On the Pallium

Why, now, if the Roman fashion is (social) salvation to every one, are you nevertheless Greek to a degree, even in points not honourable? Or else, if it is not so, whence in the world is it that provinces which have had a better training, provinces which nature adapted rather for surmounting by hard struggling the difficulties of the soil, derive the pursuits of the wrestling-ground— pursuits which fall into a sad old age and labour in vain— and the unction with mud, and the rolling in sand, and the dry dietary? Whence comes it that some of our Numidians, with their long locks made longer by horsetail plumes, learn to bid the barber shave their skin close, and to exempt their crown alone from the knife? Whence comes it that men shaggy and hirsute learn to teach the resin to feed on their arms with such rapacity, the tweezers to weed their chin so thievishly? A prodigy it is, that all this should be done without the Mantle! To the Mantle appertains this whole Asiatic practice! What have you, Libya, and you, Europe, to do with athletic refinements, which you know not how to dress? For, in truth, what kind of thing is it to practise Greekish depilation more than Greekish attire?

The transfer of dress approximates to culpability just in so far as it is not custom, but nature, which suffers the change. There is a wide enough difference between the honour due to time, and religion. Let Custom show fidelity to Time, Nature to God. To Nature, accordingly, the Larissæan hero gave a shock by turning into a virgin; he who had been reared on the marrows of wild beasts (whence, too, was derived the composition of his name, because he had been a stranger with his lips to the maternal breast); he who had been reared by a rocky and wood-haunting and monstrous trainer in a stony school. You would bear patiently, if it were in a boy's case, his mother's solicitude; but he at all events was already be-haired, he at all events had already secretly given proof of his manhood to some one, when he consents to wear the flowing stole, to dress his hair, to cultivate his skin, to consult the mirror, to bedizen his neck; effeminated even as to his ear by boring, whereof his bust at Sigeum still retains the trace. Plainly afterwards he turned soldier: for necessity restored him his sex. The clarion had sounded of battle: nor were arms far to seek. “The steel's self,” says (Homer), “attracts the hero.” Else if, after that incentive as well as before, he had persevered in his maidenhood, he might withal have been married! Behold, accordingly, mutation! A monster, I call him—a double monster: from man to woman; by and by from woman to man: whereas neither ought the truth to have been belied, nor the deception confessed. Each fashion of changing was evil: the one opposed to nature, the other contrary to safety.

Still more disgraceful was the case when lust transfigured a man in his dress, than when some maternal dread did so: and yet adoration is offered by you to me, whom you ought to blush at—that Clubshaftandhidebearer, who exchanged for womanly attire the whole proud heritage of his name! Such licence was granted to the secret haunts of Lydia, that Hercules was prostituted in the person of Omphale, and Omphale in that of Hercules. Where were Diomed and his gory mangers? Where Busiris and his funereal altars? Where Geryon, triply one? The club preferred still to reek with their brains when it was being pestered with ointments! The now veteran (stain of the) Hydra's and of the Centaurs' blood upon the shafts was gradually eradicated by the pumice-stone, familiar to the hair-pin! While voluptuousness insulted over the fact that, after transfixing monsters, they should perchance sew a coronet! No sober woman even, or heroine of any note, would have adventured her shoulders beneath the hide of such a beast, unless after long softening and smoothening down and deodorization (which in Omphale's house, I hope, was effected by balsam and fenugreek-salve: I suppose the mane, too, submitted to the comb) for fear of getting her tender neck imbued with lionly toughness. The yawning mouth stuffed with hair, the jaw-teeth overshadowed amid the forelocks, the whole outraged visage, would have roared had it been able. Nemea, at all events (if the spot has any presiding genius), groaned: for then she looked around, and saw that she had lost her lion. What sort of being the said Hercules was in Omphale's silk, the description of Omphale in Hercules' hide has inferentially depicted.

But, again, he who had formerly rivalled the Tirynthian — the pugilist Cleomachus— subsequently, at Olympia, after losing by efflux his masculine sex by an incredible mutation— bruised within his skin and without, worthy to be wreathed among the “Fullers” even of Novius, and deservedly commemorated by the mimographer Lentulus in his Catinensians— did, of course, not only cover with bracelets the traces left by (the bands of) the cestus, but likewise supplanted the coarse ruggedness of his athlete's cloak with some superfinely wrought tissue.

Of Physco and Sardanapalus I must be silent, whom, but for their eminence in lusts, no one would recognise as kings. But I must be silent, for fear lest even they set up a muttering concerning some of your Cæsars, equally lost to shame; for fear lest a mandate have been given to canine constancy to point to a Cæsar impurer than Physco, softer than Sardanapalus, and indeed a second Nero.