Vibratos calido ferro, myrrhaque madentes.
The Romans called a man who thus frizzled himself, homo calamistratus.
Crisp and curled ringlets were ever admired, and Petrarch thus describes them:
Aura che quelle chiome bionde e crespe
Circondi, e movi, e se mossa de loro
Soave mente, e spargi quel dolce oro
E poi’l raccogli, e’n bei nodi l’increspe.
Apuleius maintains, that if Venus were bald, though circled by the graces and the loves, she would not please even swarthy Vulcan. Petronius, in his description of Circe, describes her tresses naturally curling, and falling negligently over her shoulders, which they entirely covered. Apuleius praises her trailing locks, thick and long, and insensibly curling, dispersed over her divine neck, softly undulating with carelessness. Ovid notices those beauties who platted their braided hair like spiral shells. Petronius, to give an idea of a perfect beauty, says, that her forehead was small, and showed the roots of her hair raised upwards. This fashion, adopted by the Chinese, was not long ago a modish coëffure in France. Lucian, however, makes Thais say of a rival courtezan, “Who can praise her person, unless he is blind? Does she not draw up her scanty hair on her large forehead?”
The ancients also perfumed their hair, especially on festivals, with various ointments, composed of the spikenard and different balsams. They also occasionally painted it with a bright yellow. Unhappy must have been the poor slaves who had to attend a Roman lady’s toilet; if a single ringlet was displaced, the scourge was applied, and the cow-skin of our West Indian planters, the Taurea (“scutica de pene taurino”) brought into play; and not unfrequently the head of the offender was broken with the steel mirror that betrayed their negligence to the impatient fair one. As we are on the subject of female ingenuity in endeavouring to spread their nets more cunningly, it may be some comfort to our modern coquettes to know that antiquity seems to sanction the use of rouge, notwithstanding the fate of Jezabel. Plautus tells us that the Roman dames daubed their faces with the “fucus, compound of white lead and of vermilion:” hence were they called fucatæ, cerusatæ, and minionatæ. Various cosmetics were also employed, and, when at home, their faces were preserved with a coat of paste, the skin having been previously rubbed with a pumice-stone, and then washed with asses’ milk. Poppæa, the wife of Nero, had five hundred asses milked every day for her baths; and when she was exiled, a reduction of her establishment to fifty asses was considered a severe chastisement. Patches were also worn, of various shapes and dimensions, even by men; and Pliny tells us of one Regulus, a lawyer, who put a patch upon his right or left eye as he was going to plead for plaintiff or defendant.
The ancients also wore a certain hair-powder, a custom that was only revived in Europe in the seventeenth century, since it appears that this filthy fashion was brought in vogue at the fair of St. Germain, in 1614, by some beautiful ballad-singers.
In ancient mythology, hair was the symbol of life. All dead persons were supposed to be under the jurisdiction of the infernal deities, and no man could resign his life until some of his hair was cut off. Euripides introduces Death going to cut off some of the hair of Alcestis, when doomed to die instead of her husband Admetus; and Virgil describes Dido unable to resign her life, from her hair having been cut off by Proserpine, until Iris was sent by Juno to perform the kind office:
“Hunc ego Diti
Sacrum jussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo.”
Sic ait, et dextra crinem secat; omnis et unà
Dilapsus, calor, atque in ventos vita recessit.
Locks of hair were suspended over the door of the deceased, to show that the family were in mourning. On these occasions, the hair was torn, cut off, or shaved. It was then sometimes strewed over the dead body, or cast on the funeral pile. On the demise of great men, whole cities and communities were shorn, while animals shared a similar fate. Admetus, on the death of Alcestis, ordered this operation to be performed on his chariot horses: and when Masistius was slain by the Athenians, the Persians shaved themselves, their horses, and their mules. Alexander, not satisfied with this testimony of grief, ordered the very battlements of a city to be knocked down, that the town might look bald and shorn of its beauty.