Lipsius, In His Notes On Tacitius, Says, In The Reign Of Julius
Csesar.
In the beginning of the reign of Tiberius, a law was made, that no
man should dishonor himself by wearing a silken garment.
We have already
stated the opinion entertained by Pliny respecting the native country of
the silk worm; this author condemns in forcible, though affected language,
the thirst of gain, which explored the remotest parts of the earth for the
purpose of exposing to the public eye naked draperies and transparent
matrons. In his time, slight silks, flowered, seem to have been introduced
into religious ceremonies, as he describes crowns, in honour of the
deities, of various colours, and highly perfumed, made of silk. The next
author who mentions silk is Pausanias; he says, the thread from which the
Seres form their web is not from any kind of bark, but is obtained in a
different way; they have in their country a spinning insect, which the
Greeks call seer. He supposes that the insect lived five years, and fed on
green haulm: by the last particular, it is not improbable he meant the
leaves of the mulberry tree. For 200 years after the age of Pliny, the use
of silk was confined to the female sex, till the richer citizens, both of
the capital and the provinces, followed the example of Heliogabalus, the
first man, who, according to Lampridius, wore _holosericum_ that is, a
garment which was all of silk. From this expression, however, it is
evident, that previous to this period the male inhabitants of Rome had been
in the habit of wearing garments made of silk mixed with linen or woollen.
Hitherto there is no intimation in ancient authors of the price of silk at
Rome; in the time of Aurelian, however, that is towards the end of the
third century, we learn the high price at which it was rated, in an
indirect manner. For when the wife of that Emperor begged of him to permit
her to have but one single garment of purple silk; he refused it, saying,
that one pound of silk sold at Rome for 12 ounces, or its weight of gold.
This agrees with what is laid down in the Rhodian maritime laws, as they
appear in the eleventh book of the Digests, according to which unmixed silk
goods paid a salvage, if they were saved without being damaged by the sea
water, of ten per cent., as being equal in value to gold.
In about 100 years after the reign of Aurelian, however, the importation of
silk into Rome must have increased very greatly; for Ammianus Marcellinus,
who flourished A.D. 380, expressly states that silk, which had formerly
been confined to the great and rich, was, in his time, within the purchase
of the common people. Constantinople was founded about forty years before
he wrote; and it naturally found its way there in greater abundance than it
had done, when Rome was the capital of the empire.
From this time, till the middle of the sixth century, we have no particular
information respecting the silk trade of the Roman empire. At this period,
during the reign of Justinian, silk had become an article of very general
and indispensible use: but the Persians had occupied by land and sea the
monopoly of this article, so that the inhabitants of Tyre and Berytus, who
had all along manufactured it for the Roman market, were no longer able to
procure a sufficient supply, even at an extravagant price. Besides, when
the manufactured goods were brought within the Roman territories, they were
subject to a duty of ten per cent. Justinian, under these circumstances,
very impolitically ordered that silk should be sold at the rate of eight
pieces of gold for the pound, or about 3_l_. 4s. The consequence was
such as might have been expected: silk goods were no longer imported; and
to add to the injustice and the evil, Theodora, the emperor's wife, seized
all the silk, and fined the merchants very heavily. It was therefore
necessary, that Justinian should have recourse to other measures to obtain
silk goods; instead, however, of restoring the trade of Egypt, which at
this period had fallen into utter decay, and sending vessels directly from
the Red Sea to the Indian markets, where the raw material might have been
procured, he had recourse to Arabia and Abyssinia. According to Suidas, he
wished the former to import the silk in a raw state, intending to
manufacture it in his own dominions. But the king of Abyssinia declined the
offer; as the vicinity of the Persians to the Indian markets for silk
enabled them to purchase it at a cheaper rate than the Abyssinians could
procure it. The same obstacle prevented the Arabians from complying with
the request of Justinian.
The wealthy and luxurious Romans, therefore, must have been deprived of
this elegant material for their dresses, had not their wishes been
gratified by an unexpected event. Two Persian monks travelled to Serindi,
where they had lived long enough to become acquainted with the various
processes for spinning and manufacturing silk. When they returned, they
communicated their information to Justinian; and were induced, by his
promises, to undertake the transportation of the eggs of the silk-worm,
from China to Constantinople. Accordingly, they went back to Serindi, and
brought away a quantity of the eggs in a hollow cane, and conveyed them
safely to Constantinople. They superintended and directed the hatching of
the eggs, by the heat of a dunghill: the worms were fed on mulberry leaves:
a sufficient number of butterflies were saved to keep up the stock; and to
add to the benefits already conferred, the Persian monks taught the Romans
the whole of the manufacture. From Constantinople, the silk-worms were
conveyed to Greece, Sicily, and Italy. In the succeeding reign, the Romans
had improved so much in the management of the silk-worms, and in the
manufacture of silk, that the Serindi ambassadors, on their arrival in
Constantinople, acknowledged that the Romans were not inferior to the
natives of China, in either of these respects.
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