 Thank you, and I'd like to thank Marta and Susanna and Cecilia for organizing such a wonderful panel. I'm so excited to be in a conference where I get to talk about ancient clothing for an entire day. It's like heaven, so thank you very much. Okay, so I'm going to talk to you about fringe clothing in Roman art and also in Roman literature, the little mention that we have of it. Fringed garments in Roman society were not very common as many of you will know and when fringe does occur it appears on certain types of garments only. We're going to talk about which garments it appears on. So a fringe we're defining today as an ornamental appendage to the border of an item. Usually fringe was simply the warp end of weaving left unfinished, although inlaid fringe does occur. That is loops of threads stitched or inlaid in an S shape on a woven garment and then the ends of both of the loops are cut, so here and here, and this is taken from Barber's 1991 work on textiles. Sometimes fringe was made separately of wool, silk, linen, or narrow strips of leather and sewn on, at least that's the case in other cultures. If it consists merely of warp threads, the weavers among you know that such threads have to be knotted close to the weft or braided or twisted so that the whole garment won't unravel, so the fringe has to, the weft has to be secured. Fringe appears on Egyptian and Near Eastern garments with some regularity, so here's a panel from the British Museum dated to the 9th century from Asher Nazepal, and here's another one, oh and then so I'll point out the fringes as we go along, so the fringes are along the shoulder here and then around the bottom there and there's another one in which the fringe is down at the bottom. Scholarship of the Near Eastern world have postulated that fringe on a garment meant high, special, high social status for a male, and that fringes were worn from the 9th century BC onwards appearing on depictions of the clothing of God's kings and great warriors. In the Near Eastern world, the hem was held to be an extension of the wearer's power and character and could even be employed as a signature when pressed upon a document, so instead of a signature they would just, they would make an impression of your hem on the clay or in on the document with ink, I guess. Much later, Matthew's mentioned in the New Testament that scribes and Pharisees wear their fringes long, which is Matthew 235, is a stinging remark intended to underline their thirst for social recognition. There is also visual evidence that people wore garments with fringed edges in ancient Egypt, although I don't have any to show you today, at least from the time of Tutmost II, so about 1490 to 1436 BCE, and we also have evidence for different colored fringes on Egyptian garments as well. Fringes also occurred to a certain extent on Greek clothing, so on the warrior vase from Mycenae dated to about 1200, soldiers marched in fringe tunics, and you can see them right there. I have a detail as well, so there's the fringe hanging down there. But usually in the Greek world fringes are an exotic occurrence. Dandified young men in the late 5th century laconized or used appearance to imitate the Spartans. Authors tell us that they sported short, fringed cloaks made of rough cloth, grew their hair long, grew beards, and wore dirty hands to imitate the Spartans. And some luxurious items of Persian clothing assumed by Athenians in the 5th century BCE for reasons of status also had fringes. So the long-sleeved chiton or chitoniskus caridotos, for instance, the shape itself, non-Greek, was sometimes finished off with fringe. The appendites, or ependites, was another Persian import, a sleeved coat-like garment, at least according to one scholar. We had a little discussion about that this morning. Worn by women and Parthenore during some ritual activity. So our Kenefros here in the slide, if you look closely, you can see fringe down there at the bottom of her appendites. Usually then the presence of fringes on a garment marks the garment as sumptuous and the wearer as a person of some status. That's what scholars of Greek clothing have concluded. This may be explained in part, I think, by the sheer inconvenience of fringes. I have a bunch of fringed kimonos that I wear sometimes. And if you wear fringes, you'll know that they're really challenging to wear because the fringe gets tangled and it gets torn, it gets caught on things easily. It's very challenging to wear a fringed garment because the fringe is such an inconvenient method of finishing off a garment. It's very impractical. So it would make sense that we see it on garments of people who are of high-ish status anyway. Fringes don't seem to have been worn on everyday clothing much in the Roman world. Fringe is spoken of as occurring on blankets by Vero, the Elder Pliny, and Calces, and are sometimes seen in Roman art. And this is the fragment of an equestrian statue in the Colosseum. I don't have a date because they didn't put a date on it. And the fringe runs along the lower edge, as you can see. There are, to my knowledge, only three occurrences in Roman literature of fringe as a fashion item. So Julius Caesar was spoken of or described as being remarkably dressed in a broad-striped tunic with fringed wrist-length sleeves, that's the first mention. The tunic seems to have been made inappropriate by the long sleeves as much as the fringe. The upstart Tremolchio wears at his neck a napkin with a broad stripe and fringes hanging from it all around in Petronius Satiricon 32. And finally, much later in the fourth century, Aumianus Marcellinus describes the Romans of his day in the following way. Other men, he says, taking great pride in coches higher than common and in ostentatious finery of apparel, sweat under heavy cloaks. And they lift them up with both hands and wave them with many gestures, especially with their left hands, possibly because that's where all their rings are, maybe, in order that the over-long fringes, longiores fimbriae, and the tunics may be conspicuous. So those are the only three mentions in Roman literature that I can detect of fringes worn as fashion, as a fashion sort of statement. Okay, so it's implied by the written sources then that fringes, I think anyway, were feminine or somehow inappropriate fashion for a man. So our three examples, the men are excoriated for wearing fringes, even if it's only very subtly. This is probably, I think, because of the fringes' Near Eastern origin, and therefore in the Roman mind, their effeminate connotations, since the Near East is soft and effeminate and unmasculine. Women do not appear in fringed wear as a fashion item as far as I can tell. The one exception I have found is a scoliasse on juvenile, writing later than the classical era who glosses this segmenta, which are bands and borders on women's dress as fringes, surely incorrect, but that is what the scoliasse tells us. There also exists a linen shroud from Roman Egypt, which some of you may be familiar with, which depicts a woman wearing the sort of classic Roman striped tunic. You can see the stripes on either side, and she is wearing either fringes or beads on the lower edge of the tunic or on her under tunic. So the dress is a little bit confusing because she seems to be wearing a long sleeved garment and then something else on top of it, although it's not all that clear. But she does have fringes on it. Her fringes may be part of her local dress, unlike the stripes, which are very Roman, and certainly the Romans, like the Greeks, did tend to associate fringes with the East, and possibly they included Egypt in that. So this is a relief of the Roman province of Egypt, which was in the temple of the Deified Hadrian, now in the Pots of Massimo dating from the mid-2nd century. So we do have that, and there is a close-up of the fringe on that statue of Isis. When Apuleius describes the cloak of the goddess Isis, it is a dark wrap with a knotted fringe at the lower edge. So that's one of the only times I can find a reference to fringe. All of this then does not explain to my mind the presence of fringe on Roman military cloaks. Sumner has written, a number of cloaks depicted both on Trajan's column and elsewhere clearly have at least one edge that is fringed. It is not certain that this indicates any kind of status, but it does appear to be associated with higher grade troops, including cavalrymen, beneficarii, pretorians, and senior officers such as tribunes. Other sculpture and artworks indicate that some cloaks could be further decorated with tassels at the bottom corners, although I don't have any to show you today. The scarlet pollutamentum was of course the general's cloak, and in art it is thickly fringed and pinned with a large circular brooch. So here is Augustus and his fringed pollutamentum here, and this is Antoninus Pius with the fringe of his pollutamentum visible over here. And this is also from a temple of the day of Phypatrion. It's a relief of trophy of arms which show fringe, I think, on the uniform as well as on the flag or the blanket that's here. After the death of the Emperor Commodus, the author of the Historia, Augusta tells us that the sale of his clothes included fringed military cloaks. Outside of military wear, fringe was most often employed by the Romans as a term on religious garments. So this is the other example that I can find of fringe. Unfortunately, I can't find a literary reference to the fact that Romans like to put fringe on religious garments, but we can see it in some Roman artistic depictions of ritual. It appears on some Etruscan statuettes of priests like the small harry specks, and the fringe is on the pieces that cross his chest. And fringe also appears on the cloaks of men and boys having a probably religious function on the release of the Arapaka. So here's the young boy here with a fringe cloak over his shoulder and there's a detail. And then also in the larger portion of the North freeze, the man right over here carrying the incense box also has a fringe cloak and there's a detail. Fringe also appears on the figures on the smaller Cantillaria relief dated to the Tiberian era, so there are many fringes there. And some of these figures carry incense boxes. Women are spoken of by a few sources as wearing fringed garments in the context of religion. The rica seems to have been a small cloak. How much, how small is unclear, they don't give the size, small enough to drape over the head, spoken of in a religious context. Although it is usually merely noted in lists of feminine clothing, Festus gives us more detail. The rica was purple or blue, it was fringed, and both he and Servius state it was the garment of the Flaminate Kai, the wives of the Flaminese. Varus seems to equate it with a garment for sacrificing. Several modern authors, however, name another garment, the rachinium, as the distinctive mantle of the widow and detect it in Roman art by its fringed border, but they're not the same garment. Thus the woman at the juncture of the third and fourth panels of the North freeze of the Arapacas, that is this woman right over here, has been identified by some as Augustus' daughter Julia, the widow of Agrippa, because of her fringed widow's mantle, which is actually not true. Widows don't have a fringed mantle, and also right behind the boy, you can see the other female, is also wearing a fringed mantle. So literary sources do not describe the morning mantle or the rachinium as fringed. Festus says this of the rica, which is not named as a morning garment, but as a sacrificial or religious one. It's not without significance, I think, that the only two women in fringed cloaks appear together on the Arapacas freeze, along with the young boy who also wears a fringed cloak and who may be a Camillus. The same religious significance of fringes may also be at work on the cloak of a female statue now in the capital line, who dates to the late second or early third century. To conclude, oh, there's another detail. I went crazy with fringes this summer. Fringes is a fashion item for men seems to have been censured by the Romans, perhaps because of its near eastern and therefore effeminate connotations. It's not mentioned as a fashion item for women at all, as far as I can tell. In Latin literature and in Roman art, fringe is seen on blankets, on some religious garments, like the female's rica, and on some high status military cloaks. But I cannot explain why fringe exactly was chosen as the decoration for such items when I would love to have some help from the audience. I'd like to say that fringe may have had some importance or some apotropaic impact for the Romans, but it may possibly just have signaled high status. Holders of religious office and military generals were necessarily of the elite classes, and perhaps the presence of fringe on their garments reflects this. Thank you very much.