# Roman Emperors
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [April 30, 2001, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843 "2001-04-30T13:36:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@don\_willard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_willard)
#### Post date: [April 30, 2001, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843/1 "2001-04-30T13:36:52Z")
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).
---
### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [April 30, 2001, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843/2 "2001-04-30T14:41:17Z")
“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…
…
---
### Author:  [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)
#### Post date: [April 30, 2001, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843/3 "2001-04-30T19:19:22Z")
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.”
---
### Author:  [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)
#### Post date: [April 30, 2001, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843/4 "2001-04-30T19:21:05Z")
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_](http://www.bartleby.com/61/), [crimson](http://www.bartleby.com/61/90/C0749000.html) is “a deep to vivid purplish red to vivid red”; [scarlet](http://www.bartleby.com/61/61/S0126100.html) is “a strong to vivid red or reddish orange”; [purple](http://www.bartleby.com/61/3/P0670300.html) is “any of a group of colors with a hue between that of violet and red”; and [violet](http://www.bartleby.com/61/3/V0110300.html) 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](http://www.bartleby.com/61/7/T0450700.html) is “a reddish dyestuff obtained from the bodies of certain mollusks of the genus Murex and highly prized in ancient times”; the [_Britannica_](http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=108949&hook=276290#276290.hook) 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”](http://www.britannica.com/eb/art?id=16187&type=A).
---
### Author:  [@bibliophage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bibliophage)
#### Post date: [April 30, 2001, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843/5 "2001-04-30T19:37:28Z")
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.
---
### Author:  [@bibliophage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bibliophage)
#### Post date: [April 30, 2001, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843/6 "2001-04-30T19:45:01Z")
I knew I should have previewed. What **MEBuckner** said.
---
### Author:  [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2001, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843/7 "2001-05-01T01:35:40Z")
Something from a discussion on dyes in the Bujold mail-list seems apropos:
> [@](#):
>
> _This was from Scott Padget about a month ago_
> The color that the Romans called “purple” did in fact come from the snail. However, that color is actually a deep reddish color with blue/purple overtones–essentially what we call “scarlet” (the original meaning of the word survives in the term “imperial purple”, which is actually a rich, deep red). The word “purple” has survived, but the color so named has mutated over the course of centuries.
>
> You see, as the snails became more and more rare during the medieval era, and the price of the dye went ever higher, enterprising merchants began adulterating the pure dye with a much cheaper but similar (and somwhat bluer) colorant in order to keep prices under control while maintaining or even increasing profits. At first, only a small amount of the inferior dye was used, and the effect on the final color of the cloth was either unnoticeable, or if the dyer was very skilled or lucky it actually made the color a bit richer. But as decades and centuries went by, more and more of the inferior blue-purple was used and ever-less of the true red-purple, until by imperceptible stages the word purple came to mean the bluish-grape color that we think of today.
>
> So the snail _was_ the source of purple dye. It’s just that nowadays that’s not the color we think of when we say “purple”. Today we call that color “scarlet” (at least in English–Your Language May Vary).
---
### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2001, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843/8 "2001-05-01T03:22:18Z")
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.
---
### Author:  [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2001, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-emperors/63843/9 "2001-05-01T03:33:08Z")
[Here](http://www.curtin.edu.au/curtin/dept/physio/podiatry/sump.html#art) is a discussion of sumptuary laws and Roman footwear from a page on the history of footwear.