2 Criticizing the Toga and Roman Masculinity

ROMAN MEN WEARING MAKEUP

Roman men were not supposed to wear makeup or dye their hair, but many did. The Romans valued youth and vigour and expected their politicians, who were often also their generals, to reflect that. The following excerpt from Plutarch records how the rumour that the consul Marius had not received his scars in battle was used as propaganda against him:

Marius was elected triumphantly, and at once proceeded to gather soldiers contrary to law and custom, enlisting slaves and poor people. Former commanders never accepted such people, but bestowed arms, like other favours, as a matter of distinction on persons who had the proper qualification: a man’s property being thus a sort of security for his good behaviour. These were not the only occasions of ill-will against Marius; some haughty speeches, spoken with great arrogance and contempt, gave great offence to the nobles^[1]; as, for example, his saying that he had carried off the consulship as a spoil from the effeminacy of the wealthy and high-born citizens, and telling the people that he gloried in wounds he had himself received for them, as much as others did in the monuments of dead men, and the imagines of their ancestors.

Plutarch,  Life of Marius

While the toga was a powerful social symbol in ancient Rome, how one wore (or refused to wear) the toga left men vulnerable to criticism. If how a person wore the toga was intrinsically linked to Roman conceptions of masculinity, then to attack what someone was wearing was to attack their virtus — ‘manliness’. Cicero emasculated those who supported his political competitor Catiline by portraying them as people who had transgressed all sorts of Roman norms. Notice how Cicero escalates from using clothing and self-grooming as a basis of attack to stating that they are degrading the Roman Republic itself:

21 There is a last class, last not only in number but in the sort of men and in their way of life: Catiline’s private bodyguard, personally selected; the friends of his embraces and of his heart, whom you see with carefully combed hair, glossy, beardless, or with well-trimmed beards, with tunics with sleeves or reaching to the ankles, and draped in veils, not with togas. All the effort of their lives, all the work of their sleepless nights is spent in suppers that last until dawn. 22 In these bands are all the gamblers, all the adulterers, all the unclean and shameless citizens. These boys, so witty and delicate, have learned not only to love and be loved, not only to sing and to dance, but also to brandish daggers and to administer poisons. Unless they are driven out, unless they die, even should Catiline die, I warn you that the school of Catiline would exist in the republic. But what do those wretches want? Are they going to take their wives with them to the camp? How can they do without them, especially in these nights? And how will they endure the Apennines, and these frosts, and this snow? Maybe they think that they will endure winter more easily because they have been in the habit of dancing naked at their feasts. Yes – we should really dread a war when Catiline is going to have a bodyguard of whores!

Cicero, Second Speech Against Catiline 21-22

In the following, the poet Juvenal attacks men who wear makeup and take care of their appearance in what he sees as feminine ways:

One draws out his eyebrows with some damp soot on the edge of a needle and lifts up his blinking eyes to be painted, another drinks out of an obscenely-shaped glass, and ties up his long locks in a gilded net; he is clothed in blue checks, or smooth-faced green; the attendant swears by Juno like his master. Another holds in his hand a mirror like that carried by the effeminate Otho…

…It was an even greater monstrous event when Gracchus,^[2] dressed in a tunic, fought as a gladiator, and fled, trident in hand,^[3] across the arena — Gracchus, a man of nobler birth than the Capitolini, or the Marcelli, or the descendants of Catulus or Paulus, or the Fabii: nobler than all the spectators in the podium; not excluding him who gave the show^[4] at which that net was flung.

Juvenal, Satire 2

ATTACKING ROME BY ATTACKING ROMAN FASHION

Though the toga was a signifier of Roman class and masculinity, Christian moralists undermined this by approaching the topic of dress and self-grooming to attack Roman pagans as corrupt and unmanly. For example, the Christian bishop, and later saint, Tertullian, attacked Roman men for spending too much time on their appearance:

I, a man and envious of women, am banishing them from their own domains. Are there, in our case too, some things which we should not do because of the sobriety we are to maintain on account of the fear we owe God? If it is true, (as it is) that a defect of nature has implanted the will to please in men for the sake of women, just as in women for the sake of men, and if our gender acknowledges that it uses deceptive trickeries of form peculiarly its own, such as cutting the beard too sharply or plucking it out here and there; shaving round about the mouth; arranging hair and disguising its greyness by dyes; removing all the hair on the body as it appears; fixing each hair in its place with some womanly pigment; smoothing all the rest of the body by the aid of some rough powder or other: then, also, taking every opportunity for consulting the mirror and gazing anxiously into it. While, when once the knowledge of God has put an end to all wish to please by means of sexual attraction, all these things are rejected as frivolous and hostile to modesty. For where God is, there modesty is, and there is sobriety as her assistant and ally.  How, then, shall we practise modesty without her instrumental mean, that is, without sobriety? How, moreover, shall we bring sobriety to bear on the discharge of the functions of modesty, unless seriousness in appearance and in countenance, and in the general aspect of the entire man, mark our carriage?

Tertullian, On the Dress of Women 2.8.2

As wearing the toga was a way for men to show their Romanness, it proved appealing wear for anyone who wanted to perform Romanness. Tertullian, true to his hateful self, also wrote an entire speech praising Greek pallium, a cloak-like garment, that attacked the wearing of the toga by the men of Carthage. In the process he also has a lot to say about how men and women should dress:

4.2 A change of clothing only starts to be a fault if it is not custom that is changed, but nature. There is an important difference between the honour we owe to the past and to religion. Let custom faithfully follow the age, and nature God. 3 So Achilles^[5] caused a breach of nature by changing into a girl, he, the man who had been reared on the marrow of wild beasts (this, then, is how he got his name, since his lips had not tasted breast milk), a hero who was taught by a coarse, wood-dwelling, monstrous teacher in a stony school! One may willingly tolerate in the case of a little boy a mother’s concern. But no doubt he was already covered with hair, no doubt he had already secretly proved himself a man to somebody when he still put up with a woman’s flowing robe, doing his hair, applying make-up, consulting the mirror, caressing his neck, his ears made effeminate by piercing, as may still be seen in his bust at Sigeum.^[6] 4 Certainly, later he is a warrior, for necessity restored his gender! There had been sounds from the battlefield, and weapons were close by. ‘Iron itself,’ so it is said, ‘attracts a man.’ Anyway, if he had persisted in being a girl even after this incentive, he might as well have got married – how about that for a change?! 5 A monstrosity, then, he is, a double one: from a man he became a woman, and then from a woman a man, although neither the truth should have been denied, nor the lie confessed. Either form of change was bad: the former ran counter to nature, the latter was against his safety.

 

Tertullian continues…

3 More degrading still were complete changes in a man’s dress because of lust rather than some maternal fear. Nonetheless you adore that man who ought to make you feel ashamed, this ‘club-arrow-hide-bearer’,^[7] who exchanged the outfit mentioned in his name for a woman’s attire. So much then was granted to the Lydian secret mistress, that Hercules prostituted himself in Omphale, and Omphale in Hercules… 4 But there is something too about the man who earlier had come close to Hercules, Cleomachus the boxer.^[8] At Olympia he underwent an unbelievable change from his male condition by being cut inside and outside his skin. Well, he earns a crown amidst the Fullers of Novius (Roman dramatist) and he has rightly been mentioned by the mime-writer Lentulus in his Catinenses!^[9] Surely, just as he covered the traces of boxing-gloves with bracelets, so he replaced the coarse sportsman’s wrap with some thin, loose-fitting garment. 5 About Physco or Sardanapallus we must keep silent: if they were not remarkable for their lusts, no-one would know them as kings.…^[10]

8 Such clothing, therefore, that is not in agreement with nature and modesty deserves sharply fixed stares, pointing fingers, and critical nods. Really, if with Menandrean luxury a man can be trailing a refined dress behind him may he hear close by the words the comic author heard: ‘What is this madman spoiling a splendid cloak?’ But now that the eyebrow of censorial watchfulness has disappeared, how much ground for criticism does the lack of distinction provide? 4 [You can see] freedmen dressed liked equestrians, slaves scarred with floggings in the dress of the nobility, captives dressed as freeborn, and country folk as city dwellers, idiots as men of the forum, citizens as soldiers. The corpse-bearer, the pimp, and the trainer of gladiators: they dress like you. 9 Look at women too. There you may see what Severus Caecina^[11] stressed before the Senate: matrons appearing in public without stolas. 2 Under the decrees of the augur Lentulus, those who had disgraced themselves this way were punished as if for sexual misbehaviour, since the garment that was the witness and guard of dignity had been felt to be an impediment to practice fornication and so had sedulously been dropped by some women. 3 But now, committing lechery against themselves and making themselves more easily accessible, they have renounced the stola, the linen attire, the rustling bonnet, the hairy head-dress, yes, even the litters and portable chairs, in which they had been kept private and apart even in public. 4 But some put out their own lights, while others kindle lights that are not theirs…4.10 And when the manager of the public toilets fans her silken gown, and comforts with necklaces a neck that is less pure than the toilets, and uses bracelets — which, as parts of what was given to brave men, even matrons would indiscreetly have owned – to insert her hands that are guilty of every shameful deed, and fits on her maculate leg a white or reddish shoe, then why do you not look at these garments?

… 5.2 Now I will interrogate your conscience: how do you feel in a toga: dressed or oppressed? Is it like wearing clothes or enduring them? 2 If you deny this, I will follow you home, and I will see what you rush to do right after you get in the door. No other garment is taken off with such relief as the toga! 3 We say nothing about the shoes, that special torture of the toga, that most impure covering of the feet, and a false one too. For who would not be better off stiffening barefoot in heat or cold, than fettered in shoes? 4 Sure, a great support for walking has been taken care of by Venetian shoemaker-workshops in the form of effeminate boots! (5.3) 1 But there is nothing so convenient as the pallium, even if it is double, as that of Crates. On no occasion there is a waste of time in dressing, for all the effort it takes consists in loosely covering oneself.

Tertullian, On the Pallium

 

Fashion could also be used to attack Rome from within the nation itself. The poet Martial, in the late first century CE, attacked current standards of male beauty none of which he agreed with and none of which were “traditional”. Martial appeared to be quite critical of the measures Romen men were taking to be good looking, and ends up being quite mean about it in the following poem:

Cotilius, you’re a good looking guy; Cotilius, many people say this.

I hear it: but tell me — what is a good looking guy?

A good looking guy is: one who arranges his curls in order

Who always smells of balsam and cinnamon

Who sings Egyptian songs, who hums Spanish ones

Who moves his hairless arms to different beats

Who wastes his entire day alongside women’s chairs

And who always is whispering something in someone’s ear

Who reads and writes notes here there and everywhere

Who shields his pallium from neighbouring arms

Who knows who loves whom, who is going to parties,

Who knows in and out the ancient heritage of Hirpinus.

What are you saying! Is this this, this, really a guy?

Then, Cotilius, your guy is something deeply troubling.

Martial Epigrams 3.63

 

Looking like a Roman man — performing like one — in antiquity no doubt too time and energy, particularly for the upper class. However, even among the deepest critics of unmanly Romans, such as Cicero, it was dificult to maintain this strict form of masculinity.