The textile industry was the second-highest taxed industry in Ancient Rome (after agriculture), abundant archaeological evidence had been uncovered for specialized industrial facilities like fullers, linen-boilers, and dyers in both Greece and Rome, and we have literary evidence for an extensive supply chain for importation and manufacture of dyes and fabrics and an intricate system of pricing and purchasing – so it comes as no surprise that textiles carried deep social, religious, and literary importance for these ancient peoples.

The clothing an Ancient Greek or Roman wore could be a strong indication of social status or role. For example, purple clothing symbolized wealth and nobility, cited as the garb of the legendary first kings of Rome, and subsequently used as a badge of the senatorial classes and then the imperial family. Yellow clothing was held as feminine, and white and gray clothing was worn by mourners. On a legal level, clothing and other textiles were one of the only sources of wealth for a woman, and were carried with her as dowry into a marriage. The race for manufacturers to create new hues and shades of fabric, and the race for wealthy families to purchase them, was cited by Pliny the Elder as one of the indications of the greed and moral decline of Roman society.

In a religious context, textiles could play important roles in both Greece and Rome. Religious figures can often be identified in artwork by their clothing – for example, the man theorized to be the high priest on the frieze of the Athenian Parthenon wears an unbelted, long tunic called a chiton, a common style of dress for priestly figures in many other contexts as well. There is also literary evidence for dress codes restricting the garb of visitors to religious sites, often involving rules about cleanliness and modesty. Textiles could be dedicated to deities, cult statues were often clothed in real fabric (for example, Athena in her peplos at the Panathenaia), and weaving implements found at religious sanctuaries indicate that textile production may have played a role in religious rites, as well.

In some of the most well-known literary works from the Greco-Roman world, textiles play a major role as symbols of feminine virtue/the "ideal woman" and as a means for woman to exert agency in their stories. In Book 6 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the beautiful but impious Arachne—denying that her weaving skill is a gift from Minerva—is challenged to a battle on the loom by the goddess herself. Though Arachne produces a tapestry depicting the god's abuse of human beings that outshines Minerva's, her fear of the goddess' wrath causes her to end her own life; Minerva, remorseful, turns the maiden into a spider so that she may forever practice her craft. Because of this myth, the remains of fulleries (laundry shops) in Pompeii and Ostia bear the symbol of Minerva, the owl, to avoid Arachne's mistake and pay their dues to the goddess. Additionally, in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis historia, the invention of the spindle is attributed to Closter, the son of Arachne.

Perhaps the most famous example of a weaving woman comes from Homer's Odyssey, in which the faithful Penelope avoids the unwanted advances of dozens of suitors by weaving a shroud for her father-in-law by day and unraveling it strand-by-strand by night. Antinoos, a suitor, describes her thusly:

"...Athena has endowed her above other women with knowledge of splendid handiwork and noble thoughts, and wiles, such as we have never yet heard that any even of the women of old knew, of those who long ago were fair-tressed Achaean women" (Odyssey, 2.115-120)

Cornered by the increasingly disruptive and disrespectful behaviour of the suitors and struggling to maintain her household and raise her son in her husband Odyssey's absence, Penelope effectively exerts control over her situation and demonstrates her virtue through retreat to her domestic activities and her manipulation of her traditionally feminine duties to buy herself and her son time to assess their situation.

The ancient textile-making process started first and foremost with a lot of “baaa”-ing. Individual sheep owners and trade shepherds alike would undergo the process of plucking or shearing the wool from their sheep either for storage in the home for weaving on a rainy day (Columella, De re rustica, Book XII) or for immediate spinning and weaving for domestic and trade needs. Because of the ease of raising a herd, the relatively large yield from a single animal, and the fibres’ naturally versatile properties (like being water-proof and easily dyeable) wool was the cheapest, easiest, and most popular material for making textiles in the ancient world.

The process for turning raw wool into cloth required effectively three steps: spinning, weaving, and a variety of post-processing tasks like bleaching, dyeing, or laundering. In the Greek world, what we refer to today as “homespun”—in which the wool would have been gathered and spun by the mistress of the household and female enslaved individuals— would have been the predominant method for spinning. Spinning would have been completed with two main tools up until the Middle Ages: the distaff and the spindle. The distaff is a rod around which the raw wool is wrapped and the spindle is a stick with a weighted top-shape at the end. Using the ancient drop-spindle technique, a spinner lets the spindle fall with gravity, holds the distaff in the left hand, and uses their right hand to twist the raw wool between the thumb and forefinger to create thread, which is then wrapped around the spindle. As cities expanded rapidly and the demand for cloth increased, spinning became an industry, completed by women and enslaved individuals of all genders in designated facilities. Because of its versalite shaggines, the wool industry became highly specialised, profitable, and competitive; Pompeii, for example, was known for its fine cloaks, the product of a specific spinning and weaving technique that rendered the finished cloth waterproof.

Weaving similarly had its origins in the domestic sphere but became similarly industrialised over time. The same basic warp-weighted loom, where the warp or vertical threads of a work were tied to stone weights to be held taut, was used for centuries and is the loom Vitruvius refers to in Book 10 of his De Architectura:

“Let us, for an instant, reflect on an invention, necessarily of an early period, that of clothing; wherein, by the organic arrangement of the loom, the connexion of the warp to the woof not only defends our bodies by the covering it affords, but is likewise an ornament to them.” (Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book X.I.5).

One or more people in a home or workshop would have stood with the loom upright or propped against the wall for hours, passing a shuttle or rod tied with different colours of yarn back and forth between two layers of tied warp threads. This part of the process is where fancier threads like imported silks or cottons, expensive purple threads, or beads and adornments would have been added to a textile, assuming that it was not to be redyed, to create unique garments to display status, wealth, or familial association. From start to finish and homespun to , the process of creating a textile required highly expert, often matrilineally-passed knowledge and skills which exemplify the interdependence of the rural atmosphere in which wool was produced and the urban sphere in which it was processed and consumed. Though by the first-century C.E. (despite an attempted revival by Augustus as part of his return to traditional Roman values) most people across the ancient Roman world had abandoned homespun and were buying their clothes from dedicated shops and getting them laundered at fulleries, the tradition of domestic work on textiles continued in the form of repair and reuse as the textiles— like their owners and wearers—were altered, shifted, and changed organically over time.

Most of our evidence for dyeing processes in Ancient Greece and Rome come from the abundant archaeological remains of workshops associated with the textile industry. We have few in depth literary sources for Ancient Greek or Roman dyeing processes. Most mentions of dyestuffs come from trade-based or economical sources, and mentions of the processes of dyeing are incidental, often added to spruce up a literary work with some other, larger purpose. For example, Aristotle, in his Historia Animalium, writes about how purple dye can be produced from murex shells while covering the topic of fish, and covers bits of dyeing processes in his discussion of boiling in the Meteorologica and colors in On Colors. Theophrastus covers the dyeing powers of some plants in his Enquiry Into Plants, which is primarily focused on herbal medicinal properties, and Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder, and Egyptian papyri during the Roman period all right briefly on dyeing with many references back to early Greek writers. With all these many incidental literary mentions, it is possible to develop a body of evidence for textile dyeing based on ancient writing as well as archaeological remains.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans used primarily plant matter for dye materials, but occasionally used animal matter as well. Animal matter was generally more expensive, as exemplified by the purple dye produced by murex shells and related shellfish species. The purple liquid was extracted from a large vein in the murex bodies, each of which produced approximately 1 milligram of dye, while price listings for murex dye reference amounts in the hundreds of pounds – the number of these animals killed and processed for purple textiles to be produced was immense. The Greeks also used an insect living in the kermes-oak, a tree ubiquitous in Greece, to produce a bright red dye, and imported the laccaic acid from a scale insect native to India and Pakistan during the Hellenistic Period to produce an orangish-yellow color.

One of the most commonly used plant dyes was saffron, a yellow-orange dye produced from the stigmas of a crocus flower, likely cultivated for the purpose of dyeing by the Greeks. 4,000 crocuses were needed to produce one ounce of dye – another example of the immense material expense of the dyeing industry. A purplish-red color could be produced from certain species of lichen, and a deep blue from the indigo plant – these two colors, and others like them, could be woven together to create a cheaper imitation of the murex shell purple. A lighter red and a lighter blue could be produced respectively from the root of a madder plant and woad, a yellow-flowered cabbage plant common in many areas even today.

Pliny the Elder gives us one of the most extensive descriptions of a dyeing process, detailing the production and use of murex dye. From his description and from other incidental depictions, we can make conjectures about certain common features of processes. Dyeing appears to have occurred less often in household contexts than weaving, localized in workshops and more industrial setups. Fabric was usually pre-treated before being dyed, often by bleaching with urine. Most processes included hours- or even days-long periods of boiling, during which dyes could be augmented with additives, such as alum, an aluminum salt compound, to modify the final color, which could be further altered by the blending of threads of different colors as mentioned above.

In conclusion, the time, energy, resources, money, and expertise that would go into the dyeing of enough fabric to clothe a noble family, produce an epic tapestry, decorate cult statues and their religious caretakers, appease the gods, and more, would have been immense. The work the Ancient Greeks and Romans put towards developing what we know to be the chemical and biological science of dyeing is truly impressive even thousands of years later.

Boehm, Isabelle and Giovanni Fanfani, Mary Harlow, and Marie Louise Nosch.“18. Lexical Εxpressions of the Texture of Fabrics in Homeric Poetry” and “19. Textiles and Clothing Imagery in Greek and Latin Literature: Structuring, Ordering, and Dissembling.” In Fanfani, Giovanni, Mary Harlow, and Marie Louise Nosch. Spinning Fates and Songs of the Loom: The Use of Textiles, Clothing and Cloth Production As Metaphor, Symbol and Narrative Device in Greek and Latin Literature. Oxbow Books Limited (Oxford: 2016): 313-337.

This anthology of essays explores the connections between practical and theoretical conceptions of textile work/art and Greek and Latin poetry and historical writing from Catullus to Theocritus’ Idyll 15 in no particular chronological or regional order. While many of the chapters deal with metapoetics (ekphrastic poetry describing garments and tapestries as metaphor for the poet’s craft) the more general concluding chapters of the book, 18 and 19, are particularly interesting for their coverage of the vocabulary used to describe textiles, which is useful for reconstructing the values associated and placed on them. Chapter 18 deals with formulaic descriptions of largely garments and shrouds in the Homeric canon, which reveals a stark focus on colour and radiance (“shining,” “white,” and “dark,” being some of the most commonly used words), though author Boehm argues that the meaning of these colours shifts depending on the wearer and context (gods in shining garments vs. mortals, for example). These themes reflect on the social values assigned to garments in the actual Greco-Roman world, where stratified colour schemes for dyed wools were fungible in meaning depending on the wearer. At times, however, Boehm lists quotes from the Iliad which mention shrouds or the beauty of garments without fully explaining the significance of these sections. Chapter 19 serves as a summary of the preceding chapters, where the editors of the volume affirm the “centrality of textiles and clothing in the material life” of Greco-Roman people (324), their use as carriers of potent symbolic meaning and social capital, and the long history of clothing imagery as a form of metapoetics. One of the notable absences in their discussion of the analogy of creating song/hymn to “weaving” (332) is a section on how this distorts the perspective and audience perception of the male poet in terms of the clear delineation of textile work as feminine/female-coded (ie. does this work feminise/demasculinise them?).

Jenkins, I. D. “THE AMBIGUITY OF GREEK TEXTILES.” Arethusa 18, no. 2 (1985): 109–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44578149.

Jenkins' article provides an essential overview of the practical, literary, and political significance of the domestic stages of wool processing, from plucking to weaving, specifically within the context of establishing its status as a gender-affirming activity. Jenkins’ connects literary depictions from Greek histories and literature (Xenophon, Aristophnes, Homer, and Euripides) to argue for a an internal/external separation of domestic activities including wool gathering (assigned to males) and the processing, curation, and presentation of raw materials into usable, aesthetic goods within the home and to internally nourish the home (female), then brought back outside and made into capital for sale and trade (again, male). These ideas reflected social customs of the Greco-Roman world, particularly Athens, in which women considered high-class were restricted to internal spaces and in which weaving was used as a measure of feminine virtue or masculine corruption/demasculinisation. Jenkins perhaps veers off of the course of connecting textile production with conception of femininity when he discusses colour in relation to the “trick garments” of Clytemnestra and Medea, arguing that the purple colour chosen for the garments they make for their targets are purple as prefigurations of the blood they will shed rather than appropriate for their respective stations (Agamemnon and Glauce, royals). His sole use of vase-paintings as a source for artistic depictions is also limiting, though with a dearth of available depictions of weaving in a medium other than sculpture, their inclusion ultimately serves to at least provide a visual reference for the extensive mythological details mentioned.

Lee, Mireille M. “4. Garments.” In Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece. Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge: 2015): 80-112.

Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece addresses the alteration of bodies—sexually, socially, and aesthetically—by textiles and body modifications like tattoos and piercings, which Lee argues were more common than popularly believed. Chapter 4 traces the creation of Greek garments from materials, like extant fibres from Lefkandi grave sites (wool) and the popularity and introduction of imported silk to the mainland, through the weaving and embellishment process to the care of garments post-production, where she asserts that laundering was less common (evidenced by a lack of distinct industrial fulleries) in the Greek world than Roman. Forging excellent connections between extant objects like miniature terra cotta baby sculptures to vase art, Lee meanders through the variety of clothing types/shapes for both women and men up to around the 2nd century B.C.E., where she at times fails to adequately explain the potential practical motivations behind the particular draping or cut of garments, like with different chiton styles. Ultimately, the chapter serves as a valuable resources for tracing the material culture of the textile trade from the 6th to 2nd centuries B.C.E. in Greece from the inception of a garment to its worn and repaired lived experience.

Bogensperger, Ines, and Helga Rösel-Mautendorfer. "Dyeing in texts and textiles: words expressing ancient technology." Egyptian Textiles and their Production:‘Word’and ‘Object’(Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Periods). Zea Books (2020): 91-105.

In this article, Bogensperger and Rösel-Mautendorfer provide an introduction to and overview of the terminology and general economic structure of the broad textile industries of Ancient Greece and Rome. They explore the range of fabric choices available in ancient times, and discuss the ease with which various fabrics may have been dyed with different dye materials, citing a plethora of secondary texts, including a multitude of papyrological sources listing dyestuffs and pricing based on gauges of quality. They also outline the archaeological and literary evidence we have for textile industry workers' guilds, positions of importance for textile-focused buildings in cities, and a product selection system for customers based on weaving cartoons and dyed swatches of fabric. Bogensperger and Rösel-Mautendorfer also conducted an experimental archaeological study, attempting to replicate the circumstances under which dyeing in these societies may have occurred and conducting as close an estimation of a typical dyeing process as they could manage with rather limited literary evidence. This style of experimental archaeology serves as the inspiration for our own experiment with different dilutions of dye, temperatures, and boiling times on different fabrics exhibited in the video above.

Pliny the Elder. “BOOK 8.73–THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF WOOL, AND THEIR COLOURS” and “BOOK 9.62—HOW WOOLS ARE DYED WITH THE JUICES OF THE PURPLE.” The Natural History. Ed. John Bostock, London. Taylor and Francis (Fleet Street: 1855).

The larger purpose of this encyclopedia-scale work by Pliny the Elder is to summarize previous writers' musings on all sectors of the natural world and synthesize this vast knowledge into one volume. As in many other works with another, higher purpose, textiles, dyestuffs, and methods of dyeing are mentioned incidentally, but with enough detail and authority to lend us information. In Book 8, Pliny's discussion of land animals, he summarizes the sorts of wool sheared from sheep in regions across the Roman Empire, and make statements on the quality of each variation. In Book 9, his exploration of fish brings us one of our most detailed descriptions of a dyeing process -- specifically the methods used to dye wool purple with the liquid from the veins of the murex, a specific species of shellfish (other shellfish species could also be used to produce this dye). The commonalities between this depiction of dyeing processes and wool quality and other less detailed mentions by other authors are one tool with which we can make conjectures about industry activities at large.

Additional Sources

Faxon, Harriet. “A Model of an Ancient Greek Loom.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27, no. 3 (1932): 70–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/3255142.

Moeller, Walter O. “Chapter Two: The Production of Woolen Cloth in the Roman World of the First Century A.D.” In The Wool Trade of Ancient Pompeii. Brill Archive, 1976: 2-8.

Monaghan, Mark D. "Coats of Many Colours: Dyeing and Dyeworks in Classical and Hellenistic Greece." Order No. U144548, University of Leicester (Leiceter, 2001). http://ezproxy.oberlin.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/coats-many-colours-dyeing-dyeworks-classical/docview/301589626/se-2.

by Kiran Williams & Sadie Pasco-Pranger

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