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Types of shoe listed
Compare my list with this one.
Calceus
Calcei were good solid shoes, worn with the toga. A calceus had a sole made of leather, grain side down; an insole of leather, grain side up; and as many layers in between as were needed to make a solid shoe. A difference between the Roman calceus and the modern Clarks walking shoe is the lack of a heel; no Roman shoes had raised heels. Those who wished to look taller simply had the whole sole thickened. Augustus, according to Suetonius, did this:
His shoes had rather thick soles to make him look taller.
Juvenal, in his notorious Sixth Satire against women, derides a woman who has her hair piled up high to make herself look taller, but from the back still looks like a pigmy. If she does not wear thick soles, she has to stand on tiptoe to be kissed:
multis adiuta cothurnis ... levis erecta consurgit ad oscula planta
Those middle layers could be narrower pieces of leather, with slits cut in the middle, and the strip opened out - why, we are not sure. Perhaps it was to keep the weight down. The uppers of the calceus covered the whole foot, and were normally made of a single piece of leather with a seam over the toes or up one side. The sources speak of a lingula , but whether this was the tongue of the shoe or a shoelace is not clear. Uppers and soles were not stitched together, as in a modern shoe, but nailed. The last feature of the calceus could be patterns punched or cut in the uppers.
Pero
If the uppers of a calceus reached over the ankles or even higher up the leg, the resulting boot might be called a pero. Some scholars in the past thought that the pero was made of raw-hide, basing their view on a passage of Vergil, Aeneid 7.690. A slinger is being described:
vestigia nuda sinistri
instituere pedis, crudus tegit altera pero.
The left foot, taking the weight of the slinger's stance, was naked, the right being shod with rawhide.
This pero was crudus, but it is unlikely that this was true of them all.
Juvenal (14.186) approves of perones:
nil vetitum fecisse volet quem non pudet alto
per glaciem perone tegi...
The man who doesn't disdain to wear knee-boots when it's freezing, he'll never turn out a bad hat.
Tertullian, on the other hand, dismisses such pandering to weakness, calling the boots perones effeminati.
Caliga
The other nailed shoe is the famous army boot, the caliga. It is so much a soldier's footwear that caligatus or caligatus miles can be translated 'common soldier'. Suetonius, for example, tells us that Augustus awarded mural crowns as rarely as possible and with due regard for merit, and caligati sometimes won them. The same Suetonius says that Vitellius would greet even caligatos milites with an embrace.
Although I myself have sometimes described the caliga as a hobnailed sandal, the term 'sandal' is wrong. Although the caliga normally showed some of the wearer's foot, the uppers did not consist of individual straps, but of a single piece of leather with slits deliberately cut out of it to ventilate the foot in a hot climate. On Hadrian's Wall things were different. Lindsey Alison Jones told the 2004 ARLT Summer School that museum reconstructions of Roman soldiers were often wrong in this respect. Soldiers on the Wall needed, and had, caligae that protected them from the damp and cold. I myself have wondered as I compare the neat footwear worn by soldiers on Trajan's Column with the flimsy articles worn by the dummy soldier in, say, the Lunt fort - when I visited several years ago. The Lunt reconstruction showed a caliga threaded with a thong down the top of the foot, and the result was, to be blunt, an unwearable muddle of leather.
A good range of caliga patterns can be seen worn by American members of Legio VI here.
(Note: Jim Bowers kindly sent these comments on the caliga:
You may be interested to see these reconstructed caligae made by Martin Moser and Lee Holeva:
RomanArmy.com (1)
RomanArmy.com (2)
Martin has also reconstructed other military footwear:
RomanArmy.com (3)
RomanArmy.com (4)
Many re-enactors (including myself) wear caligae with quite wide 'straps', but it has been realised that the 'flimsy' type were actually quite robust. The thicker type are generally bought off the shelf and are mass produced in India, hence their widespread use.
)
Civilians, too, could wear the caliga, just as there are from time to time today fashions for wearing military-style clothing in civvy street. Umbricius, in Juvenal's Third Satire, moves out of Rome to a quiet country small-holding, and promises to visit Juvenal if and when he also retires to the country:
gelidos veniam caligatus in agros.
I will come over to your cold country in my thick boots (so the Loeb translation has it).
Diocletian's price list even includes 'caligae without hobnails', as worn by civilians, but the caliga was really a soldier's shoe, and it was in an army camp that the future Emperor Gaius was given the caligulae, the bootkins, which gave him his famous nickname. Gaius was not the only army child to have such little boots. At least one shoemaker on Hadrian's Wall (where so many shoes have been found at Vindolanda that they are filling the museum's underground storage space) turned out a nice line in caligae in women's and children's sizes, for the wives and children, no doubt, of the troops.
By the way there are instructions from the (American) Legio IX Hispana for making your own caligae here.
