I may notice here, as I am dealing with clothes, another case that comes later--that of the Spartan girls. The testimony is very decided that these girls wrestled with each other in a state of nudity. The testimony itself, indeed, is not contemporaneous, though it is good, and therefore it is possible that it may be erroneous. It is possible, also, that the word translated “nude” may not in some of the authorities imply absence of all clothing. Some scholars have rejected the statements with scorn.[207] One writer has devoted a monograph to the subject, and his conclusions are of the moderate type. “Illud pro certo habendum esse puto non in omnibus exercitationibus virgines prorsus fuisse nudatas neque ulla vestimenta exceptis fortasse iis, quae ad pudenda tegenda opus essent, retinuisse. Quod quidem in una exercitatione luctandi factum esse verisimile est. Quoniam enim virgines luctantes more virorum, ut ait Theocritus poeta, corpora oleo unguere solebant, fieri non potuit, quin corpora nudarent atque etiam tunicam, vestimentum interius, exuerent.”[208] But whatever may be the conclusions reached on this point, testimony is unanimous that the Spartan girls were modest, and the very opposite of licentious. “Their stripping,” says Plutarch, “had nothing disgraceful about it, for modesty was present and incontinence absent”; and he censures Herodotus for saying that the woman in putting off her tunic puts off modesty, “for, on the contrary, the chaste woman puts modesty on instead.” And this was the opinion of the conservative Greeks of the time of Aristophanes, for they regarded the addition of clothing to men and women, and the wrapping the limbs up in Ionic dress as a vile innovation, tending to luxury and lasciviousness.[209] Bekker points out[210] that the custom of women washing men prevailed in the middle ages, and he quotes passages in which women bathe the men and then clothe them. He also supplies a parallel to the Spartan girls divesting themselves of their clothes. One passage describes the baptism of damsels by an archbishop, when it is said that the maidens were stripped of all their clothing before all the barons, and they were whiter than the flower of the eglantine.