Color: A Natural History of the Palette (52 page)

A seductive sofa scene

It is strange today to picture how ambitious civil servants and soldier officers in Ancient Rome must have sighed for the forbidden pleasure of wearing robes or hoisting sails that were one particular shade of reddish blue. But at some points in the history of these stone-paved streets of Baalbek that I was walking along—and indeed in every town in the Roman and Byzantine empires—had I been an ordinary person wearing clothes dyed with Tyrian purple I would have been killed. And at other points in the town’s history I would have been admired: I was wearing purple—I
must
be someone important. Or at least (since they were so expensive that even the third-century Emperor Aurelian once famously told his wife they couldn’t afford for her to buy a purple dress) someone very rich.

The various rules about this color over the centuries are bizarre and fairly confusing. In some reigns (Nero’s was one of them, but the fifth-century Christian emperors Valentian, Theodosius and Arcadius were even more vehement) almost nobody could wear mollusk-dyed purple, on pain of execution. Sometimes (as in the time of Septimus Severus and Aurelian in the third century) women could wear it, but only very special men like generals could join them. In other reigns—and Diocletian in the fourth century was particularly enthusiastic—everybody had to wear as much purple as possible, with the money going straight into the imperial coffers. When any new ruler appeared on the scene, powerful people must have looked to their wardrobes and wondered what they would be allowed to wear during the following season.

The Byzantine emperors continued the Roman tradition of exclusivity,
¹¹
although the purple dye works were gradually moved north toward Rhodes and Thebes. One of the most extraordinary series of mosaics that survived the seventh and eighth centuries, when the Byzantine Christians destroyed much of their art, is in the San Vitale church in Ravenna in Italy. It shows the Emperor Justinian’s wife Theodora, surrounded by attendants, covered in jewels, and wearing a deep, almost crimson, shade of purple. The Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople apparently used to write his formal signatures in this color
¹²
(he now uses ordinary black ink) while some of the most sumptuous books of the sixth and seventh centuries were written on calf vellum that had been dyed purple. The National Library in Vienna owns one of these books, and one of the most remarkable pages in it shows the story of Joseph, nearly naked and being seduced by a very insistent Potipher’s wife. The writing above the painting was once silver but has now tarnished to black, while the background to this sexy scene is a soft crimson, as if it had been stained with blackberries.
¹³

Purple is not the only color in history to have been bound by strict rules—in England there was a particularly rigorous ruling introduced by King Richard I in 1197 called the Assize of Cloth, effectively confining lower classes to common gray clothing; in China, during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), there was a shade of yellow that could be worn only by emperors; by contrast (an optical as well as a political contrast) after the 1949 Maoist revolution all Chinese, whatever their rank, had to wear clothes dyed blue— I remember a Tibetan nun telling me that when she was a child growing up in Tibet nobody but monks and nuns was allowed to wear orange or red. But purple is certainly the color that has been most legislated about, over the longest time. We don’t have any true equivalent today—Perkin’s moment of curiosity in the lab ensured that today we can dye our clothes virtually any garish or subtle color we want, and only the fashion gurus dictate what colors we are permitted to go out in. Perhaps the only place this kind of color coding works today is in a rigid structure like an army or a school, where small variations in uniform still signal hierarchy.

Many classical commentators wrote about this phenomenon— Pliny is one of the best sources. But he was not very impressed.
¹⁴
“This is the purple for which the Roman fasces and axes clear a way,” he wrote. “It illuminates every garment, and shares with gold the glory of the triumph. For these reasons we must pardon the mad desire for purple, but why the high prices for . . . a dye with an offensive smell and a hue which is dull and greenish, like an angry sea?”

Like Pliny, I found it hard to really appreciate the appeal of this purple, I realized; nor did I understand how it could be extracted from mollusks. The national mourning was over, and it was now time to go to the town of Tyre, to try to find out how it was made, and what it looked like.

TYRE

There were only two hotels in Tyre, my guidebook told me. One, it claimed, was nasty, the other expensive. But as I drove around the town, lost in the dark, I spotted a third. It was called Hotel Murex— after the Latin name for the species of shellfish,
Murex brandaris
and Murex trunculus, that I was looking for.
¹⁵
I have never quite figured out why I find murex such an ugly word. Perhaps it sounds too much like the kind of name a toilet-cleaner manufacturer would invent, along the lines of “Murex: We make sure your bacteria don’t breed.” But I didn’t want to let my etymological prejudices get in the way of my quest, so I parked the car and checked in.

It was music night at the Murex. An Arab band was making the restaurant jump, and men danced with men, women with women, in a raucously joyful wall-thumping party that lasted through to the early morning. The hotel had opened just a few weeks before, and was owned by a rich émigré Lebanese family. I talked to their son, who was in his mid-twenties. He said he lived in Africa, traded diamonds and dreamed of marriage with his fourteen-year-old girlfriend. “When she is ready, of course.” His parents had chosen the hotel name because they felt it was a celebration of the past wealth of Tyre, and of a time when the whole Mediterranean world had heard of their city.

In the lobby there was a display case of marine artifacts, and the centerpiece was a large murex shell. It was about the shape and size of a triple-scoop ice cream—although with a thinner cone which curled—and it was vanilla colored. According to Pliny, murex catch their prey by piercing them with their spines—and the many spikes were certainly fairly sharp, although I did wonder whether they were quite sharp enough. I once saw a large collection of shells from the murex family—some of them (
Murex palmarosae
, for example) were as evil looking as a lionfish, others were like strange delicate skeletons. Most of them have some kind of potential for purple (which comes from a gland near the anal opening: Pliny was quite far wrong when he suggested nicely that it was a mouth), but the best are
Murex brandaris
, which live in mud, and
Murex trunculus
, which can be found on the rocky bottom of the sea floor.

This one was
trunculus
, and it had been found by one of several muscular men in singlets who seemed to hang around the reception desk. I asked him where he found it, and he said he could show me. He had found it as a shell a few kilometers away, but we hatched a plan to go out in his brother’s fishing boat and search for live murex, which, he said, were rare but possible to find. I had an image of dropping cockles tied to pieces of string into the sea to “attract the purples, which go for them with outstretched tongues,” just as Pliny described. But the next morning, when we were booked to go out on the boat, the waves were too rough for an expedition.

In 1860, four years after Perkin’s purple had been invented, Napoleon III sent a team of archaeologists to Tyre, to try to locate the island fortress and see what remained of the Phoenicians. “One can call Tyre a city of ruins, built out of ruins,”
¹⁶
pronounced Ernest Renan, who was in charge of the excavations, when he saw what was left. Today there are now even more ruins—the most recent war has left its own bullet-marked devastation. Where the old ruins happen to be near the new ones it gives a strange impression that history has concertinaed: two thousand years of war and peace blended together in the universality of crumbled walls.

I found it hard to imagine, as I strolled through modern streets on reclaimed land toward the busy and smelly Phoenician port, what Tyre must have been like when the French team arrived. It was desolate—even twenty years later a visiting English traveller wrote that “The streets are most wretched . . . while windowless mud-floored hovels nestle among huge fragments of polished granite and porphyry columns prostrate in rubbish,” and was able to conclude that the prophecy by Ezekiel in around the sixth century B.C. (“I will make you a bare rock; you shall be a place for the spreading of nets; you shall never be rebuilt”—Ezekiel 26, 4) had apparently come true. Although God must have been merciful, since when I visited the place had certainly been rebuilt—with plenty of concrete.

When Renan arrived he pronounced the job almost impossible. The town’s curse had meant it had been attacked and besieged many times; archaeological scavengers had taken what they could of the Greco-Roman marble and disturbed the major sites, and after digging five trenches and uncovering almost nothing it seemed to the team that there was little left. Then suddenly their luck seemed to change, and they discovered stone sarcophaguses from 500 B.C. and a Byzantine church with its mosaic floor miraculously preserved. But to Renan’s disappointment he did not find remains from the era he was really looking for, and Roman Tyre would be allowed to sleep a little longer—until the early twentieth century, when an entire Roman town was discovered to the southeast. It included a triumphal archway (which no doubt was first opened with a ceremony in which the important officials wore plenty of purple) as well as a necropolis full of carved tombs, a hippodrome worthy of any epic chariot race, and, most important for my own quest, murex dye vats. The latter might be rather humble looking, but they are what made this town famous. Indeed, they are probably what paid for everything else.

I tried to get there on my second full day in Tyre, when once again the storm waves made it too dangerous to go fishing for shellfish. But I don’t think many tourists go to the archaeological site to find the antique purple dye baths, and access is limited. The guards at the ruined city kept shooing me away from this overgrown corner of the site—why didn’t I want to stroll under the monumental archway or examine the grand gravestones like everyone else?—and I had to resort to devious methods to get a good view. These mostly involved pretending to look dreamily at the sea and then dashing across fallen marble columns when the two men were looking the other way.

The most telling thing about the dye vats is their location. They are very much on the edge of the old town, on the side where the wind would blow the smell away. With Tyrian purple—as I had learned in my quests for indigo and madder and many other organic dyes—the beauty of the color is in the effect rather than the process. Purple was a very smelly business: there is an extraordinarily wide difference between the sublime nature of this luxury product and the urine-and-lime nature of its manufacture. In the vats it stank (although it was only many months later that I would really appreciate quite how much it stank), and it was hardly surprising then that the good citizens of the cities that benefited from the business were adamant that they wanted the factories on the most windward edges of their backyard.

The murex baths I saw were about the size of a dining table for six, and deep enough for a man to stand submerged to his waist (or a Phoenician man to stand submerged to his chest) in them— though if it had been me, only the abuses of slavery or a very large salary would have managed to persuade me to do it. They were lined with white stone, which looked almost like a classical version of concrete—crumbling around the edges. Far behind them were tall columns that the archaeologists had raised again to celebrate the extraordinary past of this city, but the murex baths were among the fallen columns. Even though they had been carefully excavated there was a sense—with their weeds and deliberate isolation from the “nice” parts of town—that they had been left once again to be forgotten.

When people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries started to try to reconstruct the dyeing process of Tyrian purple they first looked to Pliny, who, after all, had visited the city in the first century A.D. so probably knew what he was talking about. The trouble is, the process was secret (and terribly complicated), and neither Pliny nor the others got the details quite right. He wrote about cutting out the vein of the murex, steeping it in water to which the equivalent of a kilo of salt to every 100 liters had been added, then after three days heating it, and after nine days straining it and leaving the wool to soak.
¹⁷
The only problem was, it didn’t quite work. In brief,
¹⁸
the problem is that as soon as the shell is broken and the colorless liquid exposed to the atmosphere, it turns into the purple pigment—which is not soluble in water. In fact, despite its reputation, like indigo (to which it is chemically very closely related), shellfish purple is a pigment and not a dye. So, I wanted to know, how did the ancients fix it onto their clothes?

What I was more concerned with knowing immediately, however, was how to fix it onto my fishing line, and on my last morning in Tyre I met my fisherman friend again at the reception desk. Can we go out in the boat today? I wondered. He called his brother on his mobile, and sounded as if he were negotiating. “No,” he said eventually. “It is still too rough out there. My brother isn’t risking going fishing today.”

So I went to the beach instead. I wasn’t resting from my quest— this was a very special beach, the place where the mystery of purple technology was first revealed. Today the beach at Tyre is a perfect bay of white sand, fringed with beach huts and bars. But once, according to local mythology, this was the place where Heracles—whom the Phoenicians worshiped as Melkart and the Romans knew better as Hercules—went for a lonely and historical walk with his dog.