flung skillfully around the body and secured by a few well-placed
pins. This costume is infinitely adjustable; it can be expanded
into flowing draperies or contracted into an easy working dress
by a few artful twitches. It can be nicely adjusted to meet the
inevitable sense of "beauty" bred in the bone of every Athenian.
True, on the cold days of midwinter the wearers will go about
shivering; but cold days are the exception, warm days the rule, in
genial Attica.[+]

[*]The Persians no doubt learned to use this style of garment during
their life on the cold, windy steppes of Upper Asia, before they
won their empire in the more genial south.

[+]The whole civilization of Athens was, of course, based on a
climate in which artificial heat would be very little needed. A
pot of glowing charcoal might be used to remove the chill of a
room in the very coldest weather. Probably an Athenian would have
regarded a climate in which furnace heat was demanded nearly eight
months in the year as wholly unfit for civilized man.

This simplicity of costume has produced certain important results.
There are practically no tailors in Athens, only cloth merchants,
bleachers, and dyers. Again fashions (at least in the cut of the
garments) seldom change. A cloak that was made in the days of
Alcibiades (say 420 B.C.) can be worn with perfect propriety to-day
(360 B.C.) if merely it has escaped without severe use or moth
holes. It may be more usual this year to wear one's garments a
little higher or a little more trailing than formerly; but THAT is
simply a matter for a shifting of the pins or of the girdle.