What did the Romans wear under their togas?

If you teach at Oxford or Cambridge, you get used to the regular bursts of outrage about “the Oxbridge interview”. I posted a few months back about the myth that we are all a load of upper-class twits who use the interview to pick students just like ourselves. Wrong on both counts.

Just recently a different variant was doing the rounds: the one about all those weird, donnish and – this is the subtext – UNFAIR questions we ask at the interviews. Just to make sure the poor squirming candidate never feels at ease. A whole list of them were reeled off in the press and even on the Today programme. “What percentage of the world’s water is contained in a cow?” (Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge)  “Are you cool? (Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford). “Why can’t you light a candle in a spaceship? (Physics, Oxford). The Evening Standard even dredged up some celebs to have a go at answering them – not very well.

What did not get headlined was the fact that the survey that had brought all these questions to light had been commissioned, and then hyped, by a company which specialises in helping potential students prepare for their Oxbridge interview – for a fee. There’s nothing like a bit of media panic to send frightened kids (and their over-anxious parents) rushing off with their cheque books to get some “specialist” advice.

My thoughts on this will, I hope,  be reassuring. More than that, they are free.

The first thing that any student going to an interview needs to remember is that we are wanting to let people in, not keep them out. Of course, it may not feel like that to the kid on the receiving end. And, of course, we have many more applicants than there are places. Not everyone can be successful. That said, we are trying at the interview to get each candidate to show themselves at their very best. We want to see how good they are, not how bad.

Sometimes this takes surprising forms, as with those odd  questions. Everyone who conducts these interviews will tell you that over-preparation is as damaging to a candidate’s chances as under-preparation. I have often sat and listened to some hopeful reeling off, unstoppably, a prepared speech on the perfection of the Virgilian hexameter or why the Spartans won the Peloponnesian War. Bowling them a googly (“So what do you think the Romans wore under their togas?) is sometimes the only way of throwing them a lifeline – of giving them the opportunity to show that they can think independently, not from the prepared script.

So if I was giving one piece of advice to those preparing for an interview in my subject? Much cheaper than being professionally “groomed” – I would go out and buy (or borrow) a book about any aspect of the ancient world that interests you and one that is not a mainline part of your school syllabus, or takes you beyond it. Read it; know its title (you’d be surprised how many interviewees can only remember the colour of the dustjacket of their favourite reading matter); and be prepared to talk about if you are asked -- but no prepared speeches, remember.

Happily this is not entirely inconsistent with another aspect of the interview survey that did not get so much media coverage. Apparently almost 40% of the philosophy candidates who had read Mill’s Utilitarianism got a place…as well as the impressive  75% of all candidates (for any subject apparently) who regularly read The Economist.

By the way, I don’t think I shall be interviewing this year. So please don’t anyone go wasting their time trying to find out what Romans did wear under their togas. Anyway, sorely tempted as I have been, I have never actually asked the question. In fact, I don’t think we know the answer. But if I were to ask it,  the point of the question (apart from stopping the unstoppable prepared script) would be to see if the candidate could begin to think through the limits of our ignorance about antiquity, as well as imagine how you might go about filling in the gaps. It wouldn’t be a “trick” at all.

Comments

[Jenny]

I was sent one of those surveys, having unwisely given my email address to that awful company who waylaid us in the street on open day before we had time to realise they weren't actually anthing to do with 'Oxbridge' at all. I certainly did not fill it in, though I did read it and thought the questions about what 'classic' books you had read were pointless and very stupid. I read the Economist in the run-up to my interview, but never at any other time before or since (I can't stand it but was terrified of being asked about current affairs in Germany - luckily we talked about novels instead). So my point is that people lied or exaggerated, and took their 'crazy' questions completely out of context, as the form seemed to try to encourage us to do. It would be easy to feel too embarrassed, even on an anonymous form, to admit, as an English student, to not having read 'Hamlet'! (that is only an example, I have read Hamlet and I am not studying English - you see how insecure an oxbridge candidate can be?)

[Jackie]

I'm with you there Professor Beard. A 'googly'finds out those with a pedestrian, but well drilled, brain. I would think you are looking for a lively, enquiring mind,not the one with the most 'information' forced into it. Someone who can think for themselves. These are born not made.

[Mary]

I take the political LOGIC of Utterly Disgusted's point. All I can say is that, in practice, I have found the googly a leveller rather than the reverse..!

[UTTERLY DISGUSTED]

Mrs. Beard, I wanted to let this go, but I can't. You seem to completely miss my point, despite my being rather heatedly over-the-top in making it.

I would ask if you really do believe that 'throwing a googly' does not play into the hands of children who have been trained to give a precocious response. Who are, as the head of St. Johns once squirmingly put it, 'Expected to sparkle' (heavily polished). Who are utterly familiar with the interview situation, who have learnt to speak easily and have the confidence to venture into a question and talk through it - to be, Mrs. Beard, at their greatest ease.

Conversely, when a student who comes from a school which does not, for example, actually resemble a Cambridge college in its architecture; who has spent years in large classes being taught how to 'get marks' on an exam and write to the examiner's specification (not to 'sparkle,' not to 'glow'); whose teachers are overworked and do not board on school premesis and so cannot provide hour after hour of after school tuition; who have no institutional or family 'history' of attending Oxbridge, who may not realise, Mrs. Beard, that they are truly bright - do you believe your little question is their friend? Do you believe it opens doors in their minds that have hitherto remained shut? How does it do this by actually being less forthcoming than a normal question, than the question about 'the limits of our knowledge about the antiquities,' which is the question you *mean?*

Do you not agree that it is precisely, yes, preparation and over-preparation and then still more preparation that accounts for the fact that nearly fifty percent of Oxbridge students come from the seven percent of private school pupils in this country?

But you clearly believe, bizarrely, that the 'googly' is something which equalizes the field - when it is the 'googly' that in fact disguises a simple question in condensed, oblique language, and therefore is only a further advantage thrust at the well-prepared girl or boy who has had such strangely codified questions fired at them for months, who know 'googlies.'

Perhaps a better term would be 'know googly,' for it is like a small private language, and only certain teachers have the resources to pass the relevant skills to understand it, on to their pupils.

For 'googly' is nothing but a little initiation test, a code-word given at the start of the interview to see if you know the countersign and can be let onto the premesis of actual question (no pun intended).

But for someone who has not been coached, polished, trained and extra-buffed to be unfazed by 'What did Romans wear under their togas?' - that question could be the last you see of them, and the reason you never see how interesting and creative their answer to 'The limits of our knowlege about the antiquities' would have been.

But then I suppose it's not too bad. I suppose enough clever kids have always got in that it doesn't make a difference anyway. And besides, it all starts at home, by the time these kids turn up for interview they are what are, and no longer have the option to be what they could have been. And all that training certainly teaches you to think in the right way, and perhaps there's something in social Darwinism, perhaps the exacting intellectual standards of top public schools are merely accidentally connected with their exacting financial standards, perhaps the government should sort out state eduction rather than I whinge on about training and your googlies. But do you really need to give the winners an extra leg-up? And must you really deliver the struggling another kick?

[Mary]

i am afraid that UTTERLY DISGUSTED has rather misunderstood my point. My experience is (as I say in the post) that more candidates do themselves harm by being over-prepared, rather than the reverse. The googly that they are not expecting actually helps them show their talents. Of course, you dont get an instant 'right answer', partly because there isn't one...and there is often a minute or so's panic (which with care one can easily get them through). But you do get a chance to see how they go about thinking about a tricky question from scratch.

[UTTERLY DISGUSTED]

But don't you see, the question of what is worn under the toga is precisely what is unfair about the interview!

Having codified the actual line of inquiry ('What are the limits of our knowledge aboout the antiquities and how can we overcome them, to some extent?') in an off-puttingly flippent remark, you leave it up to luck whether the candidate will dare to climb down from their anxiety about the situation and engage with your very insensitive tone at complete ease.

How many clever, creative, talented students would simply go 'Oh Christ, that's one of those Cambridge Questions that you can't have an answer to!' How many would be blasted off their stride?

For goodness' sake, the Finals aren't written in that kind of paracryptic style, so why on earth should you so phrase the questions given to students who are at a Sixth-Form level, who will be thinking that they are arrived at one of life's most defining and important moments (regardless if this is true?).

The ridiculous distinction between your paragraph-length explanation and your glib example cry out for the simple response:

'Just ask them the bloody question you had in mind!'

Or do you speak to everyone in the same playfully oblique manner? I can only imagine that if it's how you treat sixth-formers, your colleagues must be set something like the Listener Crossword should you only want to ask them the time.

[Mrs. Margaret Hooker]

On glimpsing through the toga undergarment articles, I would like to mention the command God gave to the Children of Israel in the book of Exodus, Chapter 28, verses 42-43.

"Make linen undergarments as a covering for the body, reaching from the waist to the thigh. Aaron and his sons must wear them whenever they enter the Tent of Meeting or approach the altar to minister in the Holy Place, so that they will not incur guilt and die. This is to be a lasting ordinance for Aaron and his descendants."

Modesty was the watchword even for the males. No "let it all hang out" for the Old Testament priests!!

[David Kirwan]

No doubt dragging poor blameless Chione into the discussion did take us outside the strict bounds of the original question, for she certainly did never wear a toga. The point was that since classes as disparate as actors and women wore a 'loincloth' the chances are that others did too. And in fact I have since found that Florence Dupont (Professor of Latin at the University of Nice) in a popular book on 'Daily Life in Ancient Rome' states that the loincloth was worn under the toga and held up by a belt, and wearing it loose or not at all was 'evidence of a debauched life'. Unfortunately she gives no reference for this statement(it is a popular book) so we can only take her word for it.

[bingley]

David Kirwan -- Chione was a woman and so presumably never togate. I don't say nobody ever wore underwear, just that respectable togate men did without for practical reasons.

[Ms Latin]

Did you spot the weird Loeb translation of Pliny NH 12, 59:
'A seal is put upon the workmen's aprons..'.
What on earth...?

[Mary]

Well, Ladies and Gentlemen...I have now done a little research on subligacula, and confess to being as puzzled as ever. The word (or its related subligar) doesn't appear very often ... a dozen times or so ... in Latin literature. And the form the object took and how regular an item of clothing it was remains utterly mysterious. Some draw a diagram as if it were a grown up nappy (diaper for US readers); others envisage an apron. A particularly odd bit of Pliny the Elder suggests that the frankincense workers in Alexandria had theirs "sealed" -- so they couldn't half-inch the valuable substance while on the job.

[Benjamin Warren]

But surely, if you rule the known world with an iron fist, you can wear whatever you damned well please underneath your toga.

[Katharine Edgar]

You can see a pair of the 'bikini pants' (made of leather) for real in the Roman gallery at the Museum of London (http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk).

They are very evocative!

[David Kirwan]

But, Bingley, Martial (Epigrams Book 3 no 87) advises Chione, since she is so pure 'down below', to wear her subligar on her face. Not conclusive, which is probably what Mary was getting at in her original remarks, but suggesting that it wasn't just actors and not only men who wore the loin cloth. (Or, as Lewis and Short to whom I owe the reference call it, a 'breech cloth'.)

[Jackie]

Surely the reason for the 'trick question' in interviews is to see how well the prospective students can think on their feet, and not to find not how much they may know about the obscure? I would think this was a legitimate tactic to sort the wheat from the chaff.The very high flyers are surely those that are not derailed by the unexpected.
To get back to the 'undergarments', I know soldiers didn't wear togas, but didn't one of the Vindolanda letters mention a parcel including some underpants?

[Richard]

Catullus 64.60 ff. () describes Ariadne's clothes falling off as she stands on the sea shore, doubtless influenced by paintings of mythological nudes produced in part for the titillation of male viewers. As a titillated male reader visualising Catullus' Ariadne, I was inclined to suppose that the passage implied women's underwear: the movement, from less intimate to more intimate, is headdress - dress - bra - "everything" (omnia), and I took this as a gracefully teasing way of implying a garment more intimate than the bra (strophium)... Compare Marvell, "To his Coy Mistress," where "the rest" is used in a similarly, ermm, coy manner , and perhaps Ovid Amores 1.5.fin. ("cetera quis nescit" ~ "you all know the rest")...

[bingley]

Yes, but Cicero seems to imply that actors without a subligaculum would be open to the mischance of accidental indecent exposure and that is why they wear it. Perhaps this doesn't apply to fine upstanding citizens like Cicero.

[Mary]

Not diverted at all...!
I am currently in Buffalo NY, so can't look up the Cicero; but will do when I get back.
Meanwhile, before someone else does, let me mention the "bikini pants" worn by the girls on the Piazza Armerina mosaics.

[David Kirwan]

Mary,

I apologise. I have diverted a serious discussion of the questions interviewers ask and why they ask them into a frivolous search for the Roman equivalent of Calvin Kleins. But to add to the diversion, Cicero (if I translate him correctly) says that no actor would appear on stage without his 'subligaculum'. (Bingley take note!)

[Bingley]

I always understood the answer was nothing. When nature called, you had one hand free to hitch your toga up but you couldn't fiddle about with any underwear with the other hand without totally disarranging your toga.

[Liz]

In apposition to David Kirwin's loin cloth, in Greece we do have a moment of universal amazement at the sight of Ephialtes, champion of the people, leaping upon an altar whilst 'monochiton'. The passage is chapter 25 of Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians, and H. Rackham's translation may be found here - http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0046:chapter=25:section=1

Perhaps we should be asking what was considered underwear rather than looking for a modern equivalent?

[Lord Truth]

Apart from writing 'What Did Romans Wear Under Their Togas',what on earth were you doing at seven minutes past three in the morning? (dont tell us...)-Whisky anyone?

[Mary]

David -- I couldn't say you were wrong. But, as always with such things, the translation "loin cloth" gets away with murder. It sounds appropriately antique (we dont wear them now, after all)...but what do we think it actually looked like. Do we ever hear about someone taking their 'sublig." off...? There's a challenge.

[David Kirwan]

PS. And quite by the way... Wasn't it a 'subligaculum', which my old school pocket dictionary defines as a 'loin cloth'? Go on! Tell me I'm wrong!

[Mary]

I had missed my colleague James Warren's excellent blog on this. Now you've heard it from two of us, independently, please believe it!
On David Kirwan...it's not that he must have got the answer "right"; he must have tackled the question intelligently.