Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/34

 beauty got their several names from those peoples, and Medean, Lydian, and Persian textiles came to be everywhere sought for with eagerness.

Writing of the wars carried on in Asia and India by Alexander the Great, almost four centuries before the birth of Christ, Quintus Curtius often speaks about the purple and gold garments worn by the Persians and more eastern Asiatics. Among the many thousands of those who came forth from Damascus to the Greek general, Parmenio, many were so clad: "Vestes auro et purpura insignes induunt." All over India the same fashion was followed in dress. When an Indian king, with his two grown-up sons, came to Alexander, all three were so arrayed: "Vestis erat auro purpuraque distincta, &c." Princes and the high nobility, all over the East, are by Quintus Curtius called, "purpurati." Not only garments but hangings were made of the same costly fabric. When Alexander wished to afford some ambassadors a splendid reception, the golden couches upon which they lay to eat their meat were screened all about with cloths of gold and purple: "Centum aurei lecti modicis intervallis positi erant: lectis circumdederat (rex Alexander) ælæa purpura auroque fulgentia, &c." But these Indian guests themselves were not less gorgeously arrayed in their own national costume, as they came wearing linen (perhaps cotton) garments resplendent with gold and purple: "Lineæ vestes intexto auro purpuraque distinctæ, &c."

The dress worn by Darius, as he went forth to do battle, is thus described by the same historian: The waist part of the royal purple tunic was wove in white, and upon his mantle of cloth of gold were figured two golden hawks as if pecking at one another with their beaks: "Purpureæ tunicæ medium album intextum erat: pallam auro distinctam aurei accipitres, velut rostris inter se concurrerent, adornabant."

From the east this love for cloth of gold reached the southern end of Italy, called Magna Græcia, and thence soon got to Rome; where, even under its early kings and much later under its emperors, garments made of it were worn. Pliny, speaking of this rich textile, says:—Gold may be spun or woven like wool, without any wool being mixed with it. We are informed by Verrius, that Tarquinius Priscus rode in triumph in a tunic of gold; and we have seen Agrippina, the wife of the Emperor Claudius, when he exhibited the spectacle of a naval combat, sitting by him, covered with a robe made entirely of woven gold without any other