Purple Colour of the Ancients. 2517 



woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, or, as she would have been 

 called in Rome, purpuraria (Ch. 16, v. 14). The finding and collect- 

 ing of the various mollusks which were employed in producing the 

 purples of antiquity, constituted, in like manner, the means of sub- 

 sistence to a particular class of the community. These were called 

 Conchytce, or shell-fishes ; and sometimes CouchylileguU, or collectors 

 of shell-fish. Thus, in the comic poet Plantus, who lived about 180 

 years before the Christian era, we meet with the exclamation, " Sal- 

 vete, fures maritimi, Conchyta?, atque hamiotse : " all hail, ye thieves 

 of the sea, ye fishers of shells, and ye who make use of the hook, 

 (Rud. 2, 2, 5) ; and, in the Codex of Theodosius and Valentinian, we 

 find a declaration regarding those " qui patre Conchylilegulo geniti 

 probabuntur : " who shall be proven to have been born of a father who 

 was a gatherer of shell-fish (lib. 11, tit. 7). It was sometimes at- 

 tempted, by means of sumptuary laws, to repress the extravagant pas- 

 sion for the wearing of purple which prevailed among the inhabitants 

 of Rome. Of the great Julius Caesar, we are informed by Suetonius, 

 " Lecticarum usum, item conchyliatae vestis, et margaritarum, nisi cer- 

 tis personis, perque certos dies, ademit : " he interdicted the use of 

 sedan chairs, and also of a garment dyed in purple, and of pearls, un- 

 less to particular individuals and during particular days (Jul. Ca?s. 

 ch. 43). 



On a review of the whole, the conclusion to which we would be 

 disposed to come is this. Among the ancients the word purpura was 

 a generic term, as the corresponding word purple is among ourselves ; 

 and it included, as purple does at the present moment, a great variety 

 of shades of colour. It embraced all those, without exception, which 

 may be discovered — by the unassisted and unpractised eye — as pro- 

 duced by the intermixture, in varying proportion, of the two primitive 

 colours, red and blue ; and in this respect, we, in modern times, go 

 along with them : but, in addition to these now mentioned, the an- 

 cients gave the appellation of purple to various colours of which we 

 never speak by that name. Of these, for example, may be enume- 

 rated, in the language of Mr. Syme, " scarlet, vermilion, arterial blood 

 red, carmine, lake, crimson, &c." (Nomenclature of Colours, pp. 42, 

 43). And among them were some of those shades which, under the 

 name of purple, were most highly and most generally esteemed by the 

 nations of antiquity. 



In modern times, the discovery in America of the cochineal insect 

 {Coccus Cacti) has superseded the use of molluscous animals in the 

 process of dyeing. By means of this insect it is believed that we are 

 vti 2 u 



