The style of dress represented by this set of monuments is certainly the most luxurious which we find in Greek art at any period. Now the date of the Acropolis maidens can be fixed at some period certainly not later than the last quarter of the sixth century. Solon’s sumptuary law regulating women’s dress must have been enacted during the first years of the sixth century, so that we may conclude that these dainty ladies with their chitons, cloaks, and scarfs represent the height of luxury in dress which was possible after the passing of that law: their self-satisfied smile seems to be inviting approval of the degree of elegance to which their ingenuity could attain, even though a stern law-giver had limited the number of their garments to three. This style of dress seems to have passed out of fashion at the end of the sixth century, or in the early years of the fifth, for we find it only in the early works of sculpture already mentioned. An attempt to render it is frequently made by the artists of the early red-figured vases—sometimes with some success; but more often the attempt results in a confusion between this somewhat elaborate style of cloak and the simpler development which it took later. Fig. 35 shows a fairly successful attempt to represent the dress. Here we have the band passing round the right shoulder and the vertical folds falling from it, but the frill and the fastening down the right arm are omitted. Possibly they taxed the artist’s skill too greatly; possibly the style had already passed out of fashion in real life. But he would be moderately familiar with the maidens on the Acropolis, although perhaps not sufficiently so to be able to reproduce their costume in detail. Working daily in his little shop down below in the Cerameicus, perhaps he did not very frequently mount the citadel, where he might study the art treasures that adorned it. Possibly even the vase is not earlier than 480 B.C., and the picture is but a reminiscence of the statues that the artist had seen on the Acropolis previous to their burial at the coming of the Persians. Very often on the vases we find the vertical folds represented falling from beneath a series of horizontal folds obviously formed by turning over the top of the cloak before fastening it on the shoulder. Here the band and fastening down the arm are omitted.[138] The place of the frill is taken by an overfold of the cloak before it is put on, and it is fastened by a single brooch on the shoulder; the material is allowed to hang in natural folds, and the necessity of cutting a curve in the upper edge is obviated by the fact that no band is worn, and the stuff is not arranged in artificial vertical folds. This style of cloak appears already on the figure of Apollo, on the relief from Thasos in the Louvre; it is seen most clearly in the Artemis of Gabii.[139] It was probably developed from the earlier and more elaborate form of cloak by gradual stages, first by omitting the