toga

The Latin toga derives from the verb tegere, 'to cover'—related to tectum (roof), tegula (roof tile), and the English words protect, detect, and integument. It is, at its root, simply a covering. The classical Roman toga was a single piece of undyed white wool—a semicircle roughly five to six meters across—draped around the body in a specific, complex arrangement that required practice and often assistance to put on. A Roman freeborn male citizen wore the toga virilis (citizen's toga) as his formal garment; colored togas marked different statuses: the toga praetexta with its purple border for magistrates and boys; the toga picta, purple and embroidered, for generals during triumphs.

Romans themselves had complicated feelings about the toga. It was undeniably cumbersome: heavy wool in the Mediterranean heat, requiring constant adjustment to keep the drape correct, impossible to work in, uncomfortable to sit in, and—unlike the Greek himation—not a garment that allowed independent movement. Toga-wearing was civic duty as much as fashion choice. The toga was legally required for Roman citizens appearing in public on formal occasions and in the Forum. Non-citizens could not wear it; freed slaves wore it as a mark of new status. The toga was citizenship made visible.

The toga's decline tracks Rome's political decline as a republic. By the 1st century CE, even in Rome, most people wore the tunica—the simple sleeved undergarment—and the pallium (a Greek-style cloak) for everyday life. The emperor Augustus reportedly despaired at the informal dress he saw in the Forum and insisted on toga-wearing; the very fact that this needed insisting upon reveals how quickly it was being abandoned. By late antiquity, the toga had been replaced by the dalmatica and paludamentum for public dress. The garment that had defined Roman identity outlasted the identity it represented by only a few centuries.

The toga's second life is entirely modern and entirely fictional. Renaissance and Baroque artists, depicting Roman histories and mythologies, draped their subjects in idealized togas—grand, pure, white, impossible. Neoclassical architects built their banks and courthouses to look like temples; neoclassical painters dressed their heroes in togas. Hollywood cemented the image: Ben-Hur, Spartacus, I, Claudius, Gladiator. The toga of the imagination is serene, dignified, and permanent. The toga of history was sweaty, inconvenient, and dying from its own era's informality.