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Abstract. The end of the Republic and the early Augustan period witnessed several changes in the size and drape of the "elite" toga. The implementation of the toga, with its capacity to change, demonstrates elite anxiety over their rank and status and the ways in which elements of adornment could be used to assert, defend, and manipulate identities in response to changing political and social circumstances. As a tool for maintaining order by demonstrating legitimacy, the changeable toga was adopted by Augustus as he and members of Rome's elite each negotiated his own place in the Roman world.
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When Appian (B. Civ. 2.17.120) describes the chaos and disorder that characterized Roman society by the end of the Republic, he does so in terms of costume, .... ("For now the Roman people are much mixed with foreigners, there is equal citizenship for freedmen, and slaves dress like their masters. With the exception of the senators, free citizens and slaves wear the same costume").1 The clear implication is that distinctive costumes were symbols of an ordered society that the Romans had lost; furthermore, the overall health and stability of Rome's highly stratified society could be measured by visual assessment of seemingly personal sartorial choices.
Although Appian was writing roughly two centuries later than the period he considers, concerns over matters of dress and their importance in demonstrating rank and status were important in the late Republic and Augustan period, as attention to matters of dress at the time demonstrates. It is then that the toga had begun to swell, growing longer, fuller and more elaborate in its drape. These developments were in response to changing political and social circumstances, including anxiety over elite privilege, which form the backdrop of the princeps' own interest in the toga. The new togas, which arose primarily out of an elite assertion of identity and status, and Augustus' interest in, and measures concerning, the toga (as well as other forms of dress) should be read as a silent but explicit conversation in which each negotiated his own position in Roman society.
But precisely who was participating in this conversation? It has been argued that the longer togas of the late Republic, which were draped in a...