Anatole France one said,‘Show me the clothes of a country and I can write its history.’1 Yet the study of dress in the ancient world has been shamefully undervalued. The semantics of the clothing of the past is an area of research that can shed a much-needed light on a variety of problems faced by students of antiquity, and in particular, as far as this book goes, on the lives and perceptions of women of the ancient Greek world. It is odd to recognize that while current scholarship questions ancient ideas of the ancient body, it rarely considers that, more often than not, the ancient body was clothed. It is time to re-dress the Greek body and allow it to be read with its full accoutrements of clothing, jewellery and make-up. To borrow a phrase from Alison Lurie, we need to understand the ‘language of dress’ spoken in the Greek world, and make full use of its vocabulary, dialects, and constructions. 2 Clothing can offer us a unique insight into the psychology not only of an individual, but also of a society. Outside the realm of fashion history proper, the study of dress as an indicator of a society’s mores has been almost entirely neglected by ancient historians and classicists who, despite several generations’ worth of potted histories on the construction and draping of Greco-Roman clothing (some of which fall far short of the mark of being in any way ‘scholarly’), 3 have only infrequently attempted to investigate the role of clothing in its wider cultural context. 4 Things are beginning to change, and the study of Roman dress in its sociocultural context, for example, is now looking much healthier. In 1988 an important seminar entitled ‘The Religious, Social, and Political Significance of Roman Dress’ was organized by Larissa Bonfante, and many of its papers were subsequently published in a groundbreaking volume, The World of Roman Costume, co-edited by Bonfante and Judith Lynn Sebesta. 5 The only comparable accounts given over to Greek dress, however, tend to be scattered through journals and art-studies, although Georges Losfeld has provided two useful, but undervalued, volumes which deal with the etymological, social, and artistic background to the study of Greek dress. 6 Ann Geddes has analysed the dress of Athenian men in the context of Athens’ inward-looking democratic ideology and offered an insight that contrasted well with Margaret Miller’s study of the Persianization of Athenian culture (including dress issues) in the classical period. 7 Andrew Stewart, Hans van Wees, and James Davidson have also questioned the nature of dress and its social messages in archaic and