The boots were something like ours; they covered the whole foot, and were laced or buttoned in front, over the instep, or at the side. In the older period men’s boots generally went above the ankle, and at the front edge had a more or less pointed tongue bent forward. (Compare examples in Fig. 31, which also show us how this tongue gradually became smaller, and at last disappeared entirely.) Afterwards, low shoes, generally stopping short of the ankle, were the rule, especially for women, if they did not wear sandals. Fig. 32 gives various examples of this: they [Illustration: FIG. 33.] are usually pointed at the toes, and old Spartan reliefs even represent shoes with points in front as part of female dress. Huntsmen, countrymen, and the like, wore high boots reaching to the shins (ἐνδρομίδες), laced or buttoned in front, as in Fig. 33. [Illustration: FIG. 34.] These generally had broad toes and thick soles, but like the ordinary shoes they had no heels. A common decoration of such boots were broad zigzag lappets of leather, falling down from the upper edge, as in the examples in Fig. 34. Between sandals and boots we find various forms of low shoes, in which the foot is partly covered with leather and partly with straps. Thus there was a kind of slipper covering the upper part of the foot in front, while the back was covered with straps, and another kind which left the toes quite free and covered the rest of the foot. Probably the _crepida_, which only originated in the Alexandrine period, but then became very common, belonged to this class, and was a shoe with low leather sides, from which straps passed across the foot. Other kinds of shoes we know only by their antique names. Thus there was an elegant kind worn by guests invited to dinner (βλαυταί); and a coarser kind worn chiefly by peasants (καρβατιναί) made of rough leather, and probably not on a block, but roughly sewn together by the country people themselves. In fact, the number of names for footgear used by the ancient writers is very large, and we may thence conclude that the fashion changed frequently. Thus in Greece there were shoes of the Persian fashion. At Athens they wore Laconian shoes; Amyclaean, Sicyonian, Rhodian shoes, and others which are also mentioned, probably refer more to the shape than to the origin. There were also shoes called after celebrated men, who probably made use of them, such as Alcibiades shoes, Iphicrates shoes, etc.; but we cannot illustrate all these from works of art, in spite of the rich variety supplied by them. They also distinguished between shoes which, like our slippers, could be worn on either foot, and those which were made on particular lasts for the right and left foot. The latter were regarded as more elegant, for they laid great stress on having shoes well-fitting and not too wide. They said of people who wore too comfortable shoes that they “swam about” in them. It