achievement
non sibi sed toti

Classics Teaching Resources

This lecture was given to the Association for Latin Teaching Summer School at Exeter some time in the 1980s. My interest was aroused by the Roman shoe in Clarks Shoe Museum in Street. The emphasis is on Roman shoes in literature. For technical discussions you would do better to visit other sites.

Introduction and Plato

A famous American was once asked what he noticed first about a woman. His answer: "Next, I notice the hands."

With me it has been the feet - not of present day women, but of ancient statues, mosaics and frescos. I commend to you the habit of concentrating on some specialised part of ancient works of art. It freshens one's vision. Has this statue bare feet? If so, why? You question the artifact, and so you begin to see it more clearly.

Even literature can gain extra interest when you read for a purpose like this.

I begin with a teacher of the teachers of the Romans. The teachers of the Romans were the Greeks, and the teacher of the Greeks was Plato. In setting up an infant republic, Plato has Socrates choose the four or five essential people:

- Now, the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence.
- Certainly
- The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.
- True.
- And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand; we may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, someone else a weaver - shall we add to them a shoemaker ... ?

The shoemaker is fourth in the list of the people essential to a city. Our subject is as important as that. In early Rome, the shoemakers' guild was among the eight craft guilds established by King Numa. [Mommsen 1.249] The others were flute-players, gold- and copper-smiths, carpenters, dyers, potters and fullers.

Just a small digression while Plato is fresh in our minds: did philosophers like Plato wear shoes at all? Study the famous Pompeii mosaic of Plato and his disciples and you find that some wore sandals, while Plato himself, pointing with his stick at a globe, wears - what? At first glance, long-toed slippers; but a closer look shows just the curiously placed shadow of his bare foot. As for other, later philosophers, Tertullian tells us that they wore palm-leaf sandals called baxae. Comic actors wore these too. Is there a spiritual link between comedians and philosophers? Or were philosophers too poor to afford leather? You can find baxae from Egypt in the British Museum. In the Golden Ass, Appuleius introduces us to a leading necromancer (is there a link with philosophers here too?) called Zatchlas "dressed in white linen, with palm-leaf sandals on his feet (pedesque palmeis baxis indutum) and a tonsured head."