Pileus (hat) in the context of "Petasos"

Ithaca (/ˈɪθəkə/ ITH-ə-kə), also Ithaki (Greek: Ιθάκη [iˈθaci]) or Ithaka (Ancient Greek: Ἰθάκη Ithákē [itʰákɛː]), is a Greek island located in the Ionian Sea, off the northeast coast of Kefalonia and to the west of continental Greece.

Ithaca's main island has an area of 96 square kilometres (37 sq mi) and in 2021 had a population of 2,862. It is the second-smallest of the seven main Ionian Islands, after Paxi. Ithaca is a separate regional unit of the Ionian Islands region, and the only municipality of the regional unit. The capital is Vathy (or Vathi).

Libertas (Latin for 'liberty' or 'freedom', pronounced [liːˈbɛrt̪aːs̠]) is the Roman goddess and personification of liberty. She became a politicised figure in the late republic. She sometimes also appeared on coins from the imperial period, such as Galba's "Freedom of the People" coins during his short reign after the death of Nero. She is usually portrayed with two accoutrements: the spear; and pileus, a cap commonly worn by freed slaves, which she holds out in her right hand rather than wears on her head.

The Greek equivalent of the goddess Libertas is Eleutheria, the personification of liberty. There are many post-classical depictions of liberty as a person which often retain some of the iconography of the Roman goddess.

In Etruscan mythology, Sethlans was the god of fire, the forge, metalworking, and by extension craftsmanship in general, the equivalent, though their names share no etymology, to Greek Hephaestus, Egyptian Ptah and the Roman Vulcan. Sethlans is one of the indigenous Etruscan gods. In Etruscan arts Sethlans may be identified by his tools, the hammer and tongs of the blacksmith, and by the pileus or conical cap he wears.

His association with order and technical skill made him essential to rituals involving material production, such as weapon or tool creation, reflecting the Etruscan reverence for divine precision and manual labor.

The Phrygian cap (/ˈfrɪdʒ(iː)ən/ FRIJ-(ee)-ən), also known as Thracian cap and liberty cap, is a soft conical cap with the apex bent over, associated in antiquity with several peoples in Eastern Europe, Anatolia, and Asia. The Phrygian cap was worn by Thracians, Dacians, Persians, Medes, Scythians, Trojans, and Phrygians after whom it is named. The oldest known depiction of the Phrygian cap is from Persepolis in Iran.

Although Phrygian caps did not originally function as liberty caps, they came to signify freedom and the pursuit of liberty first in the American Revolution and then in the French Revolution, particularly as a symbol of Jacobinism (in which context it has been also called a Jacobin cap). The original cap of liberty was the Roman pileus, the felt cap of emancipated slaves of ancient Rome, which was an attribute of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty. In the 16th century, the Roman iconography of liberty was revived in emblem books and numismatic handbooks where the figure of Libertas is usually depicted with a pileus. The most extensive use of headgear as a modern symbol of freedom in the first two centuries after the revival of Roman iconography was made in the Netherlands, where it became popular headdress. In the 18th century, the traditional liberty cap was widely used in English prints, and from 1789 also in French prints; by the early 1790s, it was regularly used in the Phrygian form.

A liberty pole is a wooden pole, or sometimes spear or lance, surmounted by a "cap of liberty", mostly of the Phrygian cap. The symbol originated in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of the Roman dictator Julius Caesar by a group of Rome's Senators in 44 BCE. Immediately after Caesar was killed the assassins, or Liberatores as they called themselves, went through the streets with their bloody weapons held up, one carrying a pileus (a kind of skullcap that identified a freed slave, not in fact a Phrygian cap) carried on the tip of a spear. This symbolized that the Roman people had been freed from the rule of Caesar, which the assassins claimed had become a tyranny because it overstepped the authority of the Senate and thus betrayed the Republic.

The liberty pole was not thereafter part of the normal Roman depiction of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty, who is very often shown holding out a pileus, and carrying a pole or rod. Both refer to the ceremony granting freeman status to a slave, where the subject was touched with the rod, and given the hat. But the hat raised on the end of the pole was shown as an attribute held by Libertas on some coins of the emperor Antoninus Pius, which was enough, with the literary references, to bring it to the attention of Renaissance antiquarians. The pileus itself was shown between two daggers, with the inscription "Ides of March", on some very famous coins made by the assassins of Julius Caesar in the civil war following the assassination.

In antiquity, the term desultor (Latin; "one who leaps down") or in Greek apobates (ἀποβάτης) and metabates (μεταβάτης) (both meaning "one who gets/leaps off") has been applied to individuals skilled at leaping from one horse or chariot to another.

As early as the Homeric times, we find the description of a man, who keeps four horses abreast at full gallop, and leaps from one to another, amidst a crowd of admiring spectators. Eustathius on Homer's Iliad, Lib. IV, assures us that riders might have up to six horses all abreast. In the games of the Roman circus, this sport was also very popular. The Roman desultor generally rode only two horses at the same time, sitting on them without a saddle, and vaulting upon either of them at his pleasure. He wore a hat or cap made of felt. The taste for these exercises was carried to so great an extent, that young men of the highest rank not only drove bigae and quadrigae in the circus, but exhibited these feats of horsemanship.