Augustine refers to the _compestria_, the drawers or apron worn
by young men who stripped for exercise in the _campus_. (_De
Civitate Dei_, Bk. XIV, Ch. XVII.)

Lecky (_History of Morals_, vol. ii, p. 318), brings together
instances of women, in both Pagan and early Christian times, who
showed their modesty by drawing their garments around them, even
at the moment that they were being brutally killed. Plutarch, in
his essay on the "Virtues of Women,"--moralizing on the
well-known story of the young women of Milesia, among whom an
epidemic of suicide was only brought to an end by the decree that
in future women who hanged themselves should be carried naked
through the market-places,--observes: "They, who had no dread of
the most terrible things in the world, death and pain, could not
abide the imagination of dishonor, and exposure to shame, even
after death."

In the second century the physician Aretæus, writing at Rome,
remarks: "In many cases, owing to involuntary restraint from
modesty at assemblies, and at banquets, the bladder becomes
distended, and from the consequent loss of its contractile power,
it no longer evacuates the urine." (_On the Causes and Symptoms
of Acute Diseases_, Book II, Chapter X.)

Apuleius, writing in the second century, says: "Most women, in
order to exhibit their native gracefulness and allurements,
divest themselves of all their garments, and long to show their
naked beauty, being conscious that they shall please more by the
rosy redness of their skin than by the golden splendor of their
robes." (Thomas Taylor's translation of _Metamorphosis_, p. 28.)