These were referred to as strophia. As Olson notes (204), you could increase your bust size (i.e.
Women also wore a “breast band” or what we would call a bra. Young women and brides-to-be could also wear an undertunic called a supparus or supparum. This was a long piece of linen around one’s thighs that, at least from descriptions, seems to have been a bit like a slip however, Lucan (2.364) suggests it could also come up to and around the shoulders. Martial (11.99) notes that women wore a tunica under their clothing which could be bothersome and ultimately give them a wedgie. There is an expert article on this by Kelly Olson, and thus many of the classical references I will now explore have been plucked from her publication on the matter. Killgrove gained some insights into the use of swaddling clothing as diapers in antiquity, I began to wonder what, exactly, Romans had on under their togas or tunics, and why we know so little about them. Mosaic from a bedroom at the Villa Romana del Casale, outside Piazza Armerina, Sicily (4th c. I started off reading (and then quickly consumed) the splendid book by late antique historian Kristi Upson-Saia on Early Christian Dress(Plug: now out in paperback!), then had Roman bioanthropologist Kristina Killgrove ask about Greco-Roman diapers, and finally, had Roman historian Richard Flower reference a particularly amusing law regarding the legal prohibition of washing one’s horse in the nude. I’d like to talk about each of these topics briefly, but throughout this discussion, I will try and tie in considerations and constructions of the Roman gaze. Sight was a powerful sense in antiquity, one that imbued clothing with an additional dimension. This week, it seems that my classical friends wished me to learn a great deal about clothing–or lack thereof.