On the Pallium

Men of Carthage, ever the leaders of Africa, noble in your antiquity, happy in your new fortune: I rejoice that you are so prosperous in your times that you have the leisure and the pleasure to find fault with dress. This is the leisure of peace and plenty. From the empire and from heaven, all is well. Yet you too once had a different dress, tunics; and they were indeed famous for the care of their weaving, the harmony of their colour, and the moderation of their measure: neither lavish below the shins, nor immodest above the knees, nor stingy at the arms, nor tight at the hands; nor, when a girdle divided them into folds, did they hang awkwardly, but on men they stood with a square fairness. The outer garment, the pallium, itself four-cornered too, thrown back from both sides and drawn round the neck, rested on the shoulders in the bite of a brooch. Its likeness today is the dress of the priesthood of Aesculapius, now yours. So too the sister city close by used to dress, and wherever else in Africa there was a Tyre. But when the urn of the world's lots was shaken differently and God favoured the Romans, the sister city hastened to change of its own accord, so that it had already greeted Scipio on his landing by its dress, Roman before its time. To you, however, after the kindness of your injury, by which you were relieved of your old age, not of your standing; after the obscene omens of Gracchus and the violent mockeries of Lepidus; after Pompey's threefold altars and Caesar's long delays; when Statilius Taurus raised the walls and Sentius Saturninus pronounced the solemn rites, while concord was welcome, the toga was offered. Ah, how far it has travelled round, from the Pelasgians to the Lydians, from the Lydians to the Romans, so that from the shoulders of a loftier people it might embrace the Carthaginians! From then on you hitch up a longer tunic as the girdle decides, and you prop up the overflow of the now rounded pallium by gathering it in layers; and whatever else condition or rank or season clothes you in, the pallium is nevertheless generally yours, and you find fault with it, forgetting even that. For my part I am hardly surprised, given an earlier proof. For the ram too (not the one Laberius calls “back-horned, wool-skinned, and testicle-dragging,” but the beam-machine that serves in breaking walls), never before swung by anyone, is said to have been armed first of all by that Carthage, “fiercest in the pursuits of war,” for the pendulum swing of a hanging thrust, having devised the force of the engine from the anger of the beast that avenges itself with its head. Yet when the last days of their country came and the ram, now Roman, dared against walls once its own, the Carthaginians were at once astounded at it as at a new and foreign invention: “So much can the long lapse of ages change!” So in the end the pallium too is not recognized.

Let the case now be taken from elsewhere, so that the pallium need not blush or grieve at being Punic among Romans. Certainly, to change one's dress is the solemn office of the whole of nature. Even this world on which we lie performs it continually. Let Anaximander see to it, if he thinks there are several worlds; let anyone else see to it, if there is one anywhere, among the Meropes, as Silenus babbles into the ears of Midas, ears well suited indeed to taller tales. But even if Plato reckons there is some world of which this one is the image, that world too must likewise change. For if it is a world, it will consist of different substances and functions, after the pattern of what this world is; for it is not a world unless it is likewise as a world. Different things joined into one are different through change. In short, alternations bind the discord of difference into league. So every world that is given body out of differences and tempered by alternations will exist by changing. Our own abode, at least, as is plain to closed eyes, or even to eyes wholly Homeric, is altogether shape-shifting. Day and night turn by turns. The sun varies by its yearly stations, the moon by its monthly measures. The ordered confusion of the stars now sets something, now raises it again. The circuit of the sky is now bright in the open, now dirty with cloud; either rains pour down, and whatever missiles come with rains, then a slight drizzle, and clear sky again. So too the sea's good faith is notorious: with breezes equally changeable, it is honest in calm, moderate in swell, and suddenly restless with great waves. So too, if you survey the earth, which loves to be clothed season by season, you would almost deny it is the same, remembering it green when you see it yellow, and soon to see it white. And its other adornments, what do they not change one from another: the shoulders of mountains by sliding down, the veins of springs by wandering, the courses of rivers by silting up? The whole globe too once changed, covered with all the waters. Still the shells and trumpet-shells of the sea sojourn on the mountains, eager to prove to Plato that even the heights were once afloat. But by swimming out again the globe changed once more in form, another yet the same. Even now its dress changes locally, when a site is damaged: when among the islands there is no longer any Delos, and Samos is sand, and the Sibyl is no liar; when in the Atlantic an island equal to Libya or Asia is sought; when a side of Italy, once cut through at the middle by the battering of the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian seas, makes its remnants into Sicily; when that whole zone of severance, twisting the quarrelsome meeting of the waters in the narrows, clothes the sea with a new vice, not spitting out shipwrecks but devouring them. The mainland too suffers, from the sky or from itself. Look at Palestine. Where the river Jordan is arbiter of the borders, there is a vast wasteland, a bereaved region, and land to no purpose. Yet once there were cities and populous peoples, and the soil answered. Then, since God is a censor, impiety earned showers of fire: Sodom is no more, there is no Gomorrah, all is ash, and the neighbouring sea lives a death together with the soil. From a cloud of this kind Tuscany too was burned, its ancient Volsinii, so that Campania might expect it all the more from its own mountains, when Pompeii was snatched away. But far be it! Would that Asia too were now secure from the gluttony of the ground! Would that Africa too had dreaded the chasm once for all, atoned for by the swallowing of a single camp! Many other losses of this kind have renewed the dress of the globe and shifted its sites. Wars too have had great licence. But it is as irksome to review sad things as the changes of kingdoms, how often these too have changed, right from Ninus, the offspring of Belus; if indeed Ninus was the first to reign, as the profane opinion of earlier times asserts. Among you the pen does not usually go further back. The histories of the ages lie open from the Assyrians, perhaps. But we who read the divine histories are masters of the matter from the very birth of the world. But I now prefer happy things, since happy things too change. In short, if the sea has washed anything away, the sky burned it, the earth drawn it under, the sword shorn it off, it returns at another time, made good by exchange. For at first the earth, in the greater part of its circuit, was empty and void of men, and wherever some nation had occupied it, it existed for itself alone. So the earth, understanding at length that it was cultivating everything, crowding a multitude in one place and deserting another, resolved to weed and to clear, so that from there, as from shoots and layers, peoples from peoples and cities from cities might be planted throughout the globe. Swarms of overflowing nations flew across. The Scythians pour out the Persians, the Phoenicians belch forth into Africa, the Phrygians give birth to the Romans, the seed of the Chaldean is brought up in Egypt, and then, when it is led across from there, it is the Jewish nation. So too the posterity of Hercules, with Temenus, go forth to occupy the Peloponnese. So too the Ionians, companions of Neleus, furnish Asia with new cities; so too the Corinthians with Archias fortify Syracuse. But antiquity is now beside the point, when our own course is before our eyes. How greatly this age has re-formed the globe! How many cities the threefold power of the present empire has brought forth or enlarged or restored! With God favouring so many Augusti as one, how many censuses have been drawn up anew? How many peoples beaten back? How many orders made illustrious? How many barbarians shut out? Truly the globe is the best-tilled estate of this empire, every aconite of hostility rooted out, the cactus and bramble of treacherous familiarity torn up, and it is lovelier than the orchard of Alcinous and the rose garden of Midas. Praising, then, a changing globe, why do you find fault with a man?

Beasts too change their form instead of their clothing; although the peacock too has its plumage as clothing, and that of the finest: more deeply dyed than any purple where its neck blooms, more gilded than any border where its back gleams, more freely flowing than any trailing robe where its tail lies; many-coloured, varied, and changing, never itself and always another, though always itself when it is another; in short, changed as often as it is moved. The serpent too must be named, though after the peacock; for it too changes what it has been allotted, its skin and its age. For as soon as it feels old age coming on, it squeezes itself into a narrow place, and, entering a hole and leaving its skin at the same moment, scraped clean at the very threshold, it leaves its slough there and unrolls itself new; with its scales its years too are cast off. The hyena, if you watch it, has a yearly sex, alternating male and female. I say nothing of the stag, since it too, arbiter of its own age, having fed on a serpent, sickens with the poison into youth. There is also “a four-footed creature, slow-paced, rustic, low, rough.” You think it is Pacuvius's tortoise? It is not. Another little beast also fits the verse, quite modest in size, but with a grand name. If you hear “chameleon” without knowing it before, you will at once fear something more than a lion. But when you come upon it in a vineyard, almost entirely under a vine leaf, you will laugh at once at the remarkable boldness of the name, since there is not even any juice in its body, which in much smaller creatures is plain to see. The chameleon lives as a mere little skin. Its little head comes straight from its back, for it lacks a neck. So it finds it hard to turn back, but for looking around its little eyes pop out; indeed they are points of light that swivel. Dull, weary, it barely lifts itself from the ground; it labours and pushes forward its gait in a daze, and rather indicates a step than takes one; always fasting, of course, and never failing; it feeds by yawning, chews the cud by puffing like a bellows; its food comes from the wind. Yet the chameleon too can change completely, and nothing else. For though it has one proper colour, it is suffused with whatever comes near it. To the chameleon alone has been given what is commonly said: to play with its own skin. Much had to be said, so as to come to man with the ground prepared. Man, from whatever beginning you take him, certainly stood naked and unclothed before his potter; only afterwards did he gain wisdom, snatched before it was yet permitted. There and then, hastening to cover what in his new body was not yet owed to shame, he girds it for the time with fig leaves; then, when he is banished from his place of origin, because he had sinned, he is handed over to the world clothed in skins, as to the mines. But those are secrets, and not for everyone to know. Come, then, let me take from your own lore what the Egyptians tell, and Alexander sets out, and his mother reads, about the time of Osiris, when Ammon, rich in sheep, comes to him from Libya. In short, they claim that among them Mercury, delighted by the softness of a ram he happened to stroke, flayed a lamb; and while he was trying it out and, as the pliancy of the material suggested, drawing out a thread by continued pulling, he wove it after the manner of the earlier net that he had joined with strips of linden bark. But you preferred to assign the whole management of wool-work and the construction of looms to Minerva, although the more diligent workshop was Arachne's. Then the material: I do not mean the sheep of Miletus and Selge and Altinum, or those for which Tarentum or Baetica is famous, nature doing the dyeing; but since shrubs too clothe us, and the grassy stalks of flax turn snowy by washing after their green, and it was not enough to plant and sow a tunic unless we also happened to fish for clothing. For fleeces come from the sea as well, where the more splendid shells grow hair of mossy wool. Nor, of course, is it unknown that the silkworm (it is a kind of little worm), drawing threads out through the air, stretches them out more skilfully than the webs of spiders, then devours them, and soon gives them back from its belly. So if you kill it, you will wind threads already alive. Such a supply of materials, then, the inventions of the clothing trade followed up, first for covering man, where necessity went ahead, then also for adorning him, and indeed for puffing him up, where ambition followed, bringing out various forms of garments. Some of these are worn by particular nations, not shared with others; others generally, useful to all, like this pallium, which, though rather Greek, is now at home in Latium in speech. With the word the garment came in. And so the very man who held that the Greeks should be put out of the city, yet learned their letters and speech when already old, that same Cato, baring his shoulder at the time of his judicial office, favoured the Greeks no less by wearing the pallium.

What now, if Romanness is salvation for everyone, and yet you are Greeks in things not altogether respectable? Or, if that is not so, where did the nations in the provinces, better employed as they are, whom nature fitted rather for wrestling with the soil, get the pursuits of the wrestling-ground, which age badly and toil for nothing, the muddy anointing, the rolling in the dust, the dry fattening? Where did some Numidians, who even keep their horses long-maned, get the barber who shaves close to the skin and leaves only the crown exempt from the razor? Where did shaggy and hairy men get resin so greedy for the armpit, tweezers so thievish at the chin? It is a marvel that these things are done without the pallium. This whole business belongs to Asia. What have you, Libya and Europe, to do with the refinements of the athletes, when you do not know how to dress for them? For really, what sort of thing is it to be plucked Greek-fashion rather than clothed Greek-fashion?

To change one's dress comes close to blame only when it is not custom but nature that is changed. There is a good deal of difference between the respect owed to the times and religion. Let custom keep faith with the times, nature with God. So the hero of Larissa shook nature when he changed into a maiden, he who was reared on the marrow of wild beasts (whence the reason for his name, since his lips had been empty of the taste of the breast), he who was schooled in a rugged school by a rock-dwelling, forest-dwelling monster of a tutor. You might put up with it if as a boy he bore with his mother's anxiety; but already grown, already having secretly played the man for someone, he still consents to let a stola flow, to arrange his hair, to make up his skin, to consult the mirror, to smooth his neck, even to have his ear made womanish with an earring, as his rounded statue at Sigeum still preserves. Of course afterwards he is a soldier; for necessity gave him back his sex. There had been a sound of battle, and arms were not far off. “Iron itself,” it says, “draws a man.” Otherwise, if even after that incitement he had persisted as a girl, he could also have married. Behold, then, a change: a double monster, from man to woman, then from woman to man, when neither the truth ought to have been denied nor the deceit confessed. Both ways of changing dress were bad, the one against nature, the other against his safety.

More shamefully still has lust transformed a man by his attire than any mother's fear, even though he is worshipped by you who ought to make you blush, that club-arrow-and-hide-bearer who traded the whole lot of his title for a woman's attire. So much licence had secret Lydia that Hercules was prostituted in Omphale and Omphale in Hercules. Where were Diomedes and his bloody mangers? Where Busiris and his tomb-like altars? Where Geryon, three in one? His club preferred still to stink of their brains when it was offended by perfumes. The old blood of the Hydra and the Centaurs in the arrows was now being rubbed off the points with pumice, luxury mocking them, so that after transfixing monsters they might perhaps sew a garland. Not even the shoulders of a sober woman or of some virago could have gone under the spoils of so great a beast unless they had long been softened, unstiffened, and deodorized (which I hope was done at Omphale's with balsam or fenugreek oil; I believe the mane also had to suffer the comb), lest the lion's hide burn the tender neck. With the gaping jaws stuffed with hair, the back teeth shadowed among the forelocks, the whole outraged face would have roared, if it could. Nemea certainly, if the place has any genius, groaned; for then it looked round and saw that it had lost its lion. What that Hercules was like in Omphale's silk, Omphale, portrayed in Hercules' hide, has already described.

And the boxer Cleomachus too, who had come before the man of Tiryns, after he had flowed away from the male at Olympia by an incredible change, bruised inside his skin and beyond it, worthy to be crowned among the Fullers of Novius, and deservedly remembered by the mime-writer Lentulus in his Catinenses, just as he covered the marks of the boxing-thongs with bracelets, so he thrust out the rough cloak of the runner with some gauzy dinner-suit. Physcon and Sardanapalus must be passed over in silence; had they not been notorious for their lusts, no one would know they were kings at all. They must be passed over, lest they too mutter something about some of your Caesars, equally shameless, lest perhaps it fall to the dog-like constancy of a Cynic to point out a Caesar more impure than Physcon and softer than Sardanapalus, and indeed a Sub-Nero.

Nor is the power of vainglory any less warm in changing garments, even when a man remains a man. Every passion is heat; but when it is fanned into affectation, the glow is already a blaze of vainglory. From that tinder, then, you have a great king burning, lesser only than his glory. He had conquered the Median nation, and was conquered by Median dress. Putting off the triumphal coat of mail, he sank into the trousers of the captives; the chest carved with the marks of the scales he laid bare by covering it with transparent weaving, and, still panting from the work of war, he cooled it, as though more gently, with fluttering silk. The swelling spirit of the Macedonian was not enough unless a more puffed-up dress also delighted him; except that philosophers too, I suppose, affect something of the kind themselves. For I hear that there has been philosophizing in purple as well. If a philosopher in purple, why not also in slippers? To be shod in Tyrian dye, unless in gold, is hardly Greek. Someone will say: “But another went about both in silk and with bronze on his sandals.” Fittingly indeed, so that something might jingle under his Bacchic clothing, he went about with a cymbal. But if Diogenes had then been barking from his tub in those parts, he would not have trampled on him with muddy feet, as Plato's couches know, but would have carried the whole Empedocles off into the shrines of the Cloacinae, so that he who had madly thought himself heavenly might greet first his sisters, and then, as a god, men.

Such dress, then, as departs from nature and modesty may rightly be fixed with a stare, pointed out with a finger, and handed over with a nod. Indeed, if someone trails a delicate garment on the ground with Menander's languor, let him hear said of himself what the comic poet says: “What a cloak that madman is ruining!” For now that the frown of the censor's watchfulness has long since been scattered, how much there is to brand! Promiscuity offers freedmen dressed as knights, branded slaves as gentlemen, surrendered captives as freeborn, rustics as townsmen, buffoons as lawyers, civilians as soldiers: the corpse-bearer, the pimp, and the gladiator-trainer dress as you do.

Turn now to the women as well. You can see what Caecina Severus gravely impressed on the Senate: matrons in public without the stola. Indeed, by the decrees of the augur Lentulus, a woman who had thus discharged herself was punished as for debauchery; since certain women had diligently given up the garments that are the witnesses and guardians of dignity, as hindrances to plying their trade. But now, playing the procuress to themselves, so that they may be approached more easily, they have renounced the stola, the tunic, the little shoe, the headdress, and even the litters and sedan chairs in which they were kept private and secluded even in public. But one puts out her own lights, another kindles lights not her own. Look at the she-wolves, markets of the people's lusts, and at the tribades too; and if it is better to turn your eyes from such shameful sights of chastity slaughtered in public, look at them all the same even from above: you will see them as matrons now. And when the overseer of the latrines flutters silk, and consoles a neck filthier than her station with necklaces, and into bracelets, which even matrons would have rashly usurped from the gifts of brave men, inserts hands privy to every shameful thing, and fits a pure white or red shoe on an impure leg, why do you not look at these, or again at those garments which lie that their novelty stands for religion? When for the sake of all-white dress and the mark of the fillet and the privilege of the cap people are initiated to Ceres; when for the opposite passion of dark clothing and a grim fleece on the head they are driven in madness to Bellona; when the ambition of a broader purple stripe and an overlay of Galatian scarlet commend Saturn; when this very pallium, arranged more fussily, and sandals worn Greek-fashion fawn on Aesculapius: how much more should you then denounce it and press it with your eyes, since, though simple and unaffected, it is guilty of superstition? But when it first clothes this wisdom which rejects the vainest superstitions, then most surely the pallium is a garment more august than all the spoils and robes, a priestly attire above all the caps and headdresses. Lower your eyes, I urge you; revere the dress, which meanwhile renounces one thing: your error.

“All the same,” you say, “to go like this from the toga to the pallium!” What then, if it were from the diadem and the sceptre? Did Anacharsis change otherwise, when he preferred philosophy to the kingdom of Scythia? Even if there were no signs that such people had crossed over to something better, this dress is something that could do it. First, as to its simple putting on: it involves no tedium. There is no need, then, of an artisan to form the folds the day before from the start and lead them down more neatly, and to hand over the whole construction of the gathered boss to the guardianship of clamps; then at dawn, the tunic first drawn up by a belt (which it would have been better to have woven shorter), the boss inspected again and anything that has strayed out of line reset, to let a part hang down on the left, but to draw back the circuit of it from which the fold is born, now as the layers run out, from the shoulders, and, leaving the right arm free, to heap it still onto the left, with another equal layer devoted to the back, and so to clothe a man with a load. Finally I will question your conscience: what do you feel yourself first in the toga, dressed or burdened? Do you have a garment, or carry one? If you deny it, I will follow you home; I will see what you hurry to do the moment you cross the threshold. There is no other garment whose taking-off is as welcome as the toga's. We say nothing of shoes, the toga's proper torment, the filthiest protection of the feet, and a false one too. For who would not rather go stiff barefoot in cold and heat than be foot-bound in a shoe? A great defence for walking the cobbler's shops of Venice have provided in their effeminate boots.

But nothing is easier than the pallium, even if it is double, like Crates'. Nowhere is there any labour in putting it on, since its whole construction is to cover loosely. That can be done with a single throw around, and nowhere an inhuman one; so it covers all of a man at once. It veils the shoulder or leaves it bare or encloses it; otherwise it clings to the shoulder, props nothing up around, binds nothing tight, does not labour over the reliability of its folds, easily governs itself, easily puts itself right; even when it is taken off, it is not committed to any cross until the next day. If there is anything of an undershirt beneath, there is no torment of a belt; if one puts on shoes, it is the cleanest work, or bare feet rather, certainly more manly than in shoes.

So much for the pallium for now, as far as you have arraigned it by name. Now it truly challenges you on its business as well. “I,” it says, “owe nothing to the forum, nothing to the Campus, nothing to the senate-house; I keep no watch for office, I seize on no rostra, I attend no praetor's courts; I do not sniff the gutters, I do not adore the railings, I do not pound the benches, I do not upset the laws, I do not bark out cases; I am not a judge, not a soldier, not a king: I have withdrawn from the populace. My only business is with myself; I care for nothing except not to care. You would enjoy a better life in retirement than in public view. But you will defame me as idle. Of course one must live for one's country and the empire and the state. That was once the maxim: no one is born for another who is to die for himself. Certainly, when it comes to the Epicuruses and Zenos, you call wise men that whole school of quiet, who consecrated it under the name of the highest and only pleasure. Yet I too shall more or less be allowed to be of public use. From any street-edge or altar I am accustomed to speak medicines for morals, which will confer good health on public affairs, cities, and empires more happily than your labours. Indeed, if I pursue sharp points with you, togas have harmed the state more than breastplates. For I flatter no vices, I spare no lethargy, no scab. I apply the cautery to ambition, by which Marcus Tullius bought a round table of citrus-wood for five hundred thousand sesterces, by which Asinius Gallus paid twice as much for a table from the same Mauretania. Ha! What fortunes they reckoned wooden spots to be worth! Likewise the ambition by which Sulla constructs dishes of a hundred pounds' weight! I fear indeed that this scale is too small, when Drusillanus, a slave of Claudius no less, builds a five-hundred-pound dish, necessary perhaps for the tables above; for which, if a workshop was built, a dining-room ought to have been too. I plunge the scalpel equally into the cruelty by which Vedius Pollio threw slaves to be attacked by lampreys: delighting, no doubt, in a new savagery with land animals toothless, clawless, and hornless, he chose to make wild beasts out of fishes, of course to be cooked at once, so that in their innards he himself might taste something of the bodies of his slaves. I will cut off the gluttony by which the orator Hortensius was the first who could kill a peacock for food; by which Aufidius Lurco first spoiled bodies by fattening and brought them by forced feeding to an adulterated flavour; by which Asinius Celer paid six thousand sesterces for the dish of a single mullet; by which the actor Aesopus confiscated a platter worth a hundred thousand of birds of the same costliness, all of them singing and talking ones; by which his son, after such a dainty, could hunger for something yet more costly. For he drained pearls, precious even by their very name, lest, I suppose, he should dine more beggarly than his father. I say nothing of the Neros, the Apiciuses, and the Rufuses. I will give a purge to the impurity of Scaurus, the gambling of Curius, and the drunkenness of Antony. And remember that these, among many, were men of the toga; such as you would not easily find in the pallium. Who will draw out and lance these abscesses of the city, if not speech clothed in the pallium?”

“You have persuaded me,” someone says, “by speech, a most wise medicine.” But even if eloquence falls silent, whether withheld by want of speech or held back by modesty (for philosophy is content even with a tongueless life), the dress itself speaks. In this way, in short, a philosopher is heard while he is seen. By my appearance I make vices blush. Who does not suffer when he sees his rival? Who can bear with his eyes one whom he cannot bear with his mind? Great is the benefit of the pallium, at the thought of which even wicked morals blush. Let philosophy see now what good it does; for it is not alone with me. I have other arts too that are useful in public. From my wardrobe are clothed the first teacher of letters, the first unraveller of speech, the first sand-reckoner of numbers, the grammarian, the rhetorician, the sophist, the physician, the poet, the one who strikes music, the one who conjectures from the stars, and the one who watches the flight of birds. The whole liberality of studies is covered by my four corners. Of course they come after the Roman knights. But the fire-bearers and the whole disgrace of the gladiators are led out in the toga. This, no doubt, will be the indignity: from the toga to the pallium!

But this is the pallium speaking. I, however, now also bestow on it fellowship with a divine sect and discipline. Rejoice, pallium, and exult! A better philosophy has now deigned to honour you, since you began to clothe a Christian.