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.
Fig. 13.—Historic Greek
Costume From Leaf's Homer's Iliad vol. ii
In short, Homeric female dress was not introduced into the Epics by any "recension," by any interpolators of any post-Achaean date, as Pinza argues that it was.[22] He supposes the Ionian female costume to be a long linen smock with short sleeves.
Pinza argues that the costume of women in Homer "is wholly different from that of Spartan ladies of archaic and classical times; and, on the other hand, exhibits many analogies with the more antique linen chiton with short sleeves, certainly of Asiatico-Semitic origin, as is proved by the etymology of the name" (chiton).[23] He supposes the Ionian costume of women, described as a long linen smock with short sleeves, to be derived, through Phoenicia, from the Syria of, say, 690 B.C., citing Hebrew female captives in Layard's Monuments of Nineveh (i. plates 61, 83, and others). In plate 61 we see a tall female captive, wearing a long garment, with a broad fringe over her head, and below it another long garment with short tight sewn sleeves, and a broad border which falls over the legs, leaving them bare from the calf. There are no pins or fibulae visible; the upper garment hides the girdle, if girdle there be. In plate 65 two figures of goddesses are carried, on chairs, in a procession. They wear long sewn smocks, with sewn sleeves ending above the elbows, and with very broad belts. The dresses end above the ankle bones. They are far from being loose or trailing; no pins or fibulae appear. The same costume, without any girdle, is worn by two women in a kitchen: they seem to have bodices and skirts (plate 30). The sleeves have no small round brooches like the Ionian chiton, which, like the Assyrian dresses, reached the feet (ποδήρης).