page_title: Clothing in ancient Rome
section_title: Silk
hierarchical_section_title: Clothing in ancient Rome / Fabrics / Animal fibres / Silk
caption_attribution_description: Español: Ménade vestida de seda, fresco romano de la Casa del Naviglio en Pompeya, siglo I, Museo Nacional de Nápoles. English: Menade (or maenad) in silk dress, a Roman fresco from the Casa del Naviglio in Pompeii, 1st century AD, Naples National Museum. Italiano: Menade danzante, in abito di seta. Affresco (cm 66 x 52) del I secolo d.C. da Pompei, Casa del Naviglio (VI, 10, 11), oggi al Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (inv. nr. 9298).
context_page_description: Clothing in ancient Rome generally comprised a short-sleeved or sleeveless, knee-length tunic for men and boys, and a longer, usually sleeved tunic for women and girls. On formal occasions, adult male citizens could wear a woolen toga, draped over their tunic, and married citizen women wore a woolen mantle, known as a palla, over a stola, a simple, long-sleeved, voluminous garment that hung to midstep. Clothing, footwear and accoutrements identified gender, status, rank and social class. This was especially apparent in the distinctive, privileged official dress of magistrates, priesthoods and the military.
  The toga was considered Rome's "national costume" but for day-to-day activities, most Romans preferred more casual, practical and comfortable clothing; the tunic, in various forms, was the basic garment for all classes, both sexes and most occupations. It was usually made of linen, and was augmented as necessary with underwear, or with various kinds of cold-or-wet weather wear, such as knee-breeches for men, and cloaks, coats and hats. In colder parts of the empire, full length trousers were worn.
context_section_description: Silk from China was imported in significant quantities as early as the 3rd century BC. It was bought in its raw state by Roman traders at the Phoenician ports of Tyre and Beirut, then woven and dyed. As Roman weaving techniques developed, silk yarn was used to make geometrically or freely figured damask, tabbies and tapestry. Some of these silk fabrics were extremely fine – around 50 threads or more per centimeter. Production of such highly decorative, costly fabrics seems to have been a speciality of weavers in the eastern Roman provinces, where the earliest Roman horizontal looms were developed.
  Various sumptuary laws and price controls were passed to limit the purchase and use of silk. In the early Empire the Senate passed legislation forbidding the wearing of silk by men because it was viewed as effeminate but there was also a connotation of immorality or immodesty attached to women who wore the material, as illustrated by Seneca the Elder:
  "I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency,
  can be called clothes... Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be
  visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any
  outsider or foreigner with his wife's body." (Declamations Vol. 1)
  The Emperor Aurelian is said to have forbidden his wife to buy a mantle of Tyrian purple silk. The Historia Augusta claims that the emperor Elagabalus was the first Roman to wear garments of pure silk (holoserica) as opposed to the usual silk/cotton blends (subserica); this is presented as further evidence of his notorious decadence. Moral dimensions aside, Roman importation and expenditure on silk represented a significant, inflationary drain on Rome's gold and silver coinage, to the benefit of foreign traders and loss to the empire. Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices of 301 AD set the price of one kilo of raw silk at 4,000 gold coins.
  Wild silk, cocoons collected from the wild after the insect had eaten its way out, was also known; being of shorter, smaller lengths, its fibres had to be spun into somewhat thicker yarn than the cultivated variety. A rare luxury cloth with a beautiful golden sheen, known as sea silk, was made from the long silky filaments or byssus produced by Pinna nobilis, a large Mediterranean clam.
caption: A maenad wearing a silk gown, a Roman fresco from the Casa del Naviglio in Pompeii, 1st century AD
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