DE CIVILITATE MORVM ON THE CIVILITY OF MANNERS

...is the fortune or dignity of everyone equal, nor do the same things appear decorous or indecorous among all nations, nor do the same things please or displease in every age.

III.
What is to be done in such a great variety of garments? Just as it would be a part of no small prudence to possess the mind of a Polypus an octopus, that is, to assume different manners for different times, places, and customs; so it will be a part of civility to conform to νόμῳ καὶ χώρᾳ the law and the place, especially if propriety has not resisted it.

IIII.
What kind of dress becomes a young man? A neglected one: yet let there be cleanliness in the dress, not of a womanly kind, from which Ovid's Phædra rightly says:
"Let youths kept like women be far from us;
The masculine form is loved when adorned with moderation."
And elsewhere, "A neglected form becomes men."

V.
What did Socrates say upon seeing a youth who walked with delicate and scarcely masculine dress? "Are you not ashamed, you who wish worse for yourself than nature herself wished: for she made you a man, and you are refashioning yourself into a woman."