Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 5.djvu/461

 DICTIONARY OF GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. 339 But it may be interesting to the readers of the Archaeological Journal to observe the points of con;..ist which a dictionary of Greek and Roman anti- quities offers with the sphere of Oriental or Medieval archaeology, and to enquire how far the want of corresponding works, of which we just now spoke, in those two great departments, is supplied, or might be to a greater extent supplied, by a Lexicon professedly confined to purely classical sub- jects. It is naturally to the external objects only of the barbarian world that we can expect to find any allusion in this work. But the well-known fact that from time to time articles of dress, or arms, were adopted both by Greeks and Romans, from their northern and eastei'n neighbours, will prepare us for occasional notices of the outward aspect of that vast mass of human life, which hovered on the outskirts of the ancient world for so many centuries, before the final irruption, which blended them for ever together. And it is worthy of observation how close a similarity was in these points exhibited, between all these various races, for all this long period, in contrast to the no less striking similarity, which gave as it were a family likeness to the cos- tumes of the classical civilization, which lay enclosed within this heteroge- neous, but still uniform, belt of barbarism. What Aristagoras of Miletus said of a large portion of the tribes adjacent to Greece in the fifth century before the Cluistian era in contradistinction to his own countrymen, was true of all the populations from the Indian to the Atlantic ocean, not only till the fall of the ancient world, but in a great degree during the middle ages, and in some points even to the present day. " They carry bows and a short spear, and go to battle in trowsers, and with hats on their heads*." This quotation is well introduced in one of the best articles, with which we have met in the dictionary, viz., that on the subject of the barbarian dress on " Bracca}," which is worth reading, as a good illustration both of the marked contrast which existed between the classical and barbarian dress, and also of the manner in which, by occasional exceptions, the barbarian Vires with Hra-'-coe frctn Trajan's Column. costume, and (as in this case) the Celtic word describing it, was adopted into • Ilerodot., v. 49.