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From https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trousers-pants-roman-h... Like with GPS and the internet, innovations from the military sector slowly spread to civil society. By 397, trousers, in all their odiousness, were becoming so common that brother-emperors Honorius and Arcadius (of the Western and Eastern empires, respectively) issued an official trouser ban. The ban is cited in a code named for their father, Theodosianus, which read: “Within the venerable City no person should be allowed to appropriate to himself the use of boots or trousers. But if any man should attempt to contravene this sanction, We command that in accordance with the sentence of the Illustrious Prefect, the offender shall be stripped of all his resources and delivered into perpetual exile.” “What the ban basically does is that it bans civilians from wearing a military outfit in the capital,” says Elm, “so one could see it as an indirect way to make it easy to distinguish civilians from military men at a time where tension was high.” Four years prior, Emperor Valens had been killed in battle within Roman borders, and a third of the army had been wiped out. So banning trousers could have been a way to make sure that the capital was easier to police, and that fighters were kept out. The ban could also be read as the desperate attempt of late-period emperors to cling to a sense of Roman identity at a time where the empire had become a melting pot of traditions, after hundreds of years of expansion and cultural appropriation. Long hair and flashy jewels soon joined boots and pants as forbidden fashion. “Barbarian influence on fashion was something that emperors wanted to control, but then their own bodyguards, which presumably they trusted, were barbarians,” says Elm. “So rather than anti-barbarian, they were mostly anti-barbarian-identity.” Restoring concepts such as “purity” and “identity” is not uncommon in fading empires—authoritarian ways to make rulers feel in control at home in the face of external weakness. |
Indeed. The Roman empire was not really "anti-barbarian" (except in its final throes): the Roman Emperorl considered himself to be the ruler of the whole world and all people in it, so the "us vs them" mentality was weaker than we may think. For instance, whenever Rome conquered some province, it usually granted citizenship to the local ruling class, so as to foster assimilation. Also, for a really long time barbarians were accepted at the "frontier" (limes) and sent to provinces that needed manpower, or to the army (which allowed them to become citizens, once discharged). Things only started to get out of hand after the battle of Adrianopolis (378), when the limes became unguarded and basically all Goths, displaced by the Huns, swarmed across the empire.