How long this ancient dress continued in use we cannot determine with any certainty; but the majority even of vase pictures with black figures show a different dress. It is true, as we mentioned just now, that the long chiton still continued in use besides the short one, but the cut and the mode of wearing it changed. The monuments of this period almost always show signs of drapery, and this is, moreover, of an artificial, exaggerated, and pedantic kind. It must have been the fashion at that time, that is, from the sixth till nearly the middle of the fifth century, to lay the folds of men’s dress, as well as of women’s, in symmetrically parallel lines. In pictures the lower edges of dresses and cloaks show various regularly cut-out points, while on the inner side there are many small zigzag folds arranged with laborious symmetry. (Compare Fig. 4, “The Rape of Helen,” after a vase picture by the vase painter Hiero.) This may be partly due to the artistic style, which at that period inclined to over-elaboration; yet it is impossible to doubt that we find here not only an expression of archaic art, but also the representation of a dress laboriously and artificially folded, stiffened, and ironed, in which the folds were produced by external aids, such as ironing, starching, pressing, even stitching of the stuff laid in folds, or sewing such folds on to the material. We cannot determine when this custom began in Greece. In works of art we find it comparatively late in the sixth century B.C.; yet, as Helbig remarks, it is by no means impossible that this fashion existed at a far more ancient period, since the custom of laying material in artificial folds by means of stiffening or ironing was already known in Egypt in 4000 B.C.; and it therefore seems extremely probable that the Phoenicians adopted the practice at a very early period, and introduced it into Greece. It is a very natural assumption that this mode of draping would in the first instance be adopted for linen material, and that it would therefore be introduced among the Greeks with the linen chiton, which took the place of the woollen one formerly worn. [Illustration: FIG. 4.] On the other hand, however, it is probable that, as woollen clothing was afterwards worn as well as linen, they attempted to ornament this in similar fashion by artificial folds; the works of art, however, show that these folds were far less in quantity and less sharply defined in woollen clothing than in linen, which is naturally much better adapted for the purpose.