Born to the Purple

A regal colour from a humble origin

‘Hercules and the Discovery of the Secret of Purple’ by Peter Paul Rubens, oil sketch (1636–1637). Public domain. Theodoor van Thulden created a more detailed painting based on Rubens’ work.

I’ve just completed an A to Z of sea snails on BlueSky. Each day, I picked a species, family or non-taxonomic group to discuss. I’m going to work up some of those short threads into stories here, because Medium offers an opportunity to explore the topics in more detail.

This story came from H is for Hexaplex.

Emperor Caligula murdered Ptolemy, King of Mauretania because he was outraged by the admiration given to Ptolemy’s purple robes. The Roman historian Suetonius recorded the event in De Vita Caesarum.

After inviting Ptolemy…to come from his kingdom and receiving him with honour, he suddenly had him executed for no other reason than that when giving a gladiatorial show, he noticed that Ptolemy on entering the theatre attracted general attention by the splendour of his purple cloak.

Purple was a royal colour. Ptolemy was a king. Only one of those two facts was important to Caligula.

It began with the Minoans and then the Phoenicians, who gathered sea snails and crushed the shells to extract a purple dye, intense and colour-fast even in the bright Mediterranean sun. The dye was expensive; it took thousands of shells to make the smallest amount. But despite that — or perhaps because of it — the colour was in demand.