ABSTRACT
As philosophers and orators were men of words, meticulous about public image, they often spoke and wrote about their dress. Benefactors and patrons also commissioned images in their honor-statues and portraits in paint and mosaic-that carefully depicted the folds and wear of their garments. These representations glorified these professions and enshrined the memory of their subjects among a community of intellectual authorities. Tertullian’s public declaration of his preference for the pallium over the toga engaged and challenged these meanings through a “tailoring rhetoric” that brought the garment into the service of Christianity. As an increasing number of learned men like Tertullian received baptism in the second through fifth centuries CE, some of them adopted or continued to wear the pallium. In so doing, they engaged their polytheist rivals and colleagues in a competition of doctrines and self-representation using words, images, and clothing.
