What did the Romans wear?

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "What Did the Romans Wear?" – Detailed Summary

Released on February 26, 2025

In this engaging episode of the History Extra Podcast, host Emily Briffet delves into the intricate world of Roman fashion with esteemed historian Ursula Rothy. Together, they explore the realities of Roman attire, debunk common misconceptions, and uncover the societal implications of clothing in ancient Rome.

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1. Introduction to Roman Clothing

The podcast kicks off with Emily Briffet posing intriguing questions about Roman attire, specifically the toga. She asks whether the iconic garment truly resembled its often-glorified portrayal in popular media.

Notable Quote:

Emily Briffet [02:11]: "What did a Roman wear under their tunic? What was the best occasion to wear socks with sandals? And what might make you a victim of the ancient Roman fashion police?"

2. The Toga: Reality vs. Media Representation

Ursula Rothy clarifies that the toga, contrary to its elaborate Hollywood depictions, was generally a plain garment. Predominantly white and made from natural wool, togas were semi-circular and draped diagonally across the body. They were exclusive to male Roman citizens, symbolizing their status and civic identity.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [03:06]: "The toga was actually, you know, often if you see sort of Hollywood films, especially in the 50s, it's all very elaborate and togas were, for the most part, quite plain garments."

3. Function and Symbolism of the Toga

The toga served as a potent status symbol. Its size and draping required significant material and skill, reflecting the wearer’s social standing. Special versions like the toga praetexta (with a purple stripe) and the toga virilis signified specific roles and transitions within Roman society.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [07:20]: "It was absolutely a status symbol, yes. ... It showed your occupation and your status."

4. Daily Attire of Romans

While the toga was central to public life, everyday wear for most Romans consisted of the tunic—a simpler garment made from two rectangles of cloth. Women’s tunics were ankle or foot-length, whereas men’s were knee-length. Occupations influenced daily attire, with artisans and laborers favoring practical tunics often worn without additional garments.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [10:05]: "The basic Roman garment that everybody wore was the tunic... and that's what all men wore under their toga as well."

5. Colors and Dyes in Roman Clothing

Romans embraced a vibrant palette beyond the monochromatic images often associated with their attire. Different dyes signified various statuses and roles. Purple, derived from Murex shells, was the most expensive and reserved chiefly for emperors and high-ranking officials. Yellow was linked to women, while other colors like red, green, and blue were accessible based on one’s economic standing.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [12:02]: "Yellow was associated with women... The most expensive one was purple dye, which was made from crushing Murex shells."

6. Accessories and Ornamentation

Jewelry and accessories were primarily worn by women, serving as additional indicators of wealth and status. Men, conversely, maintained a more austere appearance, with occasional use of rings or subtle adornments. Over time, women's jewelry became more elaborate, mirroring shifts in societal norms and aesthetic preferences.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [13:32]: "In terms of accessories, jewellery and things like that, that was really the preserve of women."

7. Underwear and Footwear

The topic of Roman underwear remains debated among historians. While some evidence suggests the use of bands like the strophium for women and loincloths for men, the extent and regularity of their use are unclear.

Footwear varied beyond the commonly depicted sandals. Romans also wore closed boots called calcei, soft socks (udones), and soft slippers (soccus). Certain shoes, like the military caligae, were distinctive to soldiers, featuring hobnails for durability.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [31:46]: "There were other shoe options as well... there were shoes called sake. They were sort of very soft slippers that women would wear."

8. Clothing Production and Maintenance

Contrary to the assumption that most Romans crafted their own garments, the industry included both domestic production and a robust retail sector. High-quality garments were often imported or produced on an industrial scale in regions like Egypt. Maintenance services, similar to modern laundries, existed to wash, dye, and repair clothing, although the frequency and methods remain partially speculative.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [35:56]: "There was retail, there was clothing retail... but how much of each we don't know."

9. Cultural Influences on Roman Dress

Roman attire was significantly influenced by the diverse cultures within the empire. Early interactions with the Celts introduced hooded garments, while later contacts with northern and eastern provinces brought variations like embroidered caftans and elaborate headgear. This cultural exchange led to a dynamic and evolving Roman fashion landscape.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [28:01]: "From the eastern provinces... there's a gradual infiltration of especially northern European provinces and the dress from those areas."

10. Social Implications and Sumptuary Laws

Clothing in Rome was a visible marker of social hierarchy and personal identity. While Romans had few sumptuary laws—regulations intended to curb excessive display of wealth—the societal pressure to dress appropriately was immense. Violations could lead to legal repercussions, although enforcement was inconsistent and often influenced by social dynamics.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [23:43]: "There were very few sumptuary laws... but there was enforcement trying to get people to wear the toga and not to wear various things."

11. Surprising Aspects of Roman Dress

One of the most astonishing revelations discussed is the regional diversity in Roman attire. Provinces showcased unique and elaborate styles, especially in women’s dress, which included intricate headdresses and embroidery that challenged the stereotypical images of Roman simplicity.

Notable Quote:

Ursula Rothy [39:12]: "The multiculturalism of the Roman Empire is often lost and just how spectacular some of those local cultures were in lots of different ways."

12. Conclusion

The episode wraps up by emphasizing the complexity and significance of Roman clothing beyond mere aesthetics. Clothing was a medium through which Romans expressed their identity, status, and cultural affiliations, reflecting the broader social and political fabrics of the empire.

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About the Speaker:

Ursula Rothy is a renowned professor of Roman archaeology and history at the Open University. She authored "The Toga and Roman Identity" in 2021, exploring the deep connections between attire and social status in ancient Rome.

Production Credits:

This episode was thoughtfully produced by Jack Bateman, ensuring a seamless and informative exploration of Roman sartorial practices.

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Transcript

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[Jack Bateman]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. What did a Roman wear under their tunic? What was the best occasion for to wear socks with sandals? And what might make you a victim of the ancient Roman fashion police? Well, in today's episode, Emily Briffet is speaking to historian Ursula Rothy. They're going to head back to the ancient world to uncover why the Romans were so obsessed with what they wore. Today, we are talking all about Roman clothing, Roman dress, and arguably the most iconic piece of Roman dress is the toga. Now, this is something that we see a lot on screen in popular media. Did the toga really look like those representations that we see on screen?

[Emily Briffet]

No. Is the answer to that? It depends on what films you're looking at and how faithfully they've tried to recreate Roman costumes. But I think there is quite a bit of misunderstanding about what the toga was. The toga was actually, you know, often if you see sort of Hollywood films, especially in the 50s, it's all very elaborate and togas were, for the most part, quite plain garments. They were only worn by men. They were only legally worn by people who had Roman citizenship. So men who had Roman citizenship. There were exceptions with women, and they're really a male garment. And for the most part they were white. So the plain white of sort of natural wool, and they were semicircular in shape. So they were draped in a certain way. They were draped sort of diagonally across the body. And there's a very specific way of being draped. And that style changed over time, but it's a very specific garment for a very specific purpose. It was the garment of male public life, basically, with a few exceptions for various types of very special togas, for very special occasions. So triumphant generals wore a special type of toga and all these kinds of things. They were white and sometimes with a purple stripe for people who were particularly important, like priests and magistrates. So, yes, quite plain and quite deliberately plain. The masculine ideal was sort of this plainness without sort of adornment and all that kind of frippery which would suggest, in a Roman mind, femininity.

[Jack Bateman]

Now, you mentioned there about how they were draped changed with time. Was this about fashion or status? Did different folds mean different things?

[Emily Briffet]

It was a fashion thing. The main changes that you see are during the imperial period, so the first few centuries ce, so you have different emperors bringing in new styles of draping the toga. I mean, Augustus, the first emperor, he brought in a much more elaborate and. And bigger toga that was draped in. In a very elaborate way. And that was sort of part of his renewal of his way of sort of returning to Roman values. And after that, at various stages over the centuries, various emperors brought in slightly new styles. And the older style of Augustus actually became the. The formal style that emperors would use, informal occasions. So it was a little bit like wearing sort of a morning suit or something like that, something sort of Old fashioned for formal occasions.

[Jack Bateman]

Could you maybe describe to us how some of these draping might look? As we can't see on this podcast, what should we imagine?

[Emily Briffet]

The basic way of draping a toga was diagonally across the chest. So you would have one side hanging down the front. So if you imagine a toga as a semicircle, that long edge at the top that would be hanging over your shoulder, you would bring that long edge around under your left arm and then throw it back over your shoulder. That's the basic form. So you have this kind of diagonal drapery that goes across your body. What Augustus brought in was a second layer. So that semicircle actually became more like an oval and it was folded over. So you had two layers of semicircle and then you had lots and lots of cloth. Basically it was a bigger toga and you would pull a bit out over the diagonal, so there's like a pouch sticking out called an umbo. And that was sort of distinctive style that he brought in that became quite fashionable in the first century and then became this venerable old style that she wore for special occasions in later centuries when that whole sort of part started to become more sort of tight and twisted. And then in, in later centuries, in, in the late six second, early third century, you have a bit that kind of gets pulled out over the shoulder. So you have a kind of triangle of cloth, and that's called a toga contabilata. And it's yet another style, and it continues until the toga disappears. So you have these different styles over time, and they have been quite important for dating artwork over the years. And in fact, pretty much the only thing that archaeologists, classical archaeologists were interested in with regard to the toga until very recently was these draping styles, because they helped to date statues. But there's a lot more to say about the toga and about Roman dress than just using it as a dating method.

[Jack Bateman]

With this decorative draping around the chest and also the volumes of material this might have taken up, is it fair to say that the toga was really sort of a status symbol?

[Emily Briffet]

It was absolutely a status symbol, yes. You know, all dress in antiquity was handmade. It was hand woven. And for poorer people, some of them, the most expensive thing they owned would have been the clothes that they wore. So the more clothes you had, the higher the status. And the toga was massive. It was a very big garment to get it around your body, draping down the front and draping around and draping down the back, it had to be 4, 5, 6 meters long. So that's a lot of material. It was a status symbol. I often talk about the toga in similar terms to a suit these days. There are people who would have had very expensive ones and there would have been people who wore them all the time, just like there are people in the modern world who wear a suit every day. You know, business people and politics, politicians and things like that. And there would have been people and who might have had several. And then there are people who might just have had a toga stuffed down the back. And we do have sources for this that are stuffed into a box somewhere that they pulled out every now and again for weddings, for funerals, for court appearances and things like that, or religious festivals, but generally didn't really wear it. It was just special occasion stuff. And that might have been just the only one they had. And they only had one for their whole life. A little bit like some men these days with suits. So it is a status symbol. It showed your occupation and your status. But it was also a matter of sort of civic pride to have one for the right occasions and to wear it when it was appropriate, even for poorer people.

[Jack Bateman]

So if we went back in time, not everyone is just wandering around in their finery, in their toga all the time.

[Emily Briffet]

Absolutely not. No. If you saw men wearing a toga on the street, it would mean that they were either politicians, statesmen, clerks, the law courts, judges in the law courts, or it was early in the morning because Rome had a patronage system. So you had patrons and clients. People had wealthy friends who helped them out. And those clients were expected to go every morning to greet their patron in the morning. And they're expected to wear a toga for this. They might be scurrying around, we know this from the satirists like Juvenile and Marshal, that this was quite an imposition and that it was no mean feat. Sort of trying to get with your toga intact across the dirty streets of Rome to your patron's house in the morning and dodge all the dirt and all the rest of it. And it was no mean feat to have this expensive garment when you really weren't very wealthy yourself and you were trying to get bits and pieces of money and funding from, from your patron. It could be quite a large expense that you're expected to lay out. But generally speaking, most people on the street would not have been wearing a toga.

[Jack Bateman]

What did the average man, woman and child wear on a day to day basis then?

[Emily Briffet]

Well, I mean, the basic Roman garment that everybody wore was the tunic. So the tunic is basically two rectangles of cloth in its basic form, sewn up over the shoulders and down the side with holes for arms and your head. And it was basically worn by everybody. So women would wear it ankle length or even foot length, and men would wear it roughly knee length. Soldiers wore it a bit shorter above the knee. And that's what everyone wore, and that's what all men wore under their toga as well. And all women wore the longer version of this. So the status comes from what you wear over that, really. So you have the statesman wearing a toga over the top. A lot of people, especially on warm days, and especially people who were sort of the artisan class, people who had workshops, cobblers, carpenters, these kinds of people, butchers, would just wear the tunic without anything on top. There were various other cloaks that you could wear. There was the Greek style, quite generic cloak, which is just a rectangular cloak people would wear. There were various hooded ponchos that you would wear in bad weather. So it kind of depend on the weather a bit. But when we see frescoes, we don't get that many images of people on the street in everyday life, but we have a few. And the ones that we have, like from the house of Julia Felix in Pompeii, most people are just wandering around in tunics, maybe with a cloak over the top, rectangular cloak over the top. Some of them are wearing hooded cloaks over the top. I think the thing that would strike most people, if you really think that if you wandered around Central Rome in 50, 50 CE, that everyone would be wearing white clothes, you would probably be quite shocked at how actually how colorful everything was. Because people did wear different colours, different dyes were possible. It was possible to dye things red or green or yellow or blue, and people did wear those colors. And the frescoes that we have and the few sources that we have show just how colourful the dress was on the streets.

[Jack Bateman]

Were there particular favourite colours, ones that were really popular?

[Emily Briffet]

We know from the written sources that yellow was associated with women. It wasn't considered a very manly colour. We know that purple was very expensive. So obviously different colours would have different prices because they were dyed with different things. We're used to going and buying a T shirt and the red one and the green one cost the same. But in the Roman times, they wouldn't have. They would have cost different things. Things because the dyes would have had different prices on them. And the most expensive one was purple dye, which was made from crushing Murex shells. So that's a shellfish which you find in the eastern Mediterranean. And that was incredibly expensive. And it ended up being really the preserve of the emperor. Apart from you could have it as this, like I said, this special stripe, this purple stripe that you would have on the toga if you were a magistrate or a priest, you holding a special office, then you could have this stripe on your toga and also on your tunic if you're a senator or an equestrian. So of a certain status. But a fully purple Murex purple toga, a fully Murex purple tunic was really. That was not on. That was absolutely the, the preserve of the emperor. And in the early times, even the emperor didn't really use. That was, it was sort of bad form. It was sort of considered extravagant and a bit too sort of monarchical. And it was really only in late antiquity that emperors were a little bit more extravagant. Things got more extravagant and they wore them on a more regular basis.

[Jack Bateman]

What about things like ornamentation or the accessories that we would think about today?

[Emily Briffet]

Men were expected not really to wear jewellery. There was various kinds of rings that could signify status and there was, you know, over time there were changes in hairstyle and beards and things like that that sort of signified changes in fashion for men. But in terms of accessories, jewellery and things like that, that was really the preserve of women. There were earrings, there were fingerings and there were bangles of various kinds and things like that. Things went in and out of fashion. Generally speaking, it increased over time. So as we get towards late antiquity, women are wearing more jewellery. There was a sort of a much more austere ideal in the Republican period and also in the early imperial period wasn't considered seemly to be too extravagant with your jewelry and that sort of changes over time, or at least in the images that we have. Maybe women were always wearing lots of jewelry and we just, they just didn't have themselves depicted in that way. There's a real problem with sources and dress obviously because we don't actually have the clothing. We don't, we do have the jewelry, but we don't have the clothing itself. So we end up being dependent on, for a lot of this, on images that were not necessarily snapshots, you know, spontaneous snapshots.

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[Jack Bateman]

I guess it's almost about how people wanted to be presented rather than how they were.

[Emily Briffet]

Yeah.

[Jack Bateman]

Do children wear the same outfits and clothing as their parents or as other adults?

[Emily Briffet]

To an extent, yes. But in the elite circles, we have a really interesting relationship between dress and childhood. We have certain images, and we also know from the written sources that ideally in elite circles, both girls and boys would wear a toga, as a toga, called a toga praetexta. So this is the toga with the purple stripe that also adult magistrates and priests wore. And this purple stripe signified protection. It signified protection and sort of sacrosanct status of those magistrates and of those priests. And it also signified the sacrosanct nature of childhood and children and innocence. So they were protected by this purple stripe on their toga. And it's interesting that both girls and boys wore this toga. It suggests that there was an element of genderlessness to elite childhood to a certain point. And then what's very interesting is that again, ideally, and the extent to which this happened, you know, very widely, we don't know. But ideally what happened was that the children would stop wearing this childhood toga, the toga praetexta, when they came of age, when they became adults. For boys, that was a point in their teens when their parents would decide that they're old enough, they'd gone through puberty, and they were old enough to be considered adults. And there would be a ceremony and people would be invited, like a christening these days or whatever. Friends and family would come and they would take off their childhood toga and they would put on the man's toga, which is without the purple stripes that their father would hand them, the toga virilis, the toga of the adult man. And from that moment on, so the childhood sort of ended suddenly and adulthood just started. And that was signified in this new dress. And that really signified not just sort of sexual freedom and those kinds of things, but also civic duty. So you were then expected, because the toga was the dress of sort of civic public life, to start attending the law courts, to start attending the Senate, to start getting involved in public life and doing your civic duty as a. As an elite Roman man. And that was a very, very important sort of transition that was shown in dress for women that came with marriage. They didn't have a special ceremony because they weren't public figures that ideally weren't supposed to be public figures. They would change into their bridal dress on their wedding day and they would change the next, the very next day into the dress of a Roman matron, and that was that. They were now a wife and potential mother. And so for children, the dress symbolism suggests that from one day to the next, you went from being a child to an adult with very different responsibilities and suddenly very different expectations of you and your gender. Whereas beforehand there was sort of a lot more of a genderless kind of ideal. Now, the extent to which people actually did that, and we know that girls would wear jewellery and. And all those kinds of things to try and be attractive in a way that boys didn't. And so, you know, this. This is all sort of very much elite written sources that we're relying on for this. But it's very interesting that it's all tied up with dress, you know, dress embodying this change.

[Jack Bateman]

So you've obviously studied this. What brought you into this? What made you interested in studying Roman dress?

[Emily Briffet]

It was a bit of a journey. I was studying Roman provincial history and provincial cultures and I was getting really interested. What really drew me into the Romans in the first place was studying in Germany, studying in Brest and looking at how far the Romans got and just thinking, this is nuts, that there were people here that were originally from Italy and they're building things and they're making pots and what were they even doing here? And what did the people who actually lived here think of all this, you know, imperialism is something quite strange if you think about it. So I was sort of studying the literature that was trying to get at what the local people thought about Roman Rule, because we don't have written sources in these kinds of places as written by local people. Through looking at pots, through looking at architecture, trying to understand how these things might reflect the extent to which people accepted Roman culture or not. And I thought there must be a better way and a better source for this. And that's how I got into Roman dress, because I thought, well, surely what people wear and especially what people depict themselves in on their gravestones is a lot more of an indication of how they saw themselves culturally than buying a pot or building a wall in a particular way. So that was my PhD work was on Roman gall and dress on gravestones, and the extent to which people did wear their local dress rather than Roman dress, to assert sort of local identities and things like that. And then that sort of got on to thinking, you know, dress is actually quite important and how much work has actually been done. Because if you're working on the provinces, you still need to think, okay, well, there are some togas here. So what's toga all about? Oh, there's nothing really extensively been written on the toga. And so, you know, this kind of gap opened up where there were people working on it, but only really since the 90s. And there's so much more to be done to understand not just what Roman dress looked like. People have been looking at that for a very long time, and museum people were wanting to get their exhibits right and all that kind of stuff. But there's a lot more to Roman dress, because the Romans were obsessed with clothes and they're obsessed with status. Roman society was a very unequal society, but it was also a very fluid society. There was a lot of social mobility. You know, slaves could be freed and could end up being very rich, successful business people. People from parts of the empire who were formerly considered barbarians could end up being emperors. You know, there is movement. And where you have movement and mobility in a society, you also have status anxiety. And you have anxiety about people getting above their station. You have anxiety about nouveau riche. All these kinds of things come into it. And dress is where you see these things more than anything else, because dress showed who you were or who you asserted yourself to be, and it asserted to people how you expected to be treated. They didn't have ID cards, they didn't have these, you know, passports, documentation. You had to assert who you were through your dress. To the extent that in law, if a woman wasn't dressed as a respectable matron on the street and they were molested, they had far less recourse in the eyes of the law, to basically sue for being molested if they weren't actually dressed as such, that you're obliged to sort of show who you were. And obviously that leaves the door wide open for people usurping status, dressing above their station and other people saying, you're dressing above your station. And we have that in the written sources especially we have that in the satires, we have that in Cicero's Letters, we have that in lots of written sources. People basically gossiping about other people's dress and saying, you know, well, we know that that person was sort of virtually living on the street a few years ago and now look at this massive toga. He's. Boy, he's not fooling anyone. Or this guy over here, this miser, we know he's worth so and so many thousand a year and he hasn't bought a new toga in 10 years. We have a lot of that, that kind of chat in the written sources. So it's really through dress that we can really get to the nitty gritty of how on the street these kinds of status boundaries were sort of negotiated and how people were sort of thinking about each other in terms of status.

[Jack Bateman]

When it comes to talking about later eras. So Tudors, early modern era, we talk about the sumptuary laws that were put in place. Was there a Roman equivalent? Was this a rule and regulation thing or was it self imposed, societal gossip imposed?

[Emily Briffet]

There were very few sumptuary laws. There were sumptuary laws, over time they tended to relate more to women's dress. So reining in those completely extravagant women spending all their husbands money on expensive silk clothes and jewelry and all those kinds of things. And Augustus brought in some of some laws like that to make sure everybody was returning back to the good austere old Roman ways where people didn't need that kind of nonsense. I mean, obviously where you have sumptuary laws, you have people breaking them. You don't sort of make sumptuary laws unless there's considered to be a problem. How those were enforced and the extent to which they're enforced, we really don't, we don't know. I mean, there was a lot of resistance amongst the elite to these kinds of things. There were various sumptuary laws later in antiquity, when dress started to change, things started to get more extravagant. People stopped wearing the toga to a great extent. And so there was sort of enforcement of trying to get people to wear the toga and not to wear various things in the city of Rome or various People of various status, but as a general rule there wasn't. Slaves must wear this. These kinds of people must wear this. These kinds of people must wear this. Written sources suggest that there was a death penalty for wearing the toga if you weren't a Roman citizen, because by doing so you're usurping Roman citizenship, so you're usurping this privileged legal status. But how that was actually enforced, whether it was really enforced is a massive question. And we have also written sources that suggest that there were people in. In the provinces wearing the toga because they were trying to signal their allegiance with Rome and didn't realize that they had to be citizens to wear the toga. So sort of perfectly innocently wearing. So this. It's a bit messy. It's a lot more messy than it seems from the legal sources, I think. And there's always going to be people bucking the trend. There's always going to be people wearing inappropriate dress. There's always going to be people wearing the appropriate dress, but very badly. That's another thing we hear about. And people, you know, especially men, talking about other men and how they tripped over their togas or their tunic was too long or wasn't belted properly, all these kinds of things. We need to imagine it quite messy. I think Pliny mentions a fresco painter who used to wear a toga to paint frescoes. Even when he was jumping up on the scaffolding and painting, getting all messy, he would always wear a toga. So, you know, that's a little bit like a plumber wearing a suit today. But people, you know, people did have individual agency, I guess, is what I'm saying. So you have to imagine that there were sort of various social rules. Probably the social rules were much more important than the legal rules, but that people were ignoring them or not getting them right. And other people were. Yeah, were sort of gossiping about them.

[Jack Bateman]

So these are some of the big fashion faux pas. But were there any fashion trends as we would see it today?

[Emily Briffet]

Yes, but less in dress. I mean, I think the things did change very slowly over time. I wouldn't call that fashion, though. I think fashion sort of needs to be conscious and it needs to be a lot quicker than that. And so I would say that the toga style changes. I think that's definitely fashion. Where you see fashion in the ancient world, in the Roman world, is in hairstyles. Hairstyles and beards. You know, those things did change very dramatically over time. And part of the reason for that is that there weren't any fashion magazines. So the way that someone in Britain, for example, would know what the latest fashions are would be to look at the coins. And coins only show the head as a general rule. So that's where you see what people are wearing. You know, the women and the men of the royal household would be depicted on the coins. And so the coins would show you what the latest styles are in hairstyles and in beards, yes or no, Big beard, short beard, all these kinds of things. So again, that's something that's used very extensively to date artworks, to date statues and things like that, because those things really did change over time and they change quite consciously. So a new emperor might bring in a new, new hairstyle and his empress might bring in a new hairstyle and everyone would start wearing the style of the new empress. They wouldn't necessarily know what she was wearing. That's really where fashion was located, in hairstyles, mainly.

[Jack Bateman]

Obviously, the Romans occupied this massive landmass. Did the cultures they encountered influence their style choices in return?

[Emily Briffet]

Yes, quite considerably. I think there was quite a bit of influence, I think, in the very early Roman period from the Celts who lived, lived in northern Italy. So I think a lot of this hooded garments probably came quite early through that contact. And later in antiquity, especially from the sort of late second, third century onward, the tunics start to get quite long, thin sleeves. And that is, I have argued, under the influence of the northern provinces, the extent to which there were troops in the northern provinces and the extent to which people from the northern provinces ended up being emperors and things like that. So that there is a gradual infiltration of especially northern European provinces and the dress from those areas to an extent also from the east, from the eastern provinces. But, you know, it's complicated because it went both ways because of course, Roman dress also influenced these dress styles. And in some places dress styles stayed exactly the same. The local dress styles remained for centuries through the Roman period. Some places they disappeared completely and it was just Roman dress. So it was a back and forth movement of dress styles. Yeah.

[Jack Bateman]

Now, there's a couple of other questions I particularly want to ask you about the outfits, what you could have expected to have found on your average Roman person. And I think it would be particularly remiss to not ask you what did the average Roman wear underneath their togas and tunics? Did they have an equivalent of bras, pants and socks?

[Emily Briffet]

Right. So this is quite a controversial topic because the latest. Well, the most recent article written about this by Kelly Olson in Canada Suggests that Romans didn't really wear underwear. And that's based on written sources where someone falls over and you can see way too much. And that suggests that they aren't covered up in various places and all these kinds of things. I think it's not something Romans talk about. It's not something that is depicted. We do know that women wore a band around their bust called a strophium to hold their bust. And interestingly, it was considered a beauty ideal to have a very small bust in the Roman world. A big bust was considered sort of a bit coarse and a bit barbaric. And that related to the fact that elite women would have wet nurses to breastfeed their children. So if you had a big bust, then, you know, you looked like you were breastfeeding your own children. So we know that. We do know that. That they had breast bands. We also have late antique mosaic from Sicily that people might know. The so called bikini girls. They look like they're sort of wearing briefs and this breastband. And that may represent underwear or it may represent what women wore when they weren't wearing anything else. A little bit like a swimsuit. For us, you know, it's the alternative to wearing clothes. We do have those sort of leather. Leather briefs. So sort of they look like knickers, but they're made out of leather. Have been found in London. But again, we don't know whether they were normal underwear or whether they were used. Used by women for exercising when they had taken everything else off. So it's a bit of a fraught question. It's not entirely clear. We know that men had loincloths. We have images from mines and various mosaics of people doing heavy labor of men wearing loincloths. But whether they wore loincloth under their tunic kind of depends how you interpret a lot of asides in written literature describing people falling over and things like that. I guess we don't know. And I think it will continue to rage, that debate. I haven't waded into it myself yet.

[Jack Bateman]

Hopefully this will be a slightly less contentious question then. We so often see the Romans wearing sandals. Did they wear sandals or were there other shoe options as well?

[Emily Briffet]

There were other shoe options as well. The sandal thing is possibly as a result of sort of knowing that what. What Roman soldiers wore. Because Roman soldiers wore these kind of. They're called Carly Guy. These kind of sandals with socks. Socks and sandals. The Romans were already doing the socks and sandals and they sort of had hob nails and they were a specific Type of army boot. But they, they really were mostly quite open and there were various sort of kinds of shoes like that. The toga was always worn with closed boots. Boots you wore them with, with boots called kalce and they were sort of ankle high boots and they would have laces going up and often had little amulets hanging off them as well that were also linked to status. But you never wore the toga with sandals. You always wore them with closed boots. I guess a bit like you wouldn't wear a suit with flip flops or something or even sandals women would wear. There were lots of different types of shoes. But there are shoes called sake. They were sort of very soft slippers that, that women would wear, kind could wear and often did wear. They were also closed shoes. There were lots of different types of shoes. Yeah. Not just sandals.

[Jack Bateman]

It's interesting to hear because you so often see that picture of the sandal. This links me onto something else. I wanted to ask you about the Roman wardrobe. Did people have a selection of tunics or items of clothing they could wear or did they tend to just interchange between maybe one or two?

[Emily Briffet]

Well, again, that depends on how much money you had. Very wealthy people would have had all sorts of things. I mean, there were also different garments for different occasions. So there was a special, special little ensemble, little suit that you would wear to go to banquets, for example. Not everyone went to banquets. That was an elite thing. And you might have various of them if you didn't want to sort of wear the same thing every week when you went to so and so's house. Men might have various togas. That may be a really good one for special occasions and an everyday one or whatever. But like I said, a lot of people would have just had very, very few garments. Maybe one tunic, maybe a couple of cloaks of various kinds, one of which might be a toga or a nice cloak for women for special occasions. It really depended on how much money you had. And also, you know, it wasn't just the quantity, it was also the quality. We know that, that from written sources of people sort of teasing each other about the holes and the patches and all that kind of stuff in their clothes. And we know that there was a second hand clothes market so you could buy secondhand clothes. We know that even really far gone clothes could be turned into rags and patches and things like that. So it would have reflected very mostly very clearly where you sat in financial terms, how many clothes you had and so what your options were. Like I said, they were very, very Expensive.

[Jack Bateman]

So clothes were valued then? If they're being patched, if they're being passed on and handed down.

[Emily Briffet]

Yes, yes. And they're stolen. So because they're valuable. I don't know how many of your listeners have been to Bath and to the Roman baths in Bath, but in Bath have been found lots of so called curse tablets. There's little lead tablets that people write curses on to curse people, often unknown people, for doing bad things to them and asking the gods to sort of wreak revenge. And a lot of the cursed tablets in baths, they do nasty things to this person who stole my cloak from the baths, you know, because you sort of, you get undressed and you put it there and people are always nicking stuff from the bars and they were the things that really, really hurt if they were nicked because they were so valuable and because you had to save up if you needed another cloak. And you know, it's cold in Britain, so you don't really want to not have that and you, you might not have the money to just go out and buy a new one tomorrow. So. Yes, and they're bequeathed in wills and things like that, you know, and dowries and stuff. They are part of your valuables, part of the stuff that you might inherit or you might want to give to people because they're valuable.

[Jack Bateman]

How were clothes made and by whom?

[Emily Briffet]

Again, this is something that is debated a lot. And the reason it's debated a lot is because if you were to just read the Roman sources, the written sources about this, you would think that basically all clothes were made by women at home on looms and that most women spent most of the day, at least in, in households that were big enough to have a loom, would sit at home weaving clothes for their family. That is not what we think is the case. We don't find loom weights in everyone's houses, although we do find them in houses. So they did exist. And we know from inscriptions and we know from written sources that there was retail, there was clothing retail. We know from the Diocletian's price edict, which is a somewhat sort of late antique source, which basically sets out the prices for all the things that are on the market. We know there was a huge market in bolts of cloth, but also in ready made garments. There was a retail sector and we know that there was sort of industrial, almost industrial scale production of various types of garments in places like Egypt. We know that from the work contracts and the apprenticeship contracts and the archaeology, they were shipping these garments around the world. And supplying the Roman army at various stages as well. So we, there was a. There was an industry enclosed, but where any individual person got their individual garment from is anyone's guess. You know, the proportion of those things that were bought in a shop, the proportion of those things that were imported versus locally made, the proportion of those things that were new versus secondhand, we just don't know. We don't find textiles really at all in Italy or in most of Europe. And the textiles that we find in drier places like the eastern provinces or Egypt, we don't know how indicative they are. And the little scraps that we get, the wonderful scraps that we get on Hadrian's walls, you know, don't necessarily tell us enough about this kind of thing either. There was local production, there was import and export and trade. We know that, but how much of each we don't know.

[Jack Bateman]

As we've visited the Roman baths in Bath and we've looked at people bathing themselves. How often did people wash their clothes?

[Emily Briffet]

We don't really know. There were a lot in Roman cities. There were a lot of, of, I guess a bit like sort of laundries or dry cleaning kind of businesses. We would sort of see them as today fullers. So you would take your clothes there to be washed and also re dyed and sort of refurbished a bit, because obviously every time you wash it, the dye goes out a bit. Most of the dyes in antiquity faded over time, so you could also get them re dyed in the, in the process. So that all sort of went together, the washing and the, and the dyeing and maybe getting rid of some of the lint or whatever. You know, there was a sort of whole refurbishment process, but yeah, we don't know the extent to which that was a special occasion. And they were washing things more regularly in the house. I mean, you would hope so. We know that they were washing themselves very regularly because there's baths everywhere and you know, the Romans were really into their bars. I mean, how clean the actual water was that they're washing is another matter. But yeah, we don't know. I'm sorry, we don't. There's so much we don't know.

[Jack Bateman]

As a final question to you, what do you think would really surprise people about Roman dress?

[Emily Briffet]

I think what is really spectacular and I think one thing that people probably don't know about and I think would be wonderful to recreate are some of the local dress styles in the provinces, because some of them are absolutely spectacular. In the Danube provinces, for example, there are various Types of very elaborate headgear and massive brooches, lots of metal jewelry. In the east, there's various turbans with chains and things hanging off. There's amazing, amazing dress that was worn for hundreds of years. And the only reason really we know about it is because the Romans introduced this habit of people depicting themselves on their gravestones, which hadn't existed necessarily before and it didn't exist afterwards. So we have this spotlight on these extraordinary. And it's the women's dress that's extraordinary. The men's dress. In the east, there's some pretty good. Pretty good embroidered caftans and things like that as well. But it's mainly the women's dress that really just knocks your socks off. And it's the Romans coming in and introducing this medium of depiction. That means that we know that for that period of time, women were wearing maybe only, you know, as. As their Sunday best, who knows? But these incredible, incredible outfits that look like you couldn't move wearing them. Some of the headdresses, we still don't really understand how they were made. They seem to sort of defy gravity a bit. So it would be quite useful, I think, to try and recreate them, just to try and understand how they were made, what kind of scaffolding you needed to make them. Yeah, I think the sort of. The multiculturalism of the Roman Empire is often lost and just how spectacular some of those local cultures were in lots of different ways. But in dress, I can assure you that there's some really amazing things and are really, really worth looking at. I think much, much more elaborate than any Roman dress.

[Jack Bateman]

That was Ursula Rothi, professor of Roman archaeology and history at the Open University and the author of the Toga and Roman Identity, which was published in 2021. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.

[Emily Briffet]

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