medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Thursday, May 19, 2011, at 10:49 pm, Nancy Spies wrote:
> Ah, but the question would be "Was raw silk known in the western
> Mediterranean at this time?" The Romans were importing silk by the
> time of the Vulgate, I believe, if not soon after, but it would have
> been in a finished state, i.e. woven or spun thread.
The Vulgate is late fourth-century. Romans were importing silk by the earlier first century, when the standard Latin adjective for 'Chinese' (_sericus_) is first recorded in its meaning 'silken' (Horace, _Epod._ 8. 15).
But from the third quarter of the first century (Pliny, _N. H._ 11. 76) onward Latin writers also referred to the silk moth by the noun _bombyx_ and to silk by the adjective _bombycinus_ (lit., 'of the silk moth'). Since both of these are loan words into Latin from Greek, basic facts of moth-based silk production will have been already known in the Greek-speaking world. That in turn suggests caution in accepting as recording an actual "first" the story of the introduction of sericulture into the Roman Empire under Justinian.
Returning to _byssus_, it first appears in surviving ancient Latin in the third quarter of the first century in its adjectival form _byssinus_ ('of _byssus_') in the sense of 'made from flax' (Pliny, _N. H._ 19. 20; the reference is to a luxury good for the manufacture of women's clothing). In its noun form _byssus_ it first appears in Latin in the later second century in Apuleius' _Metamorphoses_, where (11. 3) the goddess to whom the narrator Lucius prays appears to him in a dream vision dressed in a multicolored garment _bysso tenui pertexta, nunc albo candore lucida, nunc croceo flore lutea, nunc roseo rubore flammida et, quae longe longeque etiam meum confutabat optutum, palla nigerrima splendescens atro nitore_ ('of finest linen..., somewhere white and shining, somewhere yellow like the crocus flower, somewhere rosy red, somewhere flaming'; tr. Adlington as rev. by Gaselee for the Loeb).
Best,
John Dillon
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