Himation

Until recently, clothing has been studied mainly by archaeology and cultural history. It has been considered a symbol of social, ethnic or gender identity. Instead, this book focuses on the numerous clothing metaphors that we can find in Greek and Latin texts and on their meanings, from a literary and philosophical perspective. It demonstrates that, far from being reduced to a rhetorical device, the metaphor is thought as a genuine conceptual and metapoetic tool in ancient texts. How were the metaphors transmitted and reworked through the years? What various meanings do they convey?

These are some of the questions that the twenty or so contributions in this book will address. They explore the continuity and wide variety of clothing metaphors in Classical and Late Antiquity, right up to the Renaissance. The metaphor of clothing emerges as a protean device that allows us to think about political or religious union and disunity, relationships between soul and body, the order of cosmos, or literary creation. These presentations are the result of two years work led by the Himation junior lab’ and its contributors, philosophers, philologists and anthropologists of Antiquity.