Fig. 3.
As a remnant of the most primitive dress, clothes made of skins, such as were afterwards worn only by country people, huntsmen and the like, still existed in the Homeric age. Homer several times mentions skins as the dress of soldiers; on the older monuments we see them drawn over a short chiton, and sometimes even fastened with a girdle.
How long this ancient dress continued in use we cannot determine with any certainty; but the majority even of vase pictures with black figures show a different dress. It is true, as we mentioned just now, that the long chiton still continued in use besides the short one, but the cut and the mode of wearing it changed.
The monuments of this period almost always show signs of drapery, and this is, moreover, of an artificial, exaggerated, and pedantic kind. It must have been the fashion at that time, that is, from the sixth till nearly the middle of the fifth century, to lay the folds of men’s dress, as well as of women’s, in symmetrically parallel lines. In pictures the lower edges of dresses and cloaks show various regularly cut-out points, while on the inner side there are many small zigzag folds arranged with laborious symmetry. (Compare Fig. [4], “The Rape of Helen,” after a vase picture by the vase painter Hiero.) This may be partly due to the artistic style, which at that period inclined to over-elaboration; yet it is impossible to doubt that we find here not only an expression of archaic art, but also the representation of a dress laboriously and artificially folded, stiffened, and ironed, in which the folds were produced by external aids, such as ironing, starching, pressing, even stitching of the stuff laid in folds, or sewing such folds on to the material. We cannot determine when this custom began in Greece. In works of art we find it comparatively late in the sixth century B.C.; yet, as Helbig remarks, it is by no means impossible that this fashion existed at a far more ancient period, since the custom of laying material in artificial folds by means of stiffening or ironing was already known in Egypt in 4000 B.C.; and it therefore seems extremely probable that the Phoenicians adopted the practice at a very early period, and introduced it into Greece. It is a very natural assumption that this mode of draping would in the first instance be adopted for linen material, and that it would therefore be introduced among the Greeks with the linen chiton, which took the place of the woollen one formerly worn.
Fig. 4.
On the other hand, however, it is probable that, as woollen clothing was afterwards worn as well as linen, they attempted to ornament this in similar fashion by artificial folds; the works of art, however, show that these folds were far less in quantity and less sharply defined in woollen clothing than in linen, which is naturally much better adapted for the purpose.
Apart from the folds, the clothes now became wider and more comfortable, and were less closely girt round the hips. The chiton is still a garment made by sewing, and the long differs from the short only in length, not in shape. Both are, as a rule, so cut as to be sewn together regularly below the girdle; above the girdle they are sometimes provided with a slit on one side to facilitate putting on. They usually have sleeves, sometimes short, sometimes long; these are either fastened all round, or, as is also the case in female dress, open at the top and fastened by pins or buttons. In this case the chiton is sewn in such a manner as to be all in one above the girdle as far as the sleeve, and open at the top, so that the slits for the arms and neck are connected; the wearer puts the chiton over his head, draws up the sleeve on the upper arm, and thus supplies the opening for the neck. Besides this, there is often an ornamental arrangement such as we find in the female dress of the same period a puff of regular folds (kolpos), formed by drawing up the dress over the girdle and letting the piece drawn up all round fall again over the girdle; and, in addition, a bib falling over the breast in zig-zag folds, which appears, as a rule, to be a separate piece sewn on the dress at the opening of the neck. In Fig. [4] we observe the kolpos and bib over the short chiton of Hermes in the centre, the bib also over the long chiton of Paris (on the left), and of Tyndareus (on the right).