Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/482

 *monly wore it, more especially in travelling. Arrian, who wrote about the middle of the second century, says, that "Laconian or Arcadian hats," were worn in the army by the peltastæ instead of helmets. This circumstance shows a remarkable change of customs; for in the early Greek history we find the Persian soldiers held up as the objects of ridicule and contempt, because they wore hats and trowsers. On the whole, it is very evident that "the Arcadian or Laconian hat" was one and the same variety, and that this variety of head-dress was simply the petasus, or hat with a brim, so called to distinguish it from the proper [Greek: pilos], which was the skull-cap, or hat without a brim.

This supposition suits the representations of the only imaginary beings who are exhibited in works of ancient art wearing the petasus, viz. the Dioscuri and Mercury.

It has been already observed that the Dioscuri are commonly represented with the skull-cap, because they were worshipped, as the reader will have perceived, as the guardians of the mariner ; but on ancient vases we find them sometimes painted with the petasus; and if this was the same with the [Greek: pilos Lakônikos], it would coincide with their origin as natives of Sparta. In Plate IX. Fig. 16, an example is shown, on one of Sir William Hamilton's vases, in which their attire resembles that of the Athenian ephebi. They wear boots and a tunic, over which one of them also wears the scarf or chlamys. They are conducted by the goddess Night.

In like manner Mercury, as a native of Arcadia, might be expected to wear "the Arcadian hat." In the representations of this deity on works of ancient art, the hat, which is often decorated with wings to indicate his office of messenger, as his talaria also did, has a great variety of forms, and sometimes the brim is so narrow, that it does not differ from the cap of the artificer already described, or the [Greek: pilos] in its ordinary form.