The Parasol played among the Greeks a very important part, as well in the sacred and funeral ceremonies as in the great holidays of nature, and even in the private life of the noble ladies of Athens.
The Parasol in its elegant form may be seen drawn on the majority of Greek vases, either painted with straight or arched branches, concave or convex, or in the shape of a hemisphere or a tortoise's back. But the Sunshade with movable rods, opening or shutting, existed at that time, as is sufficiently indicated by the phrase of Aristophanes in the /Knights/ (Act v. Scene 2)--"His ears opened and shut something like a sunshade."
An archæologist might amuse himself with writing a special work on the rôle of the Sunshade in Greece; documents would not fail him; nay, the book would soon grow big, and might bristle with notes from all quarters, abounding in the margins, after the example of those good solid volumes of the sixteenth century, which none but a hermit would have the leisure to read conscientiously to-day. Such is not our business in this light chapter.
One cannot exactly say for what motive the Sunshade was carried by young virgins in all the processions in the Thesmophoria, the festivals of Eleusis, and the Panathenæa. Aristophanes calls the baskets and the white Sunshades "symbolic instruments, destined to recall to human beings the acts of Ceres and Proserpine."
Perhaps it is not necessary to search beyond this Aristophanic definition, which may on the whole entirely satisfy us. Moreover, these Sunshades were white, not, say they, because the statue erected by Theseus to Minerva was of that colour, but because white marked the liveliest joy and pomp according to Ovid, who recommends very carefully in his /Fasti/ the wearing in sign of rejoicings white tunics worthy of pleasing Ceres, in whose cult both the priestesses and the things they used ought to be entirely white.
In a man, according to Anacreon, the carrying a Parasol was the mark of a libertine and effeminate life; one might draw an analogous conclusion from a scene in the /Birds/ of Aristophanes, in which Prometheus, through fear of Jupiter, cries to his slave, before abandoning himself to a sweet passion for Venus only, "Quick, take this sunshade, and hold it over me, in order that the gods may not see me."