The other day in discussion group, someone brought up the whole issue of how only the Roman Emperor was allowed to wear the “crimson slippers,” as he put it. I had always heard (as had some others in the group) that the phrase was “purple shoes.” 1) What actual color were the footwear?
2) Is crimson a dark red, a tomato red, a purplish or bluish red, or what, as opposed, say to scarlet? 3) What color is purple for that matter? I think of it as the color of the the original main kind of African violet or even the violet violet flower with a little more blue in it. Others say that purple is that wine color or a mixture of red and blue with more red. 4) What is the correct translation of the Greek or Latin phrase that is translated as crimson slippers or purple shoes, and what was that actual phrase? 5) Et enfin, what else did the emperor get to wear that the other courtiers or other people couldn’t wear? 6) Wait! One more thing, I read tsomewhere that when visitors were allowed in to see the Emperor Diocletian, the room was filled with incense smoke and the throne went up on a hydralic lift in order to impress everyone. Is this true? And did the titled officials actually stand on the throne dais steps, for instance the basileus, the panhypersebastos, the plain sebastos, the caesar (I looked up some of these titles on the internet and had no luck in finding out about these exotic names).
“Poor Emperor Julian, lost in Mesopotamia, but you’ve always had the power to go back home!”
“What do you mean, Glinda?”
“Just close your eyes, click your heels together three times, and keep repeating “There’s no place like Rome”!”
"There’s no place like Rome…
There’s no place like Rome…
There’s no place like Rome…
…
Very clever, Cal.
As for the OP, “Tyrian purple,” extracted from the Murex shellfish, used for royalty, was a dark purplish red.
This is just MHO, but I would say the color of African violets is “violet.”
Crikey, Don. I dunno, possibly multiple threads would have been better here.
Questions 2 and 3: From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, crimson is “a deep to vivid purplish red to vivid red”; scarlet is “a strong to vivid red or reddish orange”; purple is “any of a group of colors with a hue between that of violet and red”; and violet is “the hue of the short-wave end of the visible spectrum, evoked in the human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approximately 380 to 420 nanometers; any of a group of colors, reddish-blue in hue, that may vary in lightness and saturation”. Tyrian purple is “a reddish dyestuff obtained from the bodies of certain mollusks of the genus Murex and highly prized in ancient times”; the Britannica notes that “although the name Purpura [the name of the mollusk from which the dye is produced] gave rise to the word purple, the colour was actually a crimson”. So, the ancient royal or imperial color was probably somewhat redder than what I personally would normally think of as “purple”.
I don’t know about imperial dyed footwear, but purple was associated with royalty long before the Roman Empire. Phoenecian, Greek, and Roman rulers wore robes dyed purple, and there were often laws against non-royals wearing the color. The very expensive dye was derived from a type of shellfish called porphura, and the color purple is named after the animal. The dye was called Tyrian Purple because of its association with the Phoenecian city of Tyre.
Purple and violet aren’t the same thing. Violet is a pure color, found at the more energetic end of the visible spectrum. The various purple hues are formed mixtures of light from the red end and the blue-indigo-violet end of the spectrum. Tyrian purple is a crimson dye (crimson is reddish-purple, a purple that is closer to red than blue). Scarlet is a reddish-orange color, closer to red than to orange.
I knew I should have previewed. What MEBuckner said.
Something from a discussion on dyes in the Bujold mail-list seems apropos:
A commoner’s toga was all white, while a man of means (such as a senator) would have a red stripe all around the border. Only the emperor would have the entire garment dyed. At least, that’s the way we were taught back in high school Latin class.
I’m not sure if there were laws enforcing the coloration, or if it was just a combination of custom and the prohibitive expense of the dye.
Here is a discussion of sumptuary laws and Roman footwear from a page on the history of footwear.