(M190) The rule which prescribes that at certain magical and religious ceremonies the hair should hang loose and the feet should be bare(1152) is probably based on the same fear of trammelling and impeding the action in hand, whatever it may be, by the presence of any knot or constriction, whether on the head or on the feet of the performer. This connexion of ideas comes out clearly in a passage of Ovid, who bids a pregnant woman loosen her hair before she prays to the goddess of childbirth, in order that the goddess may gently loose her teeming womb.(1153) It is less easy to say why on certain solemn occasions it appears to have been customary with some people to go with one shoe off and one shoe on. The forlorn hope of two hundred men who, on a dark and stormy night, stole out of Plataea, broke through the lines of the besieging Spartans, and escaped from the doomed city, were shod on the left foot only. The historian who records the fact assumes that the intention was to prevent their feet from slipping in the mud.(1154) But if so, why were not both feet unshod or shod? What is good for the one foot is surely good for the other. The peculiar attire of the Plataeans on this occasion had probably nothing to do with the particular state of the ground and the weather at the time when they made their desperate sally, but was an old custom, a form of consecration or devotion, observed by men in any great hazard or grave emergency. Certainly the costume appears to have been regularly worn by some fighting races in antiquity, at least when they went forth to battle. Thus we are told that all the Aetolians were shod only on one foot, “because they were so warlike,”(1155) and Virgil represents some of the rustic militia of ancient Latium as marching to war, their right feet shod in boots of raw hide, while their left feet were bare.(1156) An oracle warned Pelias, king of Iolcus, to beware of the man with one sandal, and when Jason arrived with a sandal on his right foot but with his left foot bare, the king recognised the hand of fate. The common story that Jason had lost one of his sandals in fording a river was probably invented when the real motive of the costume was forgotten.(1157) Again, according to one legend Perseus seems to have worn only one shoe when he went on his perilous enterprise to cut off the Gorgon’s head.(1158) In certain forms of purification Greek ritual appears to have required that the person to be cleansed should wear a rough shoe on one foot, while the other was unshod. The rule is not mentioned by ancient writers, but may be inferred from a scene painted on a Greek vase, where a man, naked except for a fillet round his head, is seen crouching on the skin of a sacrificial victim, his bare right foot resting on the skin, while his left foot, shod in a rough boot, is planted on the ground in front of him. Round about women with torches and vessels are engaged in performing ceremonies of