Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/237

 through more than ten lines, of all the persons concerned in the manufacture or sale of garments.

Solearii astant, astant molochinarii.

All the lexicographers and commentators explain Molochinarius to be one who dyes cloth of the color of the mallow. Lanarius was a woollen-draper; Coactiliarius, a dealer in felts, a hatter; Lintearius a linen-draper; and Sericarius a silk-mercer. According to the same analogy, Molochinarius would mean a dealer in Molochina, i. e. ''in all kinds of cloth made from mallows''.

The class of writers, which will now be produced as affording testimony respecting the use of the mallow for weaving, are Greek authors, and who instead of the common Greek terms employ the Attic term [Greek: Amorgos] and its derivatives.

[Greek: Amorgos] has been explained by some of the lexicographers to be a kind of flax (See Julius Pollux, L. vii. § 74.). Perhaps by this explanation nothing more was intended than that it was a plant, the fibres of which were used to spin and weave into cloth. It is highly probable that it was the Malva Silvestris or Common Mallow, and that it was called [Greek: Amorgos].

According to the Attic lexicons of Pausanias (apud Eustath. l. c.) and of Mœris, was an Attic term. We now find traces of it in seven Attic writers, four or five of whom wrote comedy. These are Aristophanes, Cratinus, Antiphanes, Eupolis, Clearchus, Æschines, and Plato.

I. We shall take first Aristophanes, whose comedy called Lysistrata is frequently quoted by Pausanias and Cratinus, and being still extant throws considerable light upon the subject. It was represented in the year 412. B. C. Lysistrata says (l. 150),

[Greek: Kan tois chitônioisi tois amorginois Gymnai parioimen],

"And if we should present ourselves naked in shifts of amorgos;" showing that these shifts were transparent. Accordingly Mœris says, that the [Greek: amorginon] was [Greek: lepton hyphasma], "a thin web." Bisetus in his Greek commentary on this play, after quoting the explanations of Stephanus Byzantinus, Suidas, Eustathius,