ABSTRACT
When painters in Classical Greece represented shoes on their vases, they liked to capture the moment when the wearers were in transition between being shod and unshod – that is, when they were in the process of tying their sandals, or had just taken them off or were about to put them on. In this chapter, the significance of the transitions involving footwear are examined, followed by an exploration of one particular aspect of the ‘one shoe off and one shoe on’ motif, referred to by modern scholars as ‘monosandalism’. Monosandalism was rooted in myth and ritual. The mythological contexts in which it occurs, both in literature and the visual arts, and the single ‘real life’ instance of the practice, in the work of the historian Thucydides, will be discussed. Its relationship with rites of passage and with the characterisation of heroes will be discussed, as will the theories of scholars who in the twentieth century brought anthropological perspectives to bear on its interpretation. Finally, the place occupied by monosandalism in the value systems of Classical Greece, including its positioning in the culture versus nature set of oppositions, will be considered.
