Hippolyte, sic est: Thesei uultus amoillos priores quos tulit quondam puer,cum prima puras barba signaret genas. . .quis tum ille fulsit! presserant uittae comamet ora flauus tenera tinguebat pudor.Yes, Hippolytus: Theseus’ face I love, those looks he had long ago as a boy, when his first beard signalled his pure cheeks . . . Then how he shone! Headbands encircled his hair, and yellow shame (flauus pudor) tinged his tender face.
Seneca, Phaedra 646–9, 651–2
Sixty years ago, Eric Laughton drew attention to a problem that occasionally arose in the translation of the Latin colour term flauus.2 This is a term that dictionaries conventionally describe as a loose equivalent of our category ‘yellow’.3 Laughton however argued that ‘yellow’ was an altogether unsatisfactory translation for flauus pudor and flaua ora in the contexts cited above, but instead they referred exclusively and unambiguously to the ‘blond’
candida uestis erat, praecincti flore capilli,flaua uerecundus tinxerat ora rubor.Shining white was your clothing, your locks were bound round with flowers, a modest blush (rubor) had tinged your yellow cheeks (flaua ora).
Ovid, Heroides 4.71–21
In his 1950 article, Laughton posited that flauus should be understood as ‘blond’ because it (along with the Greek category xanthos) was a classic epithet of heroines and goddesses in Greek and Roman verse, as well as freshly bearded adolescent males.10 This argument that it was the literary context that made flauus ‘blond’ was a diversion from his original, bolder, line that one should position this category linguistically and conceptually as a primary designator of blond hair. That original proposal had big implications: ‘blond’ should come first in our dictionaries – with ‘yellow’ as a secondary category whenever flauus was used to refer to something that was not hair, such as gold, corn or sand. Laughton had put his finger on an important cultural pattern. With this key semiotic rearrangement (rather than a mere literary conjecture), the Roman reader would have no doubt to what flauus pudor, flaua ora and flaua puella referred.
However, one would be wrong to claim that the simple rule flauus = blond would resolve all the difficulties surrounding this category. Although it seems certain that the Thesaurus incorrectly proposed ‘skin colour’ as one of the semiotic registers for flauus, there is an extensive and diverse list of physical contexts which employ flauus, where ‘blond’ does not appear to work. The Thesaurus finds two main areas for application of flauus: first,
The two semantic categories in which flauus appears to pick up glaukos are poorly represented, and complicated. The first category, in which flauus describes disturbed water, is surmised from two difficult fragments of early Latin verse, one depicting ships sweeping over the ‘yellow marble’ (flauum marmor) of the sea, and the other describing a ritual washing in ‘yellow water’ (flaua lympha).11 Both fragments are preserved only because they presented a visual puzzle for Aulus Gellius’ imaginative discussion of colour terms at Noctes Atticae 2.26 (see below pp. 229–33). The second area where flauus = glaukos – the underside of olive trees – is likewise an individual poetic peculiarity, also debated in the Gellius passage: Virgil Aeneid 5.309 describes Aeneas’ promise of an olive wreath to the contest-winners – ‘their heads will be crowned by the yellow olive’ (flauaque caput nectentur oliua). Several interpretations have been proposed, including ‘pale green’, allusions to yellow pollen and the reflection of yellow sunlight; a more likely explanation is that Virgil was suggesting a metaphor where olive leaves could be made to resemble hair.12 The Thesaurus’ glaukos category, then, is too sparse and too problematic (even for ancient interpreters) to stand as an acceptable register of flauus.
The manifold instances where flauus represents the Greek categories xanthos/purros, on the other hand, cannot be so easily dismissed. Flaua harena (‘yellow sand’) was a fairly regular association in Latin verse,13 and Tiber (along with other rivers) earned the epithet flauus – although divine personification, with the characteristic blond hair of divinities, may be implied.14 Honey is often described as flauus.15 So too wax (but only in Ovid’s Metamorphoses).16 Corn and cornfields several times take this category – although one detects a poetic allusion to blond hair.17 Flauum aurum (‘yellow gold’) was a regular chromatic label: the beautified Aeneas resembles Parian marble set with flauum aurum and Martial could describe gold coins as flaua moneta, and gold dishes as flaua chrysendeta.18 Elsewhere, in a poem packed with material metaphor, he claims true electrum shines less than the ‘yellow metal’: minus flauo metallo, 8.50.5 – just as fine silver surpasses ‘snow-white ivory’, niueum ebur. Propertius could describe the unique stone chrysolithos as possessing a ‘yellow light’ (flauum lumen, 2.16.44), and Statius could imaginatively describe Numidian marble quarries as flaua metalla (Siluae 1.5.36).
The Thesaurus’ one-offs, then, point to the possibility of a more flexible use of flauus = ‘yellow’. Tibullus describes as flaua uincula the durable bonds of marriage (2.2.18); one commentator suggests this might allude to chains of gold, although he ends (as most commentators do) by connecting it to a far more general register
Flauus is by no means an isolated case. The adjectives uiridis and uirens (‘green’) most commonly described the healthy crops and shrubs of Roman agriculture and horticulture, or the rich verdure of the Italian countryside.23 Vitruvius, for example, discussing urban architectural design, advocates ‘green spaces’ (uiridia) because of the healthy sensation they bestow upon the viewer (5.9.5).24 Viridis, however, is one of those Latin colour terms which stands in our dictionaries somewhat awkwardly on the line between representing our colour ‘green’ and the quality ‘vigorous’. Most dictionaries aim to separate the two loosely: it seems incompatible with our idea of colour, for example, that Gellius could describe a strong and vigorous sound, such as the letter ‘H’, as uiridis.25 Columella talks about the green taste of olives, and others describe the oil of the freshest varieties as uiride.26 Pliny advises that seeds be sown under a ‘green sky’ (uiride caelum) – not literally ‘green’ of course, but clear and fresh and conducive to germination.27 Similarly, it hardly seems plausible that Virgil’s Euryalus, cut down in his ‘uiridis’ youth was in any real sense ‘green’, nor the cheeks of children in Statius, nor the flame which Horace pictures
Like flauus, however, uiridis could break beyond the semantic range of ‘verdant’ (and so, in a sense, become a ‘colour’). Outside verdure, uiridis was most commonly used to denote ‘green’ rocks, earths and minerals, particularly emeralds – presumably because
One final example: the category caeruleus, which evoked the appearance of deep sea or copious waters. One of Rome’s biggest aqueducts, a great Claudian technical feat which brought thousands of gallons of fresh water into the capital from across Italy, brought water to the fons Caerulea, a deep reservoir so called (Frontinus tells us) from its similitudo – to the sea.38 The Thesaurus, however, like other dictionaries, considers caeruleus to be derived from caelum, and sets ‘sky-blue’ as its first and primary meaning. Two early Latin verse fragments indeed appear to set this category in the