Roman Patrician Matron’s Clothing

Clothing

“A married woman’s rank, status, and morality were also supposed to be indicated by her dress: long tunic, stola, and palla or mantle, drawn over the head when the woman was out of doors, and hair bound in fillets.” (Olson, Dress, 25)

All my garments were constructed with undyed linen thread using a running stitch and finished and hemmed by rolling over the edge and sewing with a whip stitch. In Textile Manufacture in the Northern Roman Provinces, Wild discusses the use of both the plain running stitch, overcast stitch, and some decorative edging and embroidery stitches. Given how similar they are, I think it’s a small leap from overcast to a plain whip stitch.

Fabric and Dyes

The Romans had an extensive trade network and an equally extensive variety of fabrics and dye choices when it came to their clothing. Judith Lynne Sebesta covers the topic extensively in her chapter “Tunica Ralla, Tunica Spissa: The Colors and Textiles of Roman Costume”. They had wool in a range of natural colors from white, to browns to greys to black; linen, worn mostly in its natural color, or bleached in the sun; for the more well-to-do, cotton imported from India and silks from China and India. The Romans also blended different fibers together such as cotton with linen for a fabric with a softer hand or cotton with wool for a lighter weight, but still warm fabric. Because of its cost, silk was often also woven with other fibers. (65-72)

While linen was harder to dye and make colorfast, all the fabrics could be dyed to a whole rainbow of colors. While Ovid says that there are as many colors available as there are in the spring flowers, he specifically mentions white, dark grey, light and sea blues, yellows in golden, saffron, and waxy or browning shades, myrtle green, amethyst purple, chestnut and almond browns, and a color that may be a very light or greyish pink. (68)

Fabrics could also be decorated in a range of styles, depending on your taste and pocketbook. The very rich could afford things like jewels and gold embroidery. There were also painted fabrics from Egypt, embroidered and checked cottons from Babylon, checked cloth from Gaul. (72)

Undergarments (Strophium and Caltula)

Roman undergarments are notoriously difficult to document with any reasonable certainty about much other than the fact that they existed. There are references to a variety of what seem to be undertunics, as well as loincloths, breastbands, and wrappings. I wanted to keep the wool tunic from being directly against my skin in the areas where it would be belted and snug, so I chose to make a caltula, an undergarment not well documented, but described as “a little mantle (paliolum) which women wear under their tunics, girded up below their breasts” (Olson, “Roman Underwear”, 203).

The caltula I made is a waist length and just wide enough to be able to pull on over my head, made of lightweight linen.

“The strophium, or breastband…was a band of linen or cotton wrapped around a woman’s chest, meant to hold the breasts and give them firmness.” The strophium could

be used to increase or flatten the bust line, depending on the shape of the woman, though the beauty ideal of the time was generally for a smaller bust and larger hips. (Olson, “Roman Underwear”, 203-4) Unlike most other Roman undergarments, we do find evidence of the strophium in art, both in an athletic context and in many depictions of sexual acts.

1Venus from the Museum Burg Linn, Germany, Found in a third century grave

2 Leda and the Swan Mosaic pavement, Late 2nd century CE., Kouklia, Museum.

Tunic

General consensus among many scholars seems to be that the tunic was made from a wide piece of cloth, often purpose-woven, sewn into a tube, with the shoulders closed by stitching or pinning at intervals along the top. Most tunics seem to be about the width of the wearer’s armspan, elbow to elbow, though wider or narrower widths would effectively produce different length sleeves, as well as an over all more or less voluminous garment. There is also evidence for the existence of a gold or gilded border along the top of some more expensive tunics called a patagium. (Olson, Dress, 25-26) The tunic was tied under the bust or waist with a cord to form it to the body.

The tunic is made from a single width of grey wool, doubled around to create an elbow to elbow width, tubular garment. The shoulder is pinned closed at the top with simple, bronze, bow-style fibulae.

Stola

The stola is a garment that was worn over the tunic by matrons. Though still essentially a tube of fabric, the stola had no sleeves and much wider arm holes than the tunic, coming down to the waist, with the shoulder construction being portrayed in a few different ways. In some images the shoulder seam seems gathered or pleated into a narrower width, sometimes pinned, sometimes with a narrow band going around the pleats. It is also shown with narrow straps either sewn directly to the top of the stola tube, or with the width of the stola gathered into a band that extended to serve as shoulder straps.

The Stola also seems to often have had a limbus, or wide band sewn around the bottom in a different color than the main garment. Aside from decoration, the limbus probably also served to show that a woman was wearing her stola, even when the straps that distinguish it from her tunic were covered by her palla. (Olson, Dress, 30)

3 Statue of Plautilla, Uffizi Museum http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/clothing_images.html

4 Bust from Isola Tiberina, Early 1st Cent CE (Olson, 29)

According to many writers of the era, the good wife of a Roman citizen wore a stola as an indicator of her status, modesty, and chastity, though the preponderance of writers lamenting women not wearing it seems to indicate it was more of a cultural sartorial ideal, than a garment always worn. If it were a truly ubiquitous item of clothing we would likely see much more frequent evidence of it in statues and other art from the period. (Olson, Dress, 31-32)

My stola is also from a single width of blue, checked wool, slightly narrower than the tunic, gathered into a band across the top creating the straps. I had hoped to add a limbus of dusty purple wool, but technical difficulties mean that I’ll be adding that at a later date.

Palla

The top-most layer of a fully dressed matron’s outfit was the palla, a rectangle of fabric of various sizes, but usually depicted as wide enough to hang to between the back of the knee and the ground when pulled over the head and long enough to drape completely around the body in a number of different configurations.

Like the stola, the ideal of the palla and the palla in practice appear to have been somewhat different. Ideally, the palla would have been used to veil the head in public, but evidence shows that, while it may have been more commonly worn than the stola, the palla was often merely wrapped around the body. Depictions of women in public include both veiled and unveiled in the same scenes, indicating that the style was probably up to the preference of the wearer. There is also the issue of the many very tall and elaborate hairstyles that would have been crushed had someone tried to wear their palla over their head. (Olson, Dress, 34-35)

My palla is about 3 yards of 50” wide linen-cotton blend, with the edges fringed and knotted as seen in the. Since the fabric was not woven specifically for this purpose, I pulled weft threads from both short ends until I had the length of fringe I wanted and tied warp threads off in sections of 15.

5 Statue of a woman with a fringed palla, Rome, Capitoline Museum, early imperial http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/clothing_images.html

6 Statue of Livia (arms restored incorrectly) Vatican Museum, end 1st century BCE http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/clothing_images.html

Men’s Tunic

Like women’s, men’s clothing was largely geometrically constructed and often from purpose woven fabric. For a long sleeved tunics, the entire garment could be woven as one piece, including the sleeves, or the sleeves could be woven as separate pieces to be attached to the body. Any decorations like stripes would generally have been woven in at the time of creation, rather than attached later as trim. (Croom, 31-33)

Again, since I do not have purpose woven fabric, this tunic was cut with one piece for the body and two for the sleeves from the same grey wool used for the women’s tunic and trimmed with the blue wool used for the stola.

 

7 Roman Clothing and Fashion, Pg 18

8 Ancient Roman Bronze Needle 55mm http://ancientpoint.com/inf/451‐ancient_roman_bronze_needle_55mm__p157.html 

Needles and Fibulae

Needles

Needles from ancient Rome have been found in both bone and various metals, “although bone was preferable to metal needles of the time because the metal tended to corrode and stain the fabric it was used on”. (Beaudry, 46) Though many extant examples are not likely fine enough to have been used in more delicate applications like garment construction, the basic construction of the larger and smaller examples is similar. There are also some of the finer needles which have two holes in the eye, likely to keep finer thread from slipping.

Beaudry argues that “copper-alloy needles were too crude for domestic sewing”, but, though I found the bronze needles that I made slower than a modern needle, they were still perfectly serviceable for garment construction. Additionally, John Peter Wild had the opportunity to examine several needles in a museum collection and felt that some of the smaller bronze needles

in that collection would have worked for the seam finishings and

9 1st Century Roman Britain: Three pins and four needles, made of bone and bronze http://www.lovelygreens.com/2011/11/ancient‐homemakingat‐british‐museum.html

embroidery he discusses. “Only one type [of needle from the Corinium Museum collection], the small bronze needles (4-5 cm. long) with one or two eyelets close together, is likely to have been employed for the work described in the foregoing paragraphs” (Wild, 58).

Several needles and netting tools, likely a kit, given their proximity, were found in a 3rd Century Roman shipwreck off the coast of Hof Carmel in Israel. While these are probably meant for fixing netting and sails and too large for sewing garments, they still provide good examples of construction and composition, photographed and analyzed for Rosen and Galili’s article.

I chose to make my needles out of bronze because of the availability of materials and people to teach me in that medium. Several iterations and attempts at various methods produced different results, though my favorite, both for simplicity of creation and use in sewing, was to draw the 14 gauge wire I had on hand down to the 1.10 hole on the draw plate (approx. 17 gauge), flatten the head to pierce the eye and then narrow the head back down a little, creating a narrower profile and a slightly oblong eye. Once I had a satisfactory eye, I hammered the tip into a taper, then sharpened it with a file and 400 then 800 grit sandpaper. To work harden the needles I put them in the tumbler over night because I found doing it manually takes a lot of time and effort for someone who isn’t used to hammering at things all day long and doesn’t have slaves to do it for them.

10 A Needle Assemblage from a Roman Shipwreck off the Israeli Coast, pg 344

Fibulae

Pins of different sizes and various levels of complexity have been used by many cultures over many years to fasten their clothing. The Romans used fibula which ranged to something not much more complicated than a metal wire sharpened on one end and bent around to create the pin, to highly ornamented pieces of adornment with jewels and glasswork.

I wanted to pin my tunic closed, so made a very

basic set of bronze bow fibulae. I started with lengths of 14 gauge bronze wire which I hammered flat along about half of. I then bent the wire where it went from flat to round, created the bow shape and used pliers to rotate and bend the end to create the hook for the pin to rest on. Once I know how long the pin needed to be, I cut it to length and sharpened it. To harden and put the spring back in them, I put them in the tumbler

overnight.

When I make them again, I will remember to put the extra spiral in the hinge area that is found in most of this style of pin. Without it, they still function, but they don’t have the same springiness that I think that would add.

11 Wire Fibula (http://www.busaccagallery.com/catalog.php?itemid=3027#)

12 Soldier's, or Straight Wire, Fibula type 3A. Roman Noricum and Pannonia. 1‐80 CE. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fibulae05.JPG)

The metal working portions of this project would not have been possible without the assistance in materials, shop space, and education from Grimwulf Harland, Isen Slegjja, and Lucian Fidelis.

Sources

Beaudry, Mary Carolyn. Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework And Sewing. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.

Croom, Alexandra. Roman Clothing and Fashion. Stroud: Amberly Plc, 2010.

Olson, Kelly. Dress and the Roman Woman. Routledge, 2008.

Olson, Kelly. "Roman Underwear Revisited." The Classical World 96.2 (2003): 201-10. JSTOR. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/>.

Rosen, Baruch, and Ehud Galili. "A Needle Assemblage from a Roman Shipwreck off the Israeli Coast." The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 43.2 (2014): 343–350.

Sebesta, Judith Lynn, and Larissa Bonfante, eds. The World of Roman Costume. Madison, Wis.: U of Wisconsin, 2001.

Wild, John Peter. Textile Manufacture in the Northern Roman Provinces. Cambridge England: U, 1970.