Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Tribon

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rich, Anthony (1849). The illustrated companion to the Latin dictionary, and Greek lexicon. p. vi. OCLC 894670115. https://archive.org/details/illustratedcompa00rich. 

TRIB'ON (τρίβων). A Greek word, signifying literally an old garment worn threadbare; whence the term was given more specially to a very coarse, common, and scanty kind of cloak (pallium), worn by the people of Sparta, and adopted by other persons, who affected to ape Spartan manners; more especially by philosophers of the Cynic and Stoic sects, as an outward sign of poverty, austerity, and simplicity. (Auson. Ep. 53. Demosth. Contra Conon. 2. p. 306. Schaeffer. Aristoph. Plut. 882.) The illustration (Tribon/1.1) represents a Greek philosopher clothed in a tribon, from a statue of the Villa Borghese. In the original, the scantiness of the garment, and the coarseness of its texture, are distinctly marked by the form and quality of its folds; but this character, though not altogether lost in our engraving, is rendered less forcibly, from want of decision in the drawing, consequent, in some degree, upon the minute scale to which it has been reduced.

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