The color purple--literally

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/qi/7744089/QI-Quite-Interesting-facts-about-the-colour-purple.html

Purple legend

Purple, the name and the colour, comes from a dye made from the mucus glands of a tropical sea snail, the murex (porphyra in Greek, purpura in Latin). This discovery is attributed to the Phoenician god Heracles, the guardian deity of the city of Tyre. One day his dog bit into a murex shell and its mouth immediately turned purple. His companion, the beautiful nymph Tyrus, declared she would sleep with the god only if he dyed her a garment in the same shade. Heracles obliged and the famous Tyrian purple dye was born.


Purple land

The dye, and the cloth made from it, was so famous that the Greeks called the land of Tyre and Sidon (equivalent to modern Lebanon) Phoinike, "the land of the purple". It required 250,000 shellfish to produce one ounce of Tyrian purple dye, making it very slow and costly to produce. The preferred method was to collect vast piles of shellfish and to allow them to decompose in the sun (classical authors attest to the stench). Production and export of the dye began around 1,200BC and fuelled the Phoenician expansion across the Mediterranean. By the third century BC, Tyrian purple was worth more than gold: a pound of it cost three times the yearly wage of a Roman baker.


Purple royal

Although the Greeks were the original customers, it was the Romans who became purple fanatics. They liked a dark shade, achieved by using dyes from two species of murex, one a dark indigo. Pliny the Elder described it as the "colour of clotted blood" and wrote that "it brightens every garment, and shares with gold the glory of the triumph". Triumphant generals wore robes of purple and gold while senators and consuls wore bands of purple at the edges of their togas. In imperial Rome, the use of purple was even more highly regulated: by the fourth century AD, only the emperor was allowed to wear the best purple. The colour's exclusivity and connection with power is why royal robes and the vestments of bishops have traditionally been purple.


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