Rome's Senate bans silk for men

In the year 16 CE, two years into the reign of the emperor Tiberius, the Roman Senate turned against luxury. At the sitting after the trial of the young noble Libo Drusus, who had killed himself on 13 September, the former consul Quintus Haterius and the former praetor Octavius Fronto spoke at length against the extravagance of the city. The Senate resolved that dishes of solid gold should no longer be used to serve food, and that 'Oriental silk' (vestis Serica, the cloth of the Seres, the silk people of the far east) should no longer disgrace men. That is all the historian Tacitus records of the decree: no penalty, no wording. Cassius Dio, writing two centuries later, gives the same two bans to Tiberius himself.

Fronto wanted more: limits on silver plate, furniture and household slaves. The senator Asinius Gallus answered that a great empire naturally made great private fortunes, and that men of rank deserved comforts to match their burdens; the house agreed with him, and Tiberius added that it was not the moment for a censor's clean-up. So the law hit two easy targets. Silk was a rare, almost transparent cloth that reached Rome from Han China, then ruled by the usurper Wang Mang, overland through Central Asia and Parthia to Syria, or by sea through India and the Red Sea ports, from which, the geographer Strabo says, some 120 ships a year sailed for India in Augustus' time. A wild silk was also woven on the Greek island of Kos. To a Roman moralist a man in see-through silk was effeminate: a citizen was meant to wear wool, above all the toga that Augustus had made the dress of public life.

The ban did not hold. In 22 CE the aediles complained that the old law on spending was a dead letter and food prices kept rising. Tiberius replied in a letter to the Senate that listed what was wrong, from huge villas and armies of slaves to gold and silver plate, men dressed like women, and the women's jewels for which, he said, Roman money was carried off to foreign and even hostile peoples. Then he refused to pass laws that no one would obey. Half a century later Pliny the Elder wrote that men were not ashamed to wear silk in summer because it was light, and reckoned that India, the Seres and Arabia took a hundred million sesterces a year out of the empire; the philosopher Seneca mocked silk dresses that hid nothing.

The decree is one of the first laws we know of aimed at a single imported fabric, and it mixes the three worries that run through every later sumptuary law: morals, the line between men and women, and money flowing abroad. The popular short version, that the Senate banned silk because Romans spent so much gold on it, joins two things the sources keep apart: Tacitus gives a moral reason in 16 CE, and the complaint about money going east comes later, from Tiberius in 22 and Pliny in the 70s. Rome never stopped wanting silk; Chinese annals say Parthia kept Roman envoys away to control the trade, and silkworms reached the Mediterranean only in the 550s.