[37] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 573, note I, citing M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, _La Civilisation des Celtes et celle de l'Epopée Homerique_, p. 349, Paris, 1899. CHAPTER IX WOMEN'S COSTUME As to the evolution of feminine costume, I speak with the greatest diffidence. Homer's women wore the loose brooched peplos, with brooch, pin, clasp, and over it the _pharos_. Women of the later dark age and the Dipylon period apparently dressed otherwise. In the archaic period the brooched peplos, girdled at the waist, was worn; but I think that there was also a revival or survival of Aegean sewn and shaped bodices, jackets, and skirts. Lastly, historic Greece reverted to the Homeric peplos and _chlaina_. The discussion is, inevitably, concerned with minutiae in details about which our actual information is far from being minute. We must therefore state here explicitly the conclusions to which we are led: namely, that neither the male nor female dress nor the armour described in the Epics was introduced, at any period, by the Ionians employed in any one of the four or five "recensions" which are postulated by certain critics, as in the "first _Iliad_" of Robert, and his "second, third, and fourth _Iliads_"[1] On the other hand, we contend that both the costume and the armour in Homer are of a single period, earlier than the Dipylon and barbaric Tirynthian age of art, while historic Greece from the middle of the sixth century began to revert to something like the Homeric type. We must remember that hitherto no representations of Homer's people in the free art of the Aegeans have been discovered, and thence no light can be derived. When the crude art of Tiryns and, later (?) of the "Geometric" school of ornament comes into view (1000-800 B.C.?), the designs of men and women are childish. In painted vases which may represent the palsied decadence of the Aegean age, the human figures are simply absurd, still they are recognisably human; though in vases of what may be called the "dotted" style of outline, they have heads like birds, as on dotted bronzes of northern Italy in the Early Age of Iron. In the "Dipylon" style, again, as soon as human beings are represented, the heads of the men are like potatoes set on sticks; the torso is an inverted isosceles triangle, with the pointed waist for apex; and the naked legs are enormously thick in thighs and calves. The women's bodies also are often equilateral triangles; the parts below the waist are clothed in tight skirts, as a general rule; the breasts, when the bust is represented, are either bare, or clad in a very tight bodice, or are hidden by a hood which falls below the shoulders like a cape. In one Tirynthian fragment we see a stout lady in a "princess frock" tight, "of the Menzies tartan,"[2] and all of one piece; another design shows a waist no thicker than a broomstick[3] (figs. 8, 9). These costumes of women, in Tirynthian and Dipylon art, are un-Homeric and post-Homeric.