[608] Bartoli, Luc. Ant. P. I. tab. 35.
[609] Aristoph. Acham. 429.
[610] Stuart, in his Antiquities of Athens, vol. iii. ch. 9. plates 8, 9, has engraved two beautiful statues of Telephus and Ganymede from a ruined colonnade at Thessalonica. In these the cap is very little pointed.
[611] Fellows’s Discoveries in Lycia, Plate 35. Nos. 3, 7. The “Phrygian bonnet” is seen in the bas-reliefs brought from Xanthus by this intelligent traveller, and now deposited in the British Museum.
The cap worn by the Persians is called by Greek authors κυρβασία or τιάρα[612], and seems to have had the form now under consideration. Herodotus, when he describes the costume of the Persian soldiers in the army of Xerxes, says, that they wore light and flexible caps of felt, which were called tiaras. He adds, that the Medes and Bactrians wore the same kind of cap with the Persians, but that the Cissii wore a mitra instead (vii. 61, 62, 64). On the other hand he says, that the Sacæ wore cyrbasiæ, which were sharp-pointed, straight, and compact. The Armenians were also called “weavers of felt” (Brunck, Anal. ii. p. 146. No. 22). The form of their caps is clearly shown in the coins of the Emperor Verus, one of which, preserved in the British Museum, is engraved in [Plate VIII.] fig. 14. The legend, surrounding his head, L. Vervs. Avg. Armeniacvs, refers to the war in Armenia. The reverse shows a female figure representing Armenia, mourning and seated on the ground, and surrounded by the emblems of Roman warfare and victory. The caps represented on this and other coins agree remarkably with the forms still used in the same parts of Asia. Strabo (L. xi. p. 563, ed. Sieb.) says, that these caps were necessary in Media on account of the cold. He calls the Persian cap “felt in the shape of a tower” (L. xv. p. 231). The king of Persia was distinguished by wearing a stiff cyrbasia, which stood erect, whereas his subjects wore their tiaras folded and bent forwards.[613] Hence in the Aves of Aristophanes the cock is ludicrously compared to the Great King, his erect comb being called his “cyrbasia.” The Athenians no doubt considered this form of the tiara as an expression of pride and assumption. It is recorded as one of the marks of arrogance in Apollodorus, the Athenian painter, that he wore an “erect cap[614].”
[612] Herod, v. 49. According to Mœris, v. Κυρβασία, this was the Attic term, τιάρα meaning the same thing in the common Greek. Plutarch applies the latter term to the cap worn by the younger Cyrus: Ἀποπίπτει δὲ τῆς κεφαλῆς ἡ τιάρα τοῦ Κύρου.—Artaxerxes, p. 1858. ed. Steph.
The “Phrygian bonnet” is called Phrygia tiara in the following lines of an epitaph (ap. Gruter. p. 1123):
Indueris teretes manicas Phrygiamque tiaram?
Non unus Cybeles pectore vivet Atys.
[613] Xenoph. Anab. ii. 5. 23; Cyrop. viii. 3, 13. Clitarchus, ap. Schol. in Aristoph. Aves, 487.