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Plautus and the Color of the Sailor
#1
This will be a rather long and trivial post (my apologies!), but it's something that's been stuck on my mind for the past few weeks.

A passage from Plautus' Miles Gloriosus describes the color of the sailor:
Quote:causeam habeas ferrugineam, et scutulam ob oculos laneam,
palliolum habeas ferrugineum (nam is colos thalassicust) (4.4.43)
The translation by Henry Thomas Riley available on Perseus renders this as:
Quote:Have on a broad-brimmed hat of iron-grey [ferrugineam], a woollen shade before your eyes; have on an iron-grey [ferrugineum] cloak (for that is the seaman's colour) (4.4.43)
Raffaele D'Amato's Arms and Armour of the Imperial Roman Soldier seems to agree with the "iron-grey" translation (p.59), as does Graham Sumner's Roman Military Dress, though he also suggests a blue-grey (p.120) (both are excellent books, by the way). However, another translation suggests "dusky," which is certainly more vague, but they also add that thalassicust "means 'suitable to a seaman'... in general appearance rather than simply in color" (Hammond et al., p.184).

The article "What Color is 'ferrugineus' by Robert J. Edgeworth addresses all of this but is, unfortunately, no longer hosted by JSTOR (though you can still see the first page), and I'll have to settle with a summary by C. P. Biggam in her book Blue In Old English:
Quote:Edgeworth declares, ‘Among Latin color terms, few have presented as many difficulties as ferrugineus and its noun form, ferrugo. He shows how these two words appear to denote blue, purple/violet, black, green, bright and/or dark, in various Latin texts, and, in addition, have been translated as ‘brown’, ‘grey’, and ‘rust-colored’ by modern editors. After a study of context and the dates of the texts involved, however, Edgeworth suggest that the Classical Latin meaning was red + (sometimes) dark, and that, by the late 4th century, the meaning had shifted slight to dark + (sometimes) red. (p.202)
Biggam then adds:
Quote:Lat ferrum means ‘iron’, and ferrugo means ‘iron-rust’, ‘colour of rust’, while ferruginous is the adjective from ferrugo. Today, rust is generally thought of as being red-brown, but such a colour is rarely used in definitions of ferrugineus. The OLD defines ferrugineus as ‘having a dark purplish colour, somber-coloured’, and ferrugo as ‘the term for shades of colour, apparently ranging from a reddish-purple to near-black’. It should be remembered that, while red-brown is a reasonable description of the colour of rust dust, active rust in situ on an iron object appears very dark, and the dictionary definitions quoted in the previous sentence are, therefore, appropriate. The Romans clearly envisaged rust as being in situ. This emphasis on rust in situ leads to a slightly different conclusion from Edgeworth’s, since it seems clear that, for most writers of Latin, ferrugo and ferrugineus were still semantically linked to their origins in concept of active rust, thus producing colour features which could be broadly classified as dark red/purple, or else be understood as meaning dark, regardless of hue. (p.202-203)
Is it possible, then, that the "seaman's color" is actually some dark shade of red or grey? Or perhaps Plautus was simply referring to a color that was "appropriate" for the sailor rather than the actual color of their clothing. In any case, the blue-grey suggested by Sumner is in my opinion more aesthetically pleasing.

All the best.
God bless.
Jeff Chu
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#2
Iron rust, and modern steel rust are not the same color. Modern steel is more orange-brown, but iron is a darker shade, at least from what I've seen.
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)

Saepe veritas est dura.
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