Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/275

 He refers to the same fabric in VI, 20, where he speaks of "the Seres, so famous for the wool that is found in their forests. After steeping it in water, they comb off a soft down that adheres to the leaves; and then to the females of our part of the world they give the twofold task of unraveling their textures, and of weaving the threads afresh. So manifold is the labor, and so distant are the regions which are thus ransacked to supply a dress through which our ladies may in public display their charms." Compare Lucan, Pharsalia, X, 141, who describes Cleopatra, "her white breasts resplendent through the Sidonian fabric, which, wrought in close texture by the skill of the Seres, the needle of the workman of the Nile has separated, and has loosened the warp by stretching out the web."

Silk fabrics of this kind were much affected by men also during the reign of Augustus, but the fashion was considered effeminate, and early in the reign of Tiberius the Roman Senate enacted a law "that men should not defile themselves by wearing garments of silk." (Tacitus, Annals, II, 33.) The cost was enormously high; from an account of the Emperor Aurelian we learn that silk was worth its weight in gold, and that he neither used it himself nor allowed his wife to possess a garment of it, thereby setting an example against the luxurious tastes that were draining the empire of its resources.

Pliny includes it in his list of the "most valuable productions" (XXXVII, 67); "the most costly things that are gatheredd from trees are nard and Seric tissues."

Pliny (XXI, 8) speaks of other uses for silk: "Luxury arose at last to such a pitch that a chaplet was held in no esteem at all if it did not consist entirely of leaves sewn together with the needle. More recently again they have been imported from India, or from nations beyond the countries of India. But it is looked upon as the most refined of all, to present chaplets made of nard leaves, or else of silk of many colors steeped in unguents. Such is the pitch to which the luxuriousness of our women has at last arrived!"

Among both Greek and Roman writers there was some confusion between cotton and silk, both being called "tree wool;" and Fabricius, in his translation of the Periplus, omits silk altogether, considering raw material, yarn and cloth alike to be Turkestan cotton. But although these accounts err in some details, Pliny is sufficiently correct in his description of cotton. He distinguishes the wool-bearing trees of the Seres from those of the Indians (XIV, 4), and describes the cotton shrub, with its "fruit resembling a bearded nut, containing on the inside a silky down, which is spun into threads; the tissue made from which is superior to all others in whiteness and softness" (XIX, 2),