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HATS AND HEAD COVERING IN ANCIENT ROME

Roman headwear
Romans didn't wear hats very often. Sometimes they wore capes with a hood. Slaves were not allowed to cover their heads. Freed slaves often wore a Phrgygian (a cone-shaped hat) as a sign of their freedom. In the French Revolution, the idea was brought back with the bonnet rouge ("red cap"), or liberty cap. Roman women regularly wore no hat, but covered their head when necessary with the palla or with a veil.
Men of the upper classes in Rome had ordinarily no covering for the head. When they went out in bad weather, they protected themselves, of course, with the lacerna or the paenula; these, as we have seen, were sometimes provided with hoods (cuculli). If the men were caught without wraps in a sudden shower, they made shift as best they could by pulling the toga up over the head. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) |+|]
Persons of lower standing, especially workmen who were out of doors all day, wore a conical felt cap which was called the pilleus. It is probable that the pilleus was a survival of what had been in prehistoric times an essential part of the Roman dress, for it was preserved among the insignia of the oldest priesthoods, the Pontifices, Flamines, and Salii, and figured in the ceremony of manumission. Out of the city, that is, while he was traveling or was in the country, a man of the upper classes, too, protected his head, especially against the sun, with a broad-brimmed felt hat of foreign origin, the causia or petasus. Such hats are shown in Figures 140 and 141. They were worn in the city also by the old and feeble, and in later times by all classes in the theaters. In the house, of course, the head was left uncovered. |+|
Some men wore a ceremonial form of headwear known as a corona, or crown, like that worn by the person modeling Nero above to the right. According to Encyclopedia.com: Like many areas of Roman dress, there were strict rules about wearing coronas. For example, a gold crown decorated with the towers of a castle could only be worn by the first soldier to scale the walls of a city under attack. The most honored corona was made from weeds, grass, and wildflowers collected from a Roman city held siege by an enemy, and it was given to the general who broke the siege. Other ceremonial coronas were worn at civic occasions such as weddings and funerals. The notion that only an emperor wore a laurel wreath is actually a historical myth. Any victorious general could wear a laurel wreath. [Source: Encyclopedia.com]
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Footwear in Ancient Rome
For footwear Greeks and Romans wore sandals and boots made from leather and wood. Romans had hobnail boots, bath clogs, leather shoes but they hadn't master shoe laces. Sandals were the primary form of footwear in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Wealthy Greeks wore sandals decorated with jewels and gold. Roman developed sandals with thicker soles, leather sides and laced insteps.
According to Encyclopedia: Along with the inhabitants of India, the ancient Romans were one of the first peoples in recorded history to develop a wide range of footwear. The ancient Mesopotamians (inhabitants of the region centered in present-day Iraq), Egyptians, and Greeks either went barefoot or used simple sandals as their dominant form of footwear. The climate in these regions made such footwear choices reasonable. But the more variable climate on the Italian peninsula, home to the Etruscans and to the Romans, made wearing sandals or going barefoot uncomfortable. These societies developed many different styles of footwear, from light sandals for indoor wear to heavy boots for military use or for travel to colder climates. Leather was the primary material used for making footwear in ancient Rome. The Romans were very skilled at making quality leather from the hides of cows. [Source: Encyclopedia.com]
Shoemakers were members of guilds and some had a better reputation than others. Six Roman shoes found by amateur Dutch underwater archaeologists in a trash dump in the Meus river south of Amsterdam were described as “ancient Guccis” because of the quality of their craftsmanship. The six complete shoes were worn by men, women and children. Among the more interesting discoveries was that the shoes had long laces that were wrapped around the top of the foot and were run beneath the shoes and then secured back on top, meaning that the Romans walked on their shoe straps.
Kinds of Footwear in Ancient Rome
The basic outdoor shoe of the ancient Romans was known as the calceus. It covered the entire foot and had leather laces, called thongs, that closed it. A lighter outdoor shoe, the crepida, covered the sides and the back of the foot, and came in several different styles. The Romans also wore several styles of boot. The cothurnus, a high ornate boot, was worn by horsemen, hunters, and people authority to show their status. Another style of boot, adopted by the Romans from the inhabitants of Gaul (present-day France) was called the gallicae. It was a tough boot made for work and cold weather. Slaves and very poor freemen at least sometimes went barefoot. [Source Encyclopedia.com]
The calceus was essentially our shoe, of leather, made on a last, covering the upper part of the foot as well as protecting the sale, and fastened with laces or straps. The higher classes had shoes peculiar to their rank. The shoe for senators (calceus senatorius) is best known to us; but we know only its shape, not its color. It had a thick sole, was open on the inside at the ankle, and was fastened by wide straps which ran from the juncture of the sole and the upper, were wrapped around the leg and tied above the instep. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) |+|]
The mulleus, or calceus patricius, was worn originally by patricians only, but later by all curule magistrates. It was shaped like the senator’s shoe, was red in color like the fish from which it was named, and had an ivory or silver ornament of crescent shape (lunula) fastened on the outside of the ankle. We know nothing of the shoe worn by the knights. Ordinary citizens wore shoes that opened in front and were fastened by a strap of leather running from one side of the shoe near the top. They did not come up so high on the leg as those of the senators and were probably of uncolored leather. The poorer classes naturally wore shoes (perones) of coarser material, often of untanned leather, and laborers and soldiers had half-boots (caligae) of the stoutest possible make, or wore wooden shoes. No stockings were worn by the Romans, but persons with tender feet might wrap them with fasciae to keep the shoes and boots from chafing them. A well-fitting shoe was of great importance for appearance as well as for comfort, and the satirists speak of the embarrassment of the poor client who had to appear in patched or broken shoes. Vanity seems to have led to the wearing of tight shoes. |+|
What has been said of the footgear of men applies also to that of women. Slippers (soleae) were worn in the house, differing from those of men only in being embellished as much as possible, sometimes even with pearls. Shoes (calcei) were insisted upon for outdoor use, and differed from those of men, as they differ from them now, chiefly in being made of finer and softer leather. They were often white, or gilded, or of bright colors; those intended for winter wear sometimes had cork soles. |+|
Status and Ancient Roman Footwear

Roman footwear defined wealth, status and social position. Senators wore brown shoes with hobnail soles and leather straps that were wound up to mid calf and tied in double knots. Upper class women wore shoes of yellow and green on special occasions and white and red for everyday wear. Lower class women wore leather, naturally-colored shoes.Wooden soles were sometimes strapped to the feet of prisoners, making escape difficult. Lacking pliability, wood restricts the foot's movement.
Roman soldiers wore hobnail-sole sandals and put on boots for long marches. As the Roman empire advanced northward they began lining their boots with fur. Roman soldiers in the 4th century B.C. wore hose-like covering to protect their legs from cold and from briars in the forest. Stockings were invented around the 5th century in Rome. The transformation of these garments to modern socks and hosiery took many centuries.
According to Encyclopedia.com: Senators who made the laws in Roman times wore a special form of calceus that was secured with four black thongs, while emperors wore calcei (plural of calceus) that were secured with red thongs. Slaves, on the other hand, were not allowed to wear calcei at all. They went barefoot. And prisoners were often forced to wear heavy wooden crepidae that made it difficult for them to walk. The actors in Roman dramas also used footwear to symbolize the status of the characters that they played. Comic actors wore light, leather crepidae, while actors in more serious plays, called tragedies, wore cothurni (the plural of cothurnus). Just like today, you could tell a lot about a person in ancient Rome by the kind of shoes they wore. [Source Encyclopedia.com]
Slippers and Socks in Ancient Rome
The slipper consisted essentially of a sole of leather or matting attached to the foot in various ways. Custom limited its use to the house, and it went characteristically with the tunic when that was not covered by an outer garment. Oddly enough, it seems to us, the slippers were not worn at meals. Host and guests wore them into the dining-room, but, as soon as they had taken their places on the couches, slaves removed the slippers from their feet and cared for them until the meal was over. Hence the phrase soleas poscere came to mean “to prepare to take leave.” When a guest went out to dinner in a lectica, he wore the soleae, but if he walked, he wore the regular outdoor shoes (calcei) and had his slippers carried by a slave. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) |+|]
Roman sometimes protected his legs by a sort of puttees (fasciae) but wore nothing corresponding to our socks or stockings and went barefoot when he had taken off his sandals to go to bed. But evidence of socks exists such as child’s striped left sock found in Roman-era Egypt. According to Archaeology magazine: Unearthed in 1913 in a trash heap at the site of Antinopolis, a city founded by the emperor Hadrian, the woolen sock is one of four ancient Egyptian textiles recently studied by a team led by British Museum chemist Joanne Dyer. She and her colleagues examined the artifacts, which also included fragments of decorated wool tapestries, with an array of imaging techniques that exposed the textiles to different wavelengths of light. These techniques have previously been used to analyze painted surfaces. The different light sources allowed the team to determine the chemistry of the dyes used to color the textiles without having to remove samples that might damage the artifacts. They found that just three natural colorants — indigo, the herb madder, and the weld plant — created the sock’s exuberant stripes. “What’s surprising is that while the textiles are highly colored and very varied, the ancient Egyptians used only a few natural dyes to create this extensive palette,” says Dyer. Despite scant resources, a skillful dyer was able to make a stripy sock that wouldn’t look out of place on a playground today. [Source: Eric A. Powell, Archaeology magazine, January-February 2019]
Decorated Roman Sandal Unearthed in Spain
In the summer of 2023, archaeologists discovered a 2,000-year-old decorated sandal while excavating a Roman settlement in northern Spain known as Lucus Asturum (modern-day Lugo de Llanera). Jennifer Nalewicki wrote in Live Science, With the help of a pulley system, researchers safely accessed the depths of the stone-lined well, finding the elaborately decorated Roman sandal submerged in mud about 10 feet (3 meters) below ground level, according to El País, a daily newspaper in Spain. [Source: Jennifer Nalewicki, Live Science, October 25, 2023]
Researchers were impressed with the shoe's craftsmanship and level of detail, especially on its sole, which is "decorated with a profusion of circles, loops, ovals and other motifs and is made of a dark brown leather," Esperanza Martín Hernández, the principal archaeologist at Dolabra Arqueológica who led the excavation, told Live Science. "The front of the shoe shows the negative stitching."
Thanks to the well's abundance of mud, the sandal was well preserved, which is a rarity in this region, especially for an item made of organic materials such as leather. "In [Spain] and in the rest of the Roman Empire, it is really rare to find the circumstances for the preservation of organic material in such good condition," she said. "In this case we are dealing with a well for the water consumption of a private house, and the reason for its excellent preservation is due to the anaerobic state of the deposit. All the organic materials have remained intact for 2,000 years thanks precisely to this lack of oxygen."
During the first and second centuries A.D., Lucus Asturum was known as a communications hub and administrative center and was also where the Greek astronomer, mathematician and geographer Ptolemy wrote his seminal work "Geography," according to El País. Other notable artifacts found in the well included ceramic jars, seeds, nuts, shells, a small metal ring, a necklace, beads and a bronze vessel, Martín Hernández said.
"We were also fortunate enough to recover several of the house's landfill sites, so that we now have a complete knowledge of its household goods: glass crockery, Gallic and Hispanic sigillata [tableware], fine South Gallic thin-walled-pottery, refractory dishes, common ware, local ceramics, jewelry, coins and working tools," she said. "In short, almost everything that allows us to make a good reconstruction of what this house must have been like in the early imperial period." Although archaeologists don't yet know who the exact inhabitants of the home were, Martín Hernández thinks that "we are dealing with people with a high level of purchasing power, as the materials we are recovering show a high level of commerce."
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons and “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston
Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.
Last updated November 2024