The Toga Praetexta

The toga praetexta looked, at a distance, like the plain white toga virilis worn by every adult Roman male citizen, except for a band of purple or crimson dye running along its border. That border marked two very different kinds of Roman standing at once. Curule magistrates, the highest ranking officials entitled to the ivory folding chair, wore it while carrying out public religious duties, as did major priesthoods including the pontifices and the flamines, the specialized priests each attached to a particular god's cult. At the same time, ordinary freeborn boys, and by some accounts freeborn girls as well, wore the same bordered toga as everyday dress from a young age until a boy formally exchanged it for the plain toga virilis at his coming of age ceremony.

Roman writers treated the purple border as more than decoration. It was widely understood to carry an apotropaic function, warding off harm from those who wore it, which fits the pattern joining magistrates performing sacrifice, a moment of ritual exposure and responsibility, with children, who occupied a similarly vulnerable and not yet fully formed position in Roman social and religious thought. Wearing the same marked border linked the highest religious offices in the state to the most ordinary members of it, its youngest.

For a Roman boy, laying the toga praetexta aside was itself a religious event, not merely a change of clothes. At the Liberalia, the festival of Liber Pater held on the seventeenth of March, boys judged ready for manhood, generally sometime in their mid teens though the exact age varied by family circumstance, exchanged the purple-bordered childhood toga for the plain white toga virilis in a household ceremony that then moved into a public procession to the Capitol or Forum, where the young man's name was entered on the citizen rolls. Traditionally he also dedicated his childhood protective amulet, the bulla, worn on a cord around the neck since infancy, to the household gods, closing out the ritual protections of childhood as he took on the responsibilities of adult citizenship.

Roman priests kept the border for life. Because the flamines and pontifices wore the praetexta throughout their tenure rather than only in childhood, the same visible marker that a Roman audience read on a boy as simply not yet grown, it read on a priest at the altar as still, in a sense, standing in the position that border had always signified, a person set apart, under a form of ritual protection ordinary adult dress did not carry.