇσι κατὰ στῆθος
περονᾶτο: "And she fastened it _over her breast_ with clasps of gold."
"We gather from this passage," says Miss Abrahams, "that the garment
was fastened _on the shoulders_ by brooches or pins inserted κατὰ
στῆθος, which Studniczka rightly interprets as '_down towards the
breast_,' a method of fastening which is represented on the François
vase and elsewhere." "The material," Miss Abrahams goes on, "is drawn
from the back, and wraps over that which covers the front, _the pins
are then inserted downwards_, and hold the two thicknesses of material
together...."
But (see fig. 11) the pins are inserted _upwards_; we observe the
long ribbed head of the pin, of known form like that of the 1450-1200
B.C. pins of Egypt and Enkomi, stuck into the fabric above the right
breast. It penetrates the fabric, and passes upwards into a large
oval shoulder piece, perhaps the tail of the piece of cloth which
covers the decorated collar over the shoulder-joint. The Homeric
phrase "pins inserted _down towards_ the _breast_" does not indicate
this mode of fastening, which is _upwards from_ the breast. "A method
practically impossible--the pin would fall out," says Mr. Dawkins.
"If so, blame the artist." Neither the "overfold" (ἀπόπτυγμα) nor the
curious oval piece on the shoulder-joint (perhaps a portion of the
fabric) is mentioned by Homer. Again, when we read,[15] "the dress is
held into the figure by a girdle worn round the waist, over which any
superfluous length of material could be drawn, forming a κόλπος or
pouch," we must remember that in the dress on the François vase _there
is no superfluous material_. The dress ends just above the heels,
there is no "tunic-trailing"; as in Homer. A woman who drew her dress
up to form a κόλπος or pouch, would show much more of her legs than
was fashionable in the archaic period, and would destroy the collant
fit over the breast. The costume fits tightly to the bust; and in art
of 600-550 B.C. this is the rule. We see no women "with deep κόλπος
or pouch," whereas the nurse of Eumaeus could conceal three cups in
her pouch. Here, again, Mr. Dawkins thinks that the limitations of
the artist cause the absence of the _kolpos_. "He made any dress
look tight, because he could only draw his idea of the body and then
indicate dress on the body. The artist has two mental images, one of
the natural body and the other of the dress, and he could only carry
out his work by combining the two."
But I must reply that, in the François vase, we are far from the
"primitive" artist. The artist knows very well what he is about. He
draws short skirts and over the bust the dress is _collant_, because
that is the fashion. The painter no longer draws impossible waists,
they are in good proportion for girls. Moreover, artists of the same
period when they design a woman in a mantle do so in the modern way.
The bust is indicated; the mantle does not cover it, but covers the
waist, and no attempt is made to show what the artist knows is there:
he does not design what is not in sight. Even an Australian black
fellow drew what he saw, not what he knew was there, in sketches
of white ladies.[16] We must not explain the François vase by the
limitations of "primitive art."
My impression is that in the eighth to seventh centuries women still
did, at least occasionally, wear a costume consisting, as in Aegean
times, of separate bodices and skirts. Thus in an archaic Corinthian
gold jewel we see an Ariadne naked from the belt upwards, beneath is
a skirt falling to the instep. Skirts were therefore separate, and
imply a separate bodice, if the upper body is to be covered[17] (fig.
12).
The pouch is Homeric, but in art of 600-550 B.C. no woman, as far as I
have observed, has any "superfluous length of material," or, at least,
almost none draws it up through the girdle to form such a pouch as
we see on Miss Abrahams's fig. 10 (Metope from the temple of Zeus at
Olympia). The wearer could hide the family plate in her pouch, not so
the women of the Francois vase. Such a costume cannot be called, as a
rule, τανυπέπλος, or ἑλκεσίπεπλος, "trailing robed," like Homer's women.
Thus the Greek dress of the seventh to sixth century, when many artists
drew what they saw under no "primitive" limitations, is not Homeric.
Homeric female dress is loose and flowing, and trailing. Archaic Greek
female dress is tight, not flowing, not trailing. Historic Hellenic
female dress is loose, flowing, and trailing; it returns to the Homeric
type. In holding these opinions we are not, then, deluded by the
freedom of Homer's art; he insists on the _kolpos_, or loose fold which
makes a pouch, and on the trailing loose peplos; nor, at least in my
opinion, are we deluded by the stiffness of archaic art, which really
represents the brevity and tightness of the prevailing fashion.
Thus we cannot cite the François vase "in illustration of the Homeric
peplos."[18] The François dress is not trailing, nor is it pouched,
nor is it Homeric. A thick, round, embroidered collar with no apparent
breach in its continuity is either pinned or sewn over the François
peplos, and the overlap is tight enough to indicate the bust very
gracefully. Moreover, the costume of Athene[19] is not that of the
François vase (fig. 13). _Both_, I think, cannot be "the closed Doric
dress." Athene has a garment much more flowing than that of the
François dress; and, unlike that costume, it has a pouch, though her
dress falls rather lower than that of the François ladies; and she
has no thick collar, and no long pins thrust up from the breast.[20]
Athene's dress would be long and trailing, if it were not drawn up
through the girdle. By the date of the Olympian figure of Athene, Greek
female dress had moved back from the fashion of the François costume
towards that which Homer knew and described.
We now reach the strange story which Herodotus tells to account for the
alleged enforced change of Athenian women's costume from the peplos
fastened with long stiletto-like pins, as in the François vase (an
Athenian work of art), to the Ionic dress, which had no long pins.
The women, he says, slew, with their long pins, a messenger who bore
the tale of the massacre of their husbands; and the men therefore
compelled them to wear the Ionian linen chiton, which does not require
the _περόνη_, the stiletto pin.[21] The event was of the first half
of the sixth century; 568 B.C. is the date conjectured, which tallies
fairly with Mr. Walters's dating of the François vase made while long
pins were still fashionable. But if the wearing of Ionic costume were,
as Miss Abrahams supposes, one of the luxuries which Solon (594 B.C.)
tried to check, then we must date the François vase in the seventh
century. Yet the costume of the vase, with its expensive embroideries,
is much more "luxurious" than the linen Ionian chiton or smock. In any
case it is certain, from the dangerous long pins of, say, 1200 B.C. at
Enkomi and in Greek deposits in Egypt, that women wore these stiletto
pins five centuries before they did so at Athens, in, say, 620-560 B.C.
So Homer had his mind, when Aphrodite scratched her hand with an
Achaean woman's pin, on Achaean female dress, not on that of Athenians
of the seventh or sixth century.