These are the principal archaic modes of wearing the hair found on the monuments, but they by no means exhaust the varieties which might be observed. The writers, however, only mention one ancient head-dress. Thucydides, in the passage already quoted, which describes the long chitons formerly worn by the Athenians, also tells us that at the same time that this old-fashioned dress was abandoned, the Athenians gave up the old way of dressing their hair in the crobylus (κρωβύλος), into which they fastened golden grasshoppers. It has not yet, however, been possible to determine with any certainty which of the head-dresses found on the statues corresponded to this crobylus, which seems to be identical with the corymbus (κόρυμβος) mentioned in other places; nor has it been possible to find any traces of the grasshoppers. Consequently almost all the head-dresses above described have been claimed for the crobylus, even the double plaits behind the ears; and the grasshoppers have been explained sometimes as the above-mentioned spirals, sometimes as hair-pins or fibulae. Perhaps some day a fortunate discovery may throw light on this difficult question.
Fig. 48.
It would be scarcely possible to assign a chronological order to all these various archaic head-dresses. However, in the latter half of the fifth century they all disappear, and here we have another proof of the increasing aesthetic sense noticeable in all domains of life in the classic period. The allusions in Aristophanes show that in his time it was only old-fashioned people, who probably also went about in long chitons, who still wore the grasshoppers. From the time of Pheidias, the elaborate head-dresses entirely vanish; and though they are continued for a longer period on the vase paintings, that is probably because painting adhered longer than sculpture to the old forms and fashions, since its free development in style was also of later growth. After this time the long, flowing hair of the men, and the pigtail disappear; and though only youths and athletes wore their hair quite short, yet the men’s hair was also shortened, and owed its chief beauty to nature, which has granted the gift of graceful curl to Southern and Oriental nations. The portrait heads of this and the following period depict the hair as simply curled, soft, and not too abundant. This seems to have continued during the following centuries; at any rate,
Fig. 49.
the monuments show no trace of a return to the artificial head-dresses fashionable in ancient times. Just as wigs, powder, and pigtails have disappeared for ever among us, so antiquity, when it had once recognised the beauty of hair in its natural growth, never returned to the stiff and laborious head-dress of the past. Of course, there were various fashions in the mode of wearing the hair and having it cut; in fact, there are a number of different names for the modes of cutting it, such as the “garden,” the “boat,” but we do not know what these were like, since the monuments afford no clue. Probably it was only dandies who laid any stress on such matters. It is but natural that there should have been many local variations in the mode of wearing the hair, as in the dress, and probably these were of some importance in the oldest period; but we know very little about them. At Sparta it was the custom at the time of the Peloponnesian War to shave the hair quite close to the head, but as the Spartans wore long, carefully-curled hair at the time of the Persian wars, a change in the fashion must have taken place at Sparta in the course of the fifth century.