11-14-2013, 02:28 PM
Cheaper and what we would call today 'fake designer' purples were indeed very common. Think of all those trimmings on late Roman tunics. Many of the women in the earlier Egyptian portraits are wearing purple tunics and cloaks. Roman writers however often sneer at people for wearing these 'cheap' imitations. The purple dye trade was very lucrative with the very best coming from Tyre.
Wearing clothes dyed with the very expensive purple might get you into hot water on occasions but then it seems it depends on how insecure or mad the emperor might be at the time. Nero once had a woman in the audience at one of his recitals stripped because she was wearing a purple tunic. I guess if a man of importance had turned up wearing a purple tunic and cloak, Nero's reaction might have been very different.
When Julian heard that a man had been arrested for making himself imperial purple robes he dismissed the case and even sent him some purple shoes as a sign he was not threatened. At other times as Robert has mentioned a man was ruined because one of the guests at a party he had thrown had reported he could make purple robes like the emperors from all the purple edging on his tablecloths.
However in general I would think it was perhaps a more a case of whether you could even afford to wear pure purple clothes rather than not being allowed too.
In the example of your older tunic Robert I would have thought it would be more in keeping with later Roman clothes that the main tunic would have been reddish with the edging around the cuffs and the roundels being in purple.
Graham.
Wearing clothes dyed with the very expensive purple might get you into hot water on occasions but then it seems it depends on how insecure or mad the emperor might be at the time. Nero once had a woman in the audience at one of his recitals stripped because she was wearing a purple tunic. I guess if a man of importance had turned up wearing a purple tunic and cloak, Nero's reaction might have been very different.
When Julian heard that a man had been arrested for making himself imperial purple robes he dismissed the case and even sent him some purple shoes as a sign he was not threatened. At other times as Robert has mentioned a man was ruined because one of the guests at a party he had thrown had reported he could make purple robes like the emperors from all the purple edging on his tablecloths.
However in general I would think it was perhaps a more a case of whether you could even afford to wear pure purple clothes rather than not being allowed too.
In the example of your older tunic Robert I would have thought it would be more in keeping with later Roman clothes that the main tunic would have been reddish with the edging around the cuffs and the roundels being in purple.
Graham.
"Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream" Edgar Allan Poe.
"Every brush-stroke is torn from my body" The Rebel, Tony Hancock.
"..I sweated in that damn dirty armor....TWENTY YEARS!', Charlton Heston, The Warlord.
"Every brush-stroke is torn from my body" The Rebel, Tony Hancock.
"..I sweated in that damn dirty armor....TWENTY YEARS!', Charlton Heston, The Warlord.