BMCR 2009.04.45: Daniel-Hughes on Olson, Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-Presentation and Society

Kelly Olson, Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-Presentation and Society.
London/New York:  Routledge, 2008.  Pp. xv, 171; fig. 30.  ISBN
9780415414760.  $35.95 (pb).

Reviewed by Carly Daniel-Hughes, Concordia University
([email protected])
Word count:  2267 words
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An assiduously researched monograph, Dress and the Roman Woman makes a
welcomed contribution to the growing interest in dress and adornment in
the Roman world.[[1]] While classicists may have once overlooked such
practices as unworthy of sustained study, scholars like Kelly Olson
explore them in order to gain a deeper understanding of the lives of
ancient women (2). This book builds on Olson's earlier work on Roman
women's dress, reiterating her insights that for the Romans dress was
linked with ethics.[[2]] Though her monograph can be placed alongside
other recent studies of Rome's vestimentary culture, this surprisingly
slender book represents the fullest and most recent examination in
English of women's dress and adornment at Rome. Dress and the Roman
Woman should become an immediate standard resource for scholars of
Roman social history and women's history, and in particular, required
reading for historians of Roman dress. Olson draws together literary
sources from across literary genres, portrait sculpture and frescoes,
as well as cosmetic artifacts, in order to outline the richest picture
of women's practices of dress and adornment from 200BCE-300CE with a
focus on the city of Rome.[[3]] The goal of this study is to examine
this material and outline the range of meanings that male authors and
women themselves attributed to practices of dress and adornment.

The breadth of Olson's analysis will surely make the monograph widely
appealing, though her admittedly mosaicist methodology might be seen as
a liability in some instances. Her approach finds her lifting quotes
out from her texts (a critique of which she is aware, see 4), and
leaves her unable to consider in full detail the rhetorical contexts of
the literature that she examines. (Yet, as I will note, Olson remains
cautious about the prescriptive nature of all of the sources she
examines). For instance, Olson includes many references to De pallio
and De cultu feminarum, treatises on men's and women's dress by
Tertullian of Carthage, which certainly remain among the most alluring
literary sources for scholars of Roman dress. Yet Olson explicitly
focuses her study on dress at Rome where both of these texts were
written for Carthaginian audiences. Tertullian's pithy oration, De
pallio, is even addressed to "the eternal Princes of Africa, men of
Carthage" (principes semper Africae, viri Carthaginienses), indicating
the provincial setting of this oration and the ethnic construction of
Christian masculinity being advanced in it.[[4]] Thus we might inquire:
to what degree are Tertullian's remarks illustrative of practices at
Rome? (De cultu feminarum, I would argue, is less problematic given the
strong correlations between Tertullian's construction of Christian
women's dress there with what we find in authors writing about women at
Rome).

On the whole, however, setting various kinds of sources in
juxtaposition with one another allows Olson to draw out larger patterns
as well as discursive tensions in treatments of dress. Her analysis not
only considers how Roman woman clothed themselves, but also how women's
clothing could communicate values and sustain particular ideologies.
She concludes that Roman society had developed a complex, and largely
unchanging, sartorial vocabulary in which women's visual displays of
dress and adornment were tied to ethics and power (5). As Olson aptly
states: "For the Romans, aesthetics were ethics" (113). She adds that
though this sartorial vocabulary appears in literary contexts where
male authors use it to deride women, clothing and adornment were also
media for women's self-expression and creative pleasure (96 and 111).
She illustrates that Rome's aesthetics of dress were "male-constructed
and male-defined" and generally prescriptive rather than descriptive.
But Olson adds that dress and adornment provided a symbolic system in
which women from various social classes willingly participated. Roman
women dressed in order to showcase their prestige in a cultural context
that privileged the visual (96 and 110).

A short introduction establishes Olson's methodological approach and
briefly locates the study in terms of previous work on ancient women's
dress (2-4). From here the book opens onto to its densest chapter, "The
Clothing of Women", in which Olson considers the garments and
accessories that were said to adorn Roman women. A daunting amount of
material is organized in different heuristic categories: the young
girl, matron, widow, bride, slave and lower class women, as well as
prostitute. Women's fabrics and their colors, jewelry, and shoes are
treated briefly in separate sections. Olson sustains a theoretically
productive suspicion about the rhetorical agendas of her various
sources, literary and pictorial. In particular, she notes the
disconnect between literary depictions of women's dress, especially of
the Roman matrona, with portraiture and paintings of Roman women. Roman
authors insist that matrons should wear the stola, a garment with a
v-shaped neckline that was worn over a tunic, and the vittae, ribbons
that were tied into the hair. Yet the visual record of such items, most
especially the vittae, are rare (38). Indeed, the item of dress that
more often distinguished the high-standing woman was the palla, a wrap
or mantle that could be, but was not always, used to veil the head
(34-36). Olson concludes that literary presentations indicate an ideal
dress code, perhaps even an antiquarian one, "drawn from the clothing
of the flaminca Dialis", who was the high priestess known for "marital
fidelity" (41). Items of dress could be used rhetorically to indicate a
woman's character; a chaste woman, for instance, could be called
stolata, stola-clad, where a prostitute might be called togata,
toga-clad, but such descriptors signified moral dispositions rather
than routine habits of dress (50 and 113). Olson thus illustrates that
sartorial discourse could be deployed by male authors to articulate
moral ideals and fix social boundaries, which in reality were more
fluid (51, 95, and 114).

The second chapter outlines the "cosmetic arts", what Latin writers
called medicamentum, a term that signified both improvement and remedy,
even poison, indicating the ambivalence of Roman authors' views of such
practices, and reflecting the fact that some cosmetic substances were
lethal if ingested (59-60 and 69). Here the reader is treated to an
amazing list of techniques Roman women might have employed in
"improving" their face, skin, and hair (the largest study of this topic
in English, see 58). Though women could shade their eyes with kohl, and
darken their eyebrows (a single brow was deemed most alluring), white
and blemish free skin was upheld as the paramount cosmetic goal (62-63
and 79). Olson notes that poor sanitation and diet as well as harsh
skin treatments, the most devastating certainly being white lead, could
combine to ravage a woman's complexion (65). Authors such as Pliny and
Ovid list countless products to combat harm done to the skin: powders
and creams formed from ash or fat, honey, and various vegetables or
herbs in combination. Failing these remedies, women might use alutae,
little patches of soft leather that covered over any unsightly
imperfection (65).

A woman's hair is also repeatedly figured as an important marker of
beauty and prestige, as Olson notes, hair was "for some the seat of
female attractiveness and a locus of feminine sexuality" (71). She
might have extended her point by noting explicitly the common and
repeated notion in Greek and Roman literature that a woman's head and
mouth metonymically indicated her genitalia.[[5]] And the hair, in
particular, was cast as the privileged and visible site of a woman's
sexuality. As Olson notes vittae were modeled after fillets that
decorated sacrificial animals (36-39). Thus on a matron's head, they
too suggested inviolability, but in that case denoting her sexual
exclusivity. Similarly Varro imagines the tutulus, a conical tower of
hair said to be worn by matrons (see 40), as a metaphor for the citadel
of the city: a matron's twisted hair protects her head, guarding her
sexuality just as the citadel guards the city against hostile
intrusions.[[6]] Olson importantly challenges the earlier presumption
that civic elites and imperial women changed their hairstyles
frequently (a claim that she argues is not born out by the portraiture,
see 71). Elaborate hairstyles, of looping curls in a conical tower, or
voluminous ropes of braids drawn up the back of head, might have been
embellished with wigs, perhaps necessary for women whose hair suffered
burning from curling irons and harsh dyes. These styles were held up by
pins and could be decorated with gems (73 and 76). Other topics briefly
discussed in this chapter include Roman aesthetics of the body and
perfume, apparently enjoyed by both Roman men and women (78).

The monograph then delves into the "anti-cosmetic tradition". Olson
notes that Roman writers often presented a woman's display of cosmetic
skill as an indicator of her deceptive spirit, love of frivolity and
luxury, and disdain for Roman mores. These complaints, she points out,
are repeated with little variation across the centuries from the
Hellenistic playwright Plautus to the Christian writers Tertullian and
Jerome (80). Latin writers variously sought out adornment as a sign of
a treacherous and false woman. Given the link between ethical
disposition and dress forged in sartorial discourse, Olson makes the
critical observation that women who did not embody the ideal garments
of a modest woman were seen as "rejecting the moral code bound up in
these clothes" (88 and 95). The adorned woman was thought to seek
unwarranted visual attention, willingly making herself into an object
for male visual pleasure (92). The ideal woman should display modesty
pudicitia by means of simple and unaffected dress, Roman moralists
claimed. Yet this sartorial discourse was ripe with contradiction: a
woman who totally avoided the cosmetic arts, cultus or care of the
body, was also disdained. A Roman woman was asked to negotiate a
tenuous balance. She was not only to be modest pudicus, but also
elegant munditia. She should employ the art of cultus with subtlety and
measure, always indicating care for her appearance but never seeming to
court erotic attention (93). Olson's discussion reveals precisely the
ambiguity that made adornment and dress useful in invective. The
blurred distinction could readily turn a woman's cultus, care for the
body, into an indication of her ornatus, ornamentation of the body,
should a Roman writer seek any multitude of grounds for her indictment.
In addition, dress was also deployed rhetorically to construct
identity, as I would argue is in evidence in the Christian writers like
Tertullian and Jerome who feature in Olson's study. In De cultu
feminarum, for instance, Tertullian argues that Christian women display
a more pure pudicitia than their "gentile" counterparts.[[7]] Indeed
both Tertullian and Jerome exploit this symbolic system so that
Christian women might exhibit a distinctive morality through their
modesty of dress and adornment.

In the final chapter, Olson examines evidence for women's participation
in the beauty culture of the Roman world. She demonstrates that women
could have purchased jewelry and fine clothing with their own funds.
Wearing such finery was a visual display of power. Cosmetic implements
were engraved on tombs because beauty rituals demanded the use of a
retinue of slaves, thus such images signified a woman's wealth and
status in this life (99). Roman authors often chided women for too much
grooming, yet in practice carefully stylizing the body was an important
preoccupation for elite women. Olson suggests, for example, that the
mysterious imperial age conventus feminarum mentioned in Seneca and
Suetonius may refer to a council of elite women who policed women's
dress and adornment precisely because these practices served to
distinguish ranks of women (101). Further, though Roman writers
remained ambivalent about the benefits of adornment, they too insisted
that elite Roman women should be visibly demarcated from non-elites and
foreigners by means of dress (103). Certain Roman women surely
exploited this connection between dress and status by negotiating this
sartorial vocabulary in ways that highlighted their station and secured
their prestige (104). Olson concludes her study by demonstrating that
literary sources reveal that a Roman woman would also beautify herself
for her own enjoyment and desire for "self-construction" (109-110). In
fact some sources depict a woman's beauty as a kind of artistic
expression: her face is likened to a painting or her acts of
beautification to "construction", rendering the arts of dress and
adornment media by which she could "communicate the self to others"
(110).

Olson's study could be expanded in regard to better understanding
women's self-construction. How exacting might such a construction be?
Olson considers how dress could communicate status, wealth, power, and
individual style, but what else might dress signal? For instance, she
notes that some women donned hairpins with figures of Eros, perhaps in
an attempt to secure "this deity's favor" (following Kleiner and
Matheson, see 75). Might we consider how dress indicated women's piety
and adherence to particular gods? Could her dressing be religiously
inflected, an act of constituting religious subjectivity? In what ways
did women calibrate their dress to indicate piety, periods of chastity,
and the like? (Of course this question raises some important
theoretical concerns about the extent to which our sources give us
access to women's own conceptions of their self-presentation). Further,
limiting her study to Rome, Olson naturally does not consider whether a
woman's dress was ethnically marked. But her study raises questions
about local variance and how dress might have differed in the
provinces, which indicate the need for future comparative analyses that
engage Olson's findings. Ultimately, Dress and the Roman Woman is a
rich study that greatly advances our knowledge of Roman women's dress
and adornment and how these practices might have shaped women's lives.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1 The Clothing of Women
2 The Cosmetic Arts and Care of the Body
3 The Dangers of Adornment
4 Self-presentation, Status, and Power
Conclusions
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Notes:


1.   The premier studies include, J.L Sebesta and L. Bonfante, eds. The
World of Roman Costume. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
and A.T. Croom Roman Clothing and Fashion. Gloucester: Tempus, 2002.
Second Edition. Some more recent treatments of this topic that build on
and critique the above are as follows, L.Llewellyn-Jones, ed. Women's
Dress in the Ancient Greek World. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales,
2002, L.Llewellyn-Jones Aphrodite's Tortoise: The Veiled Women of
Ancient Greece. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2003, and J.
Edmondson and A. Keith, eds. Roman Dress and the Fabric of Roman
Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008 (which features an
article by Olson on the dress of young girls, and extends her treatment
of that subject in this book).

2.   See for instance, K.Olson, Matrona and Whore: The Clothing of
Women in Roman Antiquity, Fashion Theory 6.4: 387-420.

3.   All figures in the monograph appear in black and white,
disappointing in the case of mummy portraits and frescoes where color
figures would have been more illustrative, particularly in the initial
chapters).

4.   See the dissertation turned monograph D.Wilhite Tertullian the
African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian's Context and
Identities. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007, especially chapter five.

5.   See for instance, Mary Rose D'Angelo, Veils, Virgins, and the
Tongues of Men and Angels In Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger
(eds)  Off with Her Head: the Denial of Women's Identity Religion, and
Culture, 131-164. Berkeley: University of California Press; cf. Lucian
Herod. 5 which describes the moment that the groom lifts the bride's
veil, as the breaking of a seal, a symbol of the rupture of the bride's
hymen. See also the discussion by Llwellyn-Jones (2003), 239.

6.   Ling. 7.44; cf. J.L. Sebesta, Women's Costume and Feminine Civic
Morality in Augustan Rome Gender and History 9.3: 537.

7.   See Ter. Cult. 1.2.1 and 2.2.1.