Types of shoe listed (2)
Soccus
So to stitched shoes, socci. These would be no good for route marches or for tramping through cold fields. The uppers, sewn by their edges between sole and insole, were of thin leather or sometimes fabric. Who wore them? Primarily they were indoor shoes for women and children. Soles found in London (their fragile uppers have all disappeared) come in a range between child size 5 and adult size 3, so there is no evidence here of men wearing socci. The bride in Catullus 61 is to wear yellow socci:
huc veni, niveo gerens
luteum pede soccum.
And Messalina wore them. We know this because Vitellius' father Lucius, a great man, eminent enough to have been left in charge of the Empire while Claudius was off in some remote venture at the world's end - Britannia, as it happens - this Lucius, who lost no chance of social advancement, used to beg Messalina to grant him the tremendous privilege of removing her socci; whereupon he would nurse the right soccus inside his gown, and occasionally take it out to kiss it. So Suetonius alleges.
Yet men, too, wore socci. The great and good Publius Rutilius Rufus, who was the first to teach the Roman soldiers the principles of fencing, and who was exiled by Sulla, wore socci. Cicero's eyebrows shot up at the thought:
ille P. Rutilius, qui documentum fuit hominibus nostris virtutis, (a paragon of virtue) antiquitatis, prudentiae, consularis homo, (he'd even been consul) soccos eos habuit.
He had socci? It wasn't his fault, Cicero hastens to add. We must put it down to the age he was living in:
nec vero homini sed tempori assignandum.
Of course Greek men wore socci - but then they were Greeks, of whom one could not expect Roman decency. Bootkin, Caligula himself, wore them:
In his dress he ignored male conventions, and even the human decencies. Often he made public appearances ... even in a woman's robe, and came sometimes shod with crepidae, slippers, sometimes with caligae, sometimes with socci, women's shoes.
Socci were worn also by comic actors, when they were not wearing baxae. They were linked with comedy as cothurni were with tragedy. Horace in Ars Poetica points out:
A comic subject will not be presented in tragic metres. Likewise Thyestes' banquet is far too grand a tale for verse of an everyday kind which is more akin to the soccus.
You may remember Pliny's two houses on Lake Como:
I have named one Tragedy, because it seems to be raised on actors' boots, and the other Comedy, because it wears soculi.
As a schoolboy reading Milton's L'Allegro I was puzzled by the lines:
Then to the well-trod stage anon
If Jonson's learned sock be on.
Knowing what a soccus is, and having studied one of Ben Jonson's very learned comedies, I see what Milton means.
Solea, Sandalium, Crepida, Ansa
Who wore sandals, soleae or sandalia? They had two to four layers of sole, were often hobnailed for extra wear, and fastened to the foot with leather thongs, usually one between the big toe and the second toe, and with various patterns of thonging for the back of the foot. Who wore crepidae, half way between sandals and closed boots, with the edges of the uppers opened up with a series of loops, or ansae, through which a thong would pass? In London the sizes found range from child size 2 to adult size 5, which suggests that they belonged to women and children, and in our climate I guess that they were summer wear. They were normally indoor wear. A law of the mysterious Arval Brethren said:
NEIVE QUIS IN POPLICO LUCI PRAETEXTAM NEIVE SOLEAS HABETO
This must have been an arcane regulation, but in general men did wear soleae indoors. In later times they may also have worn them out of doors, although the evidence cited by nineteenth century scholars Dr Smith in his Dictionary of Antiquities and Professor Becker in his Gallus is not entirely convincing.
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