Caliendrum
Caliendrum a tall female head-dress, but whether a wig of false hair or an arrangement of draperies it is not easy to determine. The Cruquian scholiast on the locus classicus of Horace (Sat. 1.8, 48) gives both explanations, without attempting to decide between them ( peplum capitis aut crinis suppositicius sen capillamentum aut galericulus capitisve ornamentum
). But galericulus (or -um) may mean a wig (Suet. Oth. 12, with Casaubon's note); and the humour of the passage is decidedly in favour of this rendering: one of the two old women drops her false teeth in her flight, the other her false hair. A fragment of Varro quoted by the same scholiast suggests a stage peruke ( tantis cothurnis accipit Critona caliendrum
). Of the only other passages where the word occurs, Arnobius (5.26, p. 209) mentions caliandria among female vanities; Tertullian, on the contrary (de Pall. 4), seems to imply a staid and sober covering which the immodest women of his time had discarded.
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.