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Classics Teaching Resources

Types of shoe - the evidence

Actual shoes

The first kind of evidence is actual ancient shoes. You would think they were perfect evidence, but they would be even better they did not deteriorate, both in the ground and in conservation. Consider the Bog People, those shrivelled, prune-like remains of men and women preserved by the chemical composition of bog water. A similar fate befalls leather. Tests, due to end in 2087, are taking place to determine the rate of shrinkage. First results show that shrinkage begins slowly, speed up between the first and fourth years, and then slows down, so that we end with a piece of leather about 9/10ths of the original size. Clearly the change is not so great as with the whole human body, but we can be sure that the shoe the archaeologist has dug up is not exactly the same size as that which some Roman lost or threw away.

After discovery, there must be careful conservation. Once away from the water, leather will shrink and harden if care is not taken. One of the Roman shoes in the Clarks museum was found in 1955 down a well near the famous Dido and Aeneas mosaic from Low Ham in Somerset, ten years after the mosaic came to light. It is a nearly intact sandal, as Clarks say, "of small children's size."

This sandal was taken to the Chief Chemist at Clarks, who discovered the conservation method advocated by one textbook:

First treat with warm dilute alcohol containing a little carbolic acid, and then with melted vasiline. After a few days, half an hour in a bath of molten paraffin, to fill up the pores before drying.

It is a good thing that the chemist first tested the method on some small pieces of leather found with the shoe. They shrank during the vasiline stage, and shrank again even more drastically in the paraffin bath. As they dried they went hard and inflexible. The chemist consulted the Guildhall Museum, now part of the Museum of London. Their advice was this:

Immerse waterlogged leather in sulphonated castor oil for about a month or six weeks. It is important to get the right grade of oil and we have acquired a special brand from Messrs Sternol, Royal London House, E.C.2.

The chemist followed this advice, and the child's shoe hardly shrank at all. At the end of the process, it was quite reasonably flexible. Clarks last shop made a wooden filler to put in the little sandal, and so it was put on display. One drawback of the castor oil treatment was that it "left the objects with a sticky black surface and unpleasant smell." There is a better method now, but the results are still not perfect.

Art

Pictures and statues also have advantages and drawbacks as evidence. We can learn from statues to associate certain types of footwear with certain kinds of people - Roman or barbarian, male or female, rich or poor. Unfortunately, if a statue is damaged the extremities, including feet, are the first to be spoiled. Again, in some statues, like the Pompeii Aphrodite adjusting her sandal, the shoe-straps, like her necklace and bikini, were just painted on, and have vanished. Mosaic pictures can lack detail, and paintings are often damaged; still, taken with other evidence, art has much to tell us.

Literature

Literature gives us the stories and the etiquette of different kinds of footwear; the difficulty is in matching the names of shoe types to archaeological finds and to shoes seen in art. Names are sometimes used loosely, and it is impossible to be absolutely sure of the difference between a caliga and a calceus. Still the search for shoes in literature leads us to sidelights on emperors, criminals, witches, priests and seduction..