Today we say the rich are born with silver spoons in their mouths. In the ancient world, they said the wealthy were born to the purple. This phrase alludes to the royal robes dyed with a precious shade of deep purple originally created by the Phoenicians in Tyre.
Tyrian purple was a hue worn by royals and conquerors including Alexander the Great. Romans loved it too, and their bright white senatorial togas were bordered with a purple band. Tyrian purple was also a status symbol. It may have even accounted for the assassination of Julius Caesar who wore the royal purple so often that his colleagues feared he intended to make himself King.
The true color cannot be accurately identified now; the best we can do is reconstruct it based on the surviving description of the ancients, but we do know that redder shades of purple were not as sought after. It was the darkest, richest purple that they wanted, and this may have been achieved by dipping the fabric twice in two slightly different shades, one redder, one bluer.
Whatever the method, the purple dye itself was so expensive that it was worth its weight in silver. The reason it was so costly is because the color improved with age. And also it was outrageously pricey because of the process used to make it.
The source of the dye was the murex brandaris, which is a name for a spiny sea snail. While it’s possible to capture one of these little gastropods and poke it until it excretes a defensive mucus used to make the precious purple, milking murex snails would’ve required a legion of slaves. Instead, millions of murex were pulled out of the ocean and ground up–you’d need a thousand to make just one gram of dye.
The exact was described by Pliny and involved vats of rotting shellfish. The smell was so gaggingly bad that dye factories couldn’t be built near urban areas. We can identify the isolated sites today by virtue of the heaps of shells that remain.
The heroine of my debut novel is Cleopatra Selene, daughter of the more famous Cleopatra VII of Egypt. Together with her husband King Juba II, Selene built dye works on islands off the coast of Mauretania. Perhaps unable to replicate the exact shade of purple invented by the Tyrians, they called their own Gaetulian purple after one of the native Berber tribes. Gaetulian purple was prized almost as much as the Tyrian variety and was probably responsible for funding many of Juba and Selene’s pet projects and architectural initiatives.