In recent decades, the development of chemistry has helped to state that the belief supported since the Renaissance that the white colour of marble was the dominant colour of antiquity was not entirely right.^[1] It turned out that the ancient buildings and statues were in fact, in the vast majority of cases, covered by intense polychromies.^[2] In this situation, it seems justified to ask whether the passion for colour and the ancients’ sensitivity to a wide spectrum of colours can also be found in the pages of the literature that they left: this is the subject of interest of the authors in this study.

The topic of colours and their terminology was discussed by Aulus Gellius in his compilation called Noctes Atticae, written most probably in the second half of the 2nd Century AD. Gellius cites a conversation between the philosopher Favorinus of Arelate and the rhetor Cornelius Fronto, during which Favorinus notices that there are more colours existing than there are words to name them, and this deficiency is particularly visible in Latin.^[3] He claims that “the fire’s red is different, blood’s red is different, purple is different, […] and Latin does not differentiate these individual tones with separate and proper names but all of them calls with the one name of »red«.”^[4] In response, Fronto tries to convince his interlocutor that, in terms of colour naming, the Latin language is not as poor as it might appear at first glance, and to support his thesis he cites examples from Ennius, Vergil and Pacuvius, taking Greek names as a point of reference. Searching for the answer to the question asked in the introduction, it is worth looking at the oldest preserved Latin works, as well as texts that were more contemporary to Gellius, i.e. Latin literature created between the second half of the 3rd Century BC and the second half of the 2nd Century AD. For the clarity of the argument, our attention here will be focused on the selected colour only – which in this case is red, and on various contexts in which the ancient authors decided to use different terms for this colour.

In Latin, red was generally described as rubor. The interlocutors of Gellius from this term derive red-describing adjectives like ruber, rufus, russus and rubidus. The adjective ruber was used by the Romans almost interchangeably with the adjective rubens and both terms meant red or reddish.^[5] It was regarded as widely observed in various meteorological phenomena, as well as in the world of animals, plants and minerals. It was used, for example, for describing the colour of a mare’s hair, cock’s combs, the colouration of some bees and crayfish, as well as moss and the berries of wild dwarf myrtle.^[6] The adjective ruber described square stone blocks obtained from quarries located around Rome, as well as tuff from Campania.^[7] Some materials, such as bed covers, straps intended to tie papyrus rolls or crests of helmets were dyed red.^[8] Moreover, red or a reddish colour was also mentioned in contexts related to the sphere of sexuality and erotics.^[9] It is present in the descriptions of statues of the god of fertility and harvest – Priapus, and of the female face depicted by Apuleius in an erotic way (Ov. Fast. 1.415; Apul. Met. 3.19). Pliny describes gout with this adjective too, because the condition caused fever and consequently redness to the face of a person affected (Plin. HN 26.101).

Red with a ginger or even yellow-brownish hue was described by the Latin word rufus. We can read about flame-red hair mainly in comedy writers’ compositions of the Archaic period.^[10] According to the convention of the Greek new comedy and the later developed Roman palliata based on it, slaves were distinguished as having red hair because the ancients believed that clever, cunning, insidious people, prone to lying, usually have hair of this colour.^[11] In later periods, we can also find a mention of hair so ginger that it seemed to be reddish (Varro, Ling. 7.83). Some authors sometimes felt tempted to give a reason for the shade’s existence. Vitruvius believed, for example, that the red hair was a result of the influence of humid air and cold climate, and consequently was typical of people living in the North (Vitr. De arch. 6.1.3). Similarly, Martial, upholding this belief in some way, specifically pointed out ginger hair as common amongst the people of Gaul (Mart., Epigr. 14.129.1). Ancient authors used the adjective rufus also in descriptions of flora and fauna. Campan wheat, poppies growing in barley fields, as well as linden wood and algae, and the hair of the cattle grazing on the fields of Troy had a red-russet shade.^[12] The term rufus was also used in medical terminology. The author of the encyclopaedic tractate De medicina, Aulus Cornelius Celsus, explained that saliva mixed with blood gives this reddish colour.^[13] Medical Scribonius Largus in turn recommended boiling some medications until they become reddish (Scrib. Larg. Comp. 213).

Red in warm brown tones was described by the adjectives russus or russeus. These terms were used primarily for various types of materials.^[14] Lucretius mentions that curtains, spread out on theatres’ beams and masts were of this red-brown colour. They not only protected viewers from the sun, but also enhanced the perception of characters on stage (Lucr. RNat. 4.75). Varro reports that the crests of war helmets were of this shade too because of its high visibility from a distance.^[15] According to Pliny, the coachman of “the Reds”, i.e. one of the teams participating in horse races (Plin. HN 7.186), wore a jacket of that colour. The author of Satyricon, in turn, by using the word russeus describes the tunic of Trimalchio, in which he played football, passing the time before the feast, and Apuleius uses this adjective for a ribbon, with which the tunic of a servant – the charming Fotis (Petron. Sat. 27.1; Apul. Met. 2.7) – was being strapped. Red-brown was also particularly desirable for a paramedic cloth. Pliny explains that only with a cloth of this colour should anemone flowers be collected, and then removed from it to dry, then packed into it again and worn on the neck like an amulet. He advises gathering aphrodisiacs in rags of a similar colour and claims that a couple of bedbugs wrapped up in a red-brown cloth helps to fight off daytime fever (Plin. HN 21.166; 28.261; 29.64).

To describe the colour red, the ancient authors also used participles, which later turned into adjectives – rubicundus and rubidus. The word rubicundus was mainly used to describe: red, ruddy, heavily tanned. In the Roman comedy of the archaic period, we find the word rubicundus in the description of the face of an extremely unattractive person (Plaut. Pseud. 1219; Ter. Hec. 440). In a similar context, Ovid later uses it while drawing a picture of a peasant woman from Umbria offering it as a negative and daunting example for women who want to clothe themselves and behave properly (Ov. Ars am. 3.303). The adjective rubicundus, like the aforementioned ruber, appears in the description of the god Priapus, as well as in texts about meteorological phenomena^[16]. Moreover, it was used to describe some details of the world of plants and animals, like the colour of sandy soil suitable for cultivation, grain ready for harvest, ripening dogwood, and a colour of dull fur.^[17] The term rubicundus can also be found in medicine-linked vocabulary. With this term, Celsus characterized the redness of the skin in those areas where later pustules or small ulcers may form, and Scribonius Largus – the redness and swelling accompanying gout (Celsus, Med. 5.28.16; Scrib. Larg. Comp. 158). In turn, the adjective rubidus was supposed to emphasize the degree of saturation with red. With its semantic help, Plautus recalls the image of deliciously browned bread and the colour of a long unused, almost rusted bottle, and Suetonius paints the face of Vitellius flushed from constant drunkenness.^[18]

The sensitivity of the ancient Romans to different tones of red can be indicated by the adjectives, which are composed of the preposition sub, such as subrubicundus, subruber denoting a reddish or slightly red shade and subrufus – reddish-russet. We find this kind of addition mainly in medical, botanical and mineralogical vocabulary. Pliny reports that the herb similar to the wall germander (teucrium chamaedrys) has a slightly reddish (subrubicundus) stalk (Plin. HN 25.167). In this way, Celsus determines the colour of the blood stream coming out of the patient’s wounds or the colour of the throat irritated by inflammation. According to Celsus, the tip of the ulcer is marked by a reddish shade (subruber), just after the removal of pus, and urine of this colour is a sign of a disease.^[19] Vitruvius explains that cinnabar was extracted in the form of an iron-like ore, but redder in tone (subrufus) and covered with red dust, and after processing, became minia (Vitr. De arch. 7.8.1). According to Pliny’s report, among all irises the best quality have those in reddish-russet shades, despite the fact that they cause sneezing when rubbed. In his opinion, some of the Indian stones had a similar colour to those irises.^[20]

The main participant in the discussion about colours cited by Gellius also mentions among the shades of red the colour referred to by the adjective phoeniceus, which is usually understood as the equivalent of purple, because purple dye-products were first obtained by Phoenicians and the rich Phoenician cities – Tyr and Sidon – that were the main centres of their production.^[21] In Latin literature the adjective phoeniceus is found mainly in Pliny’s descriptions of plants and animals. According to Pliny, the male species of a plant called anagallis arvensis, commonly known as scarlet pimpernel, can be distinguished by its purple flower. In his opinion, the head of a tragopan, commonly known as a horned pheasant, has this colour (Plin. HN 25.144; 10.136). Lucretius in turn calls Phoenician purple using the form puniceus (Lucr. RNat. 2.830). This is how the later authors poetically described Aurora’s chariot or Aurora itself.^[22] The colour of the blood or the shade of skin that was bloody was also called in this way.^[23] They also used the attributive puniceus to denote a certain type of roses, crocuses, and some species of growing or already ripened berries.^[24]

However, the adjective purpureus was the most popular term for purple in Latin literature. It can be found in many descriptions concerning the world of nature. Purple was attributed to some species of plums, pears and ripening grapes. Therefore, wine was also described sometimes by this colour.^[25] Also certain types of flowers such as roses, violets and poppies were characterized as purple.^[26] Consequently, spring was poetically called in such a way too, due to the general colour impression given by flowers blooming at this time of year.^[27] The attributive purpureus also appears in the descriptions of the colour of the sea or sea water. According to ancient authors, the water took this shade of red because of the rising sun reflected in it, the blood spilled in it, or the high salinity of water.^[28]

Sometimes the adjective purpureus was used to describe the colour of blood and, consequently, bloody, and thus red or ruddy, cheeks.^[29] So when, e.g. at the time of death, the face was getting pale, in the poetic description the blushes were losing their purple tinge.^[30] For the same reason, the purple shade was associated with life. In Vergil’s text, the dying Retus in his last minute “spat out a purple soul” (purpuream vomit ille animam).”^[31] The radiance of youth or the amazing light, compared to Aurora, which was beaming from the faces of goddesses or gods was also poetically painted with words related to this colour.^[32] The Romans used the term purpureus to emphasize the almost divine look, or even the divine origin, of the people with purple lips. Catullus describes in this way the colour of a girl’s lips seen through the eyes of a boy who is in love with her, and Horace attributes this colour to the lips of Augustus (Catull. Carm. 45.12; Hor. Carm. 3.3.12).

Purple pigment was very expensive and, therefore, only the most influential and wealthy people could afford purple-dyed fabrics.^[33] For this reason, just like gold, it became a symbol of power in Rome.^[34] Purple clothes were worn by kings, senators, military leaders, dictators, emperors and probably also by the more empowered priests.^[35] Senators and their sons, before they came of age, had the so-called toga praetexta. Its characteristic feature was a purple stripe 2 to 3 inches wide (5 to 8 cm), initially located along the bottom rounded edge of the toga, and later alongside the edge of a pocket. Senators and Roman equites (equestrian order members) wore woollen or cotton tunics underneath their purple togas and these were decorated with purple stripes too. To distinguish two social classes, the equestrian tunics had two stripes running from shoulder to waist, while the senators’ tunics had one wide stripe which ran through the middle.^[36] According to Pliny, the sails of the Admiralty ship were also purple (Plin. HN 19.22). Purple was considered to have extraordinary properties. The king of Megara Nizus was said to have a purple lock of hair that guaranteed his own and the whole city’s safety.^[37]

Favorinus, in Gellius’s text, suggests that that the poverty of the Latin language in terms of colour terminology forces the need to borrow names from nouns to which one wants to refer and if – for example – someone wants to specifically emphasize the similarity of the colour to blood (sanguis), because of the lack of other options, he is constrained to call it ‘bloody’ – sanguineus. Indeed, this was a common practice among the Latin writers. With this adjective they described the drops of blood as bloody tears, eyes bloodshot from rage, faces full of blood from agitation, bloody hands and bodies, swords, spears and armour dripping with blood, as well as bloody streams flowing from wounds; and, finally, river water which became red from the blood spilled in it.^[38] The word sanguineus was used in both the exact and the figurative sense.^[39] Poets mention the bloody attributes of war-related deities, such as Bellona’s whip or the bloody trumpets that supported Mars.^[40] In addition, the attributive sanguineus can be seen in the descriptions of selected parts of some plants, not only well-known pigment plants. Vergil, for example, refers to this colour when mentioning elderberries (Verg. Ecl. 10, 27), and Pliny alludes to the root of the Anchusa officinalis, known as common bugloss or alkanet with which the wool gained a very deep shade of red (Plin. HN 22.48). This colour was also attributed to some unusual phenomena, such as bloody rain or comet tails, which the Romans called “crested” (crinitas) (Cic. Div. 2.60; Plin. HN 2.89).

In Latin literature we can also find definitions of certain shades of red (miniatus, coccineus, cerasinus, rubeus), which the speakers in Gellius’s work do not mention. A bright, vivid red of mineral origin, found in mines in a natural state was called a minium.^[41] Pliny uses the adjective miniatus to define a bright red collar around the neck of a green parrot from India, called “siptace” (Plin. HN 10.117). Writing to Titus Pomponius Atticus, Cicero expresses his worries hoping that Atticus would not critically mark too many places in the newly emerging Cicero’s work with his red raddle, i.e. a crayon with a pressed, cinnabar-coloured chalk, because he – that is to say Cicero himself – does not seem to be in the best writing form (Cic. Att. 15.14). Cicero also uses the attributive miniatus when comparing the colour of sauce, in which octopuses were served, to the cinnabar-coloured face of the Capitoline Jupiter.^[42] The adjective coccineus, in turn, is used by the author of Satyricon as the equivalent of a dark red shade when he is describing the colour of the mantle that the host of Trimalchio’s famous feast was wearing. With the same name, he describes the colour of the wool that filled the pillows in his home (Petron. Sat. 32.3; 38.5). According to Martial, this colour characterized the capes of competitors of one of the teams participating in chariot races.^[43] However, the term cerasinus as a cherry red, can also be found in the works of the author of Satyricon. Cerise was the colour of the tunic of Fortunata, Trimalchio’s wife, as well as their door attendant’s belt (Petron. Sat. 28.8; 67.4). Furthermore, the great colour sensitivity and a kind of sophistication of the ancients can be indicated by the Latin term rubeus (blackberry) present in the description of the colouration of horned cattle coats and the plumage of chickens.^[44]

Summarizing the whole of the observations presented above, it can be stated that Favorinus was not entirely right in accusing the ancient Romans of a lack of diversification in their colour terminology. In addition to the vocabulary mentioned by the participants of Gellius’s dialogue, pointing to various shades of red such as reddish (ruber vel rubens), russet (rufus), brownish (russus vel russeus), slightly red (rubidus vel rubicundus) or purple (poeniceus vel puniceus vel purpureus), they used names describing light red (subrubicundus), bright red (miniatus), dark red (coccineus), as well as reddish-russet (subruber), cherry (cerasinus) and blackberry (rubeus) tones. Even if the mentioned terms of different shades of red do not indicate the Romans’ creativity in the ‘new word-formation’ exercise – as Favorinus pointed out – their diversity remains nonetheless a testimony to the ancients’ remarkable sensitivity to colour and its various, sometimes complex, shades.

The variety of the red colour terms used by the ancient Romans becomes also a testimony to the colour richness of the reality perceived, but also created, by their several centuries’ long civilization effort. Even the occurrence of the word ruber can serve as an example, as it was the basic term for the colour red, making the natural world of fauna and flora colourful in Romans’ minds and, at the same time, enlivening their everyday utensils and military equipment in a coloristic way, not to mention the human emotional states determining that kind of body colour. A similar example is offered by the broad range of usage of the adjective purpureus, which we find in the description of the fruit orchard, some types of wine, as well as in details of the floristic world, the human face animated with emotions, the splendour emanating from the robes of senators or even of the sea’s colour, commonly perceived as blue, just as ships’ sails usually considered to be white.^[45]

If, in turn, the attention is turned rather towards the diachrony of the appearance of these red-related expressions, attested in literary testimonies of antiquity and the later ages, it would have to be sadly concluded that the fascinating ancient ‘redful’ reality was to a considerable extent transformed, under the influence of changes to mentality caused by the progressive dominance of Christian ideology, into a barren and colourless emptiness of ascetic, everyday life, now treated as the entrance hall to the posthumous life only. If we consider two representative, as can be assumed, writings of Tertullian^[46] or The City of God (De civitate Dei) by Saint Augustine, we find that the red colour so intensely present in the “pagan” reality of ancient Rome becomes almost exclusively a sign of shame in those new realities. It is represented mainly by the verb erubesco (blush with shame), only sometimes by the term ‘red’ as such, with not many exceptions from this meaning.^[47] For example, Tertullian writes about the red face of a daughter who felt shame because of “paternal madness”, and about the unknown Filomela, whose loss of virginity causes the same psychological and physiological reaction.^[48] That description, by analogy, brings to mind the phrase of Arnobius informing about the existence of the redness caused by some great wrongdoings.^[49] It is worth mentioning one situation depicted by Augustine, that becomes characteristic of the above statement: during some pagan ceremony, when a noble matron crowns the genitals of a man, her husband stands among the people watching this spectacle, sweaty and red on his face from the feeling of shame.^[50]

It is worth adding that the expansion of the colour red, which was a characteristic feature in the peak period of the Roman civilization development in classical antiquity, although it finds its decrease in the realities of the emerging Christian culture, was in fact preceded by an era when its presence was marked only to a negligible degree. To reach such observations, it would be sufficient to study the basic literary “testimonia” of the Roman’s archaic age, like the remains of the literary output of Cato the Elder or the quite large number of Plautus’s surviving comedies. In Cato’s works, the term red as such appears only once in relation to a moss that is characterized by this colour^[51], and indicates its presence several times by mentioning the type of soil, referred to as rubrica or terra rubricosa (Cat. De agricult. XXXIV, 2, 1; 2, 3, XXXV, 1, 4, CXV, 2, 2, CXXVIII, 1, 2). When it comes to Plautus, in his 15 preserved comedies – apart from the aforementioned terms describing red hair colour – red does not appear at all whereas in several plays it appears very rarely.^[52] Therefore, one can make a statement that more or less intense red, nearly absent in both later and earlier realities, became a hallmark of the culture of ancient Rome in the years in which it reaches its civilizational apogee, of the culture that still speaks to us due to its expressiveness and dynamics.

^* dr Marta Czapińska-Bambara (Uniwersytet Łódzki) – Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Lodz at the Department of Latin Studies and Linguistics. She received her mastersʼ degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Classics and defended her PhD thesis in Classical Philology. Her research focuses mainly on the Latin literature and the reception of selected political, rhetorical and philosophical concepts of ancient authors in Renaissance thought. She is the author of a monograph Èthos przywódcy politycznego w myśli starożytnej i renesansowej. Platon, Cyceron, Machiavelli, Guicciardini.

e-mail: marta.czapinska@uni.lodz.pl

^* dr hab. Zbigniew Danek prof. UŁ (Uniwersytet Łódzki) – Professor of Classics and, since 2003, the head of the Department of Latin Studies and Linguistics at the University of Lodz. He defended his PhD thesis on the Platonic dialogue Cratylus in 1987 and obtained his post-Doctoral degree in 2000 on the basis of a dissertation on the gnoseological problems of the Platonic dialogue Thaeetetus. His current research focuses mainly on the problems of epicurean anthropology, as well as on Platonic concepts concerning the gnoseological status of linguistic structures and the rational and metaphysical cognition of reality.

e-mail: zbigdan@uni.lodz.pl