Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 April 1880 — The Liberty Cap. [ARTICLE]

The Liberty Cap.

The “Liberty Cap” takes its origin from the ancient Phrygian cap, which may be seen in all the representations of the Trojans in Flexman’s illustrations to Homer. In ancient Greece and Borne slaves were not allowed to have the head covered, and part of the ceremony of freeing a slave was placing this cap on his head, which thus became the symbol of liberty and was so regarded during the Roman Republic. A cap on a pole was used by Saturninus as a token of liberty to aU slaves who might join him, and Marius raised the same symbol to induce the slaves to take arm* with him against Seylia. After the death of Cesar the conspirators marched out in a body .with a cap borne before them on a spear, and it is said that a medal struck on the occasion and bearing this device is still in existence. In Dr. Zinkeisen’s “History of the Jacobin Club” we are told that the “Liberty Cap” or “Bonnet Rouge’’ was introduced by the Girondists ana that it owed ite favorable reception principally to an article by Briseot, which appeared in the Patriate Francois and in which he declared that the “mournful uniform of hats” had been introduced “by priests and despots” sail proved from history that “all great nations—the Greeks, the Romans and Gauls—had held the eap in peculiar honor.” It is also said that the “Bonnet Rouge” was habitually worn by the galley slaves and was adopted as the symbol of freedom after the release of the Swim regiments of Chateau Vieux, and it is very likely that this circumstance gave the first impulse to the fashion, But it soon became identified with th« “liberty Cap” of antiquity.—# Y. Worlds “Notes and Queries,"