King of Tyre (five hundred years before the Christian era); others fix it in that of Minos, who reigned 939 years earlier or, 1439 B. C. The honor of the invention of dyeing purple, is however, generally awarded to the Tyrian Hercules, who presented his discovery to the king of Phœnicia; and the latter was so jealous of the beauties of this new color, that he forbade the use of it to all his subjects, reserving it for the garments of royalty alone. Some authors relate the story differently: Hercules' dog having stained his mouth with a shell, which he had broken on the seashore, Tysus, a nymph of whom Hercules was enamored, was so charmed with the beauty of the color, that she declared she would see her lover no more until he had brought garments dyed of the same. Hercules, in order to gratify his mistress, collected a great number of the shells, and succeeded in staining a robe of the color she had demanded. "Colored dresses," says Pliny[1], "were known in the time of Homer (900 B. C.), from which the robes of triumph were borrowed." Purple habits are mentioned among the presents made to Gideon, by the Israelites, from the spoils of the kings of Midan. Ovid, in his description of the contest in weaving between Minerva and Arachne, dwells not only on the beauty of the figures which the rivals wove, but also mentions the delicacy of shading by which the various colors were made to harmonize together:
Then both their mantles button'd to their breast,
Their skilful fingers ply with willing haste,
And work with pleasure, while they cheer the eye
With glowing purple of the Tyrian dye:
Or justly intermixing shades with light,
Their colorings insensibly unite
As when a shower, transpierced with sunny rays,
Its mighty arch along the heaven displays;
From whence a thousand different colors rise
Whose fine transition cheats the clearest eyes;
So like the intermingled shading seems
And only differs in the last extremes.
Their threads of gold both artfully dispose,
And, as each part in just proportion rose,
Some antic fable in their work disclose.—Metam. vi.
- ↑ Plin. viii. 48.
