Who won, what the theme was, where each of them came from, I do not know: the rest of the story lies behind a door that opens only to subscribers, and I, a thrifty man, did not knock. But I have enough for a conversation. A man who talks about the toga does not need the winner's name, any more than a man who talks about wine needs the innkeeper's. "What have you to do with needle and shears, Flaccus," you ask, "you who as a boy wore the one tunic your father gave you each year?" Quite right. That is exactly why I know what a garment that sits well is worth.

I remember Maecenas, the most elegant of men, laughing whenever my toga hung lopsided on my shoulders, or a worn tunic peeped out beneath a new one. He laughed at the clothes; I felt my mind was far more lopsided, and no tailor could set that straight. I grant it: the needle does not heal the soul. But a man who walks in a toga cut to his body walks more upright; and a man who walks more upright often thinks more uprightly. Decorum, as the philosophers teach, is seen first in bearing and dress, and only then in a life.

Now look at the forum of our own day. Cato handed out to his farm stewards a tunic and a cloak by measure, the same for all, fitted to nobody: that was the slaves' ration. Today free men, citizens, even senators, buy tunics sewn a thousand at a time, made for no man and therefore fitting none; and they call it freedom that they may choose the same sack in twelve colours. I call it a slave's ration, taken willingly. Cicero taught that hirelings are those "whose labour is bought, not their skill"; the tailor, who measures the man before he cuts, sells his skill; the factory, which knows nothing of its thousands of bodies, sells labour.

Nor is this a trifle, though I seem to be laughing. When Augustus saw a crowd at an assembly wrapped in dark cloaks, he was indignant and ordered the aediles to let no one stand in the forum unless he wore the toga. He understood that the face of the commonwealth is seen in the dress of its citizens, and that a people which covers itself carelessly will soon govern itself carelessly. What an aedile can barely achieve by edict, a tailor achieves by persuasion: he restores one man at a time, and then the next.

Who gains? Botré, I suppose, and his review; his reputation grows, clients come, his patronage of the craft is confirmed. I do not blame him: Maecenas too won glory from Virgil's poems, and the poems were none the worse for it. I am glad, besides, that craftsmen from distant nations come to Italy to match their needles against ours; once "captive Greece took her rough conqueror captive and brought the arts to rustic Latium"; now the arts themselves come back to us to learn. But I keep watch on one thing: that tailoring, which restores decorum, does not turn into luxury, and that no one orders twenty togas so he can strut like a peacock in the colonnade. "There is a measure in things, there are fixed limits, beyond and short of which right cannot stand."

The remedy, then, is at hand, and it is not new: buy one garment, but a good one; let the craftsman measure you, talk with you, even correct you; wear it for ten years, until it grows old with its owner. And teach your sons, as my father taught me, by examples, not by precepts: show them a man well dressed and sober, and a man badly dressed and drunk, and let them judge for themselves. A garment that fits everyone fits no one; and you may say the same of opinions.