Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/515

 458 Primitive Greixe : Mycenian Art. began to shake off somewhat of their primitive rudeness. The conjecture is not unreasonable ; nevertheless, it seems more probable that the garment depicted on our monuments is a tunic. Women, as soon as the sense of modesty awoke in them, no doubt led the way in adopting so convenient a mode of dress ; but in cutting it up with tucks and flounces they invested it with a character it had not before. The tunic was gathered in at the waist by a girdle made of a piece of cloth, leather, or metal.^ To judge from one or two images (Fig. 419, 14), the dress was fastened in front by means of buttons. This view of the case would account for the prodigious quantity of stone buttons that have been brought out of the graves. Tunics enriched with bands of many colours were only for the well-to-do, or at most kept for festive occasions. Every-day garments, and those worn by slaves, were of course void of any such embellishments. The woman portrayed on an oft-cited vase, who witnesses the soldiers marching to the front, is clad in a trailing tunic, but without ornament (Fig. 488). The tight-fitting bodice and full skirt of this period did not admit of being held together with mere pins, like the true Greek costume ; this is always seamless, and composed of a rectangular piece of cloth draped about the figure, the ends of the stuff being fastened on the shoulder and at the side by means of clasps, brooches, or hooks. The principle on which the two costumes are constructed is widely opposed, and' the result is a very different effect. The use of the needle made fibulae superfluous. Hence these are absent both at Troy, in Cyprus, the Cyclades, and the shaft-graves of Mycenae ; but they appear in the tombs of the lower city as well as at Vaphio, where specimens exhibiting two or three forms, but quite simple, have been picked up (Fig. 253). It is not unlikely that even when the practice of wearing fibulae became fairly general, their use was confined for a long time to fasten the mens chlcena and the female hwtation on the shoulders ; a cloak unrepresented on the monuments, but the need of which must have been sorely felt in the winter months. If men were bejewelled, women were so to a much larger extent. A couple of tombs which only contained women, and a third wherein men and women were buried, have supplied gold ornaments in greater abundance than any other sepulture. The ^ TSOUNDAS, MvK'JjIrai.