The fashion of wearing silk was unknown at Rome, before the beginning of the empire. The rage for dressing in it was already so great in the time of Tiberius, that the emperor prohibited the use of it by a positive law. The Greeks also had a taste for it; and the cloak of _Amphion_ was certainly of silk, for the historian Philostratus (Ion, Book I.) tells us that its color changed according to the different ways in which the light was reflected from it. Pliny gives us to understand that the gold stuffs of the ancients were not made as those of our time, of a thread of gold or silver, wrapped around a woof of silk, but that they were woven of gold deprived of all alloy: knowing this, he speaks of the manner in which the wife of Claudius dressed herself to attend a _Naumachia_ or sea fight, in the following terms—“Nos vidimus Agrippinam—indutam palludamento auro textile, _sine alia materia_.” It is about fifty years since they extracted, by assaying, more than four pounds weight of pure gold from some old dresses which the fathers of the Clementine College, at Rome, discovered in an urn of basalt, buried in their vineyard. Tarquin, the Elder, was he, among the Roman Sovereigns who most usually wore dresses of gold. From the time of Homer the Greeks wore _black_ dresses for mourning. This bard shews us Thetis wearing, after the death of Patroclus, the blackest of her dresses. (Iliad, 24.) For many years the same usage prevailed among the Romans, but it was partly changed under the emperors, so that when Plutarch wrote, the women in mourning could wear nothing but white. Besides, we have a proof of it at the obsequies of Septimius Severus: “The image of this emperor,” Herodian tells us, “formed of wax, was surrounded on one side by a row of women in _white_, and on the other by the body of all the senators, clothed in _black_. At the death of the Empress Plotina,” adds the historian, “her husband Trajan covered himself with very black habits for the space of nine days.” The _toga_ necessarily received as many shades of color as the other garments: but as to the form of this kind of robe it is impossible to decide. When Dionysius, of Halicarnassus, asserts that the toga presented the appearance of a semicircle (’ημικυκλος) he did not at all intend to describe its shape, but only the form which it assumed when worn upon the body. Strabo asserts that the military cloak with which the warriors clothed themselves had an oval form; and that among the Athenians it was often worn by the young people even in time of peace. The _tunic_, which was the principal part of the under clothing, was not generally used among the nations of antiquity, except the Greeks and Romans; all the Cynic philosophers disdained to make use of it. We know that Augustus put on as many as four tunics in winter. The name of this great emperor reminds us that it was in his reign, or thereabouts, that the Romans began to use table-cloths. Montfaucon believes that the