Page:Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto volume 2 Haines 1920.djvu/281

 2. Then Fronto said to Favorinus:

"We do not go as far as to deny that the Greek language, in which you seem to be well-read, is more comprehensive and copious than our own: still in designating those colours which you have just mentioned, we are not so poorly off as you seem to suppose. For, in fact, those words which you lately mentioned, rufus and ruber, are not our only ones to denote the colour red; but we have others besides and more than the Greek ones mentioned by you. For fulvus and flavus and rubidus and phoeniceus and rutilus and luteus and spadix are designations of the colour red, either intensifying it, as if firing it, or blending it with green, or deepening it with black, or softly brightening it with greenish white.

3. "For phoeniceus, which you mentioned in its Greek form, is a word of our own, and rutilus, and spadix, which is synonymous with phoeniceus—a word that, though Greek by origin, is naturalized with us—signifies the richness and brilliance of red, such as it appears in the fruit of the palm-tree when not very much burnt by the sun; and hence come the words spadix and phoeniceus. For the Dorians call a branch with fruit broken off from the palm-tree a spadix.

4. "Fulvus, however, seems to be a blend of red and green, in which sometimes the one colour, sometimes the other, predominates: as a poet, the most careful in his choice of words, calls an eagle fulvus, and jasper and wolfskin caps and gold, and sand 265