“The first, Apulia’s; next is Parma’s boast;
And the third fleece Altinum has engrossed.”
Martial, xiv. Ep. 155.
Martial also speaks of the matchless Tarentine togæ, a present from Parthenius:—
“With thee the lily and the privet pale
Compared, and Tibur’s whitest ivory fail;
The Spartan swan, the Paphian doves deplore
Their hue, and pearls on the Erythrean shore.”
Martial, viii. Ep. 28.
[159] The sheep of Tarentum, from the days of the Greek colonists, were famed, as they are still, for the warm brown tints on their black wool. Pliny says that this is caused by the weed fumio, on which they browsed. Swinburne says, in his “Travels in the Two Sicilies,” that there the wool is so tinged by the plant now called fumolo, which grows on the coast.
[160] See Blümner’s “Technologie,” p. 92; also “Comptes Rendus de la Commission Impériale Archéologique” of St. Petersburg, 1881; also the Catalogue Raisonnée of Herr Graf’schen’s Egyptian Collection of Textiles at Vienna.
[161] See Pliny’s “Natural History,” viii. 74, § 191. Tanaquil is credited with the first invention of the seamless coat or cassock.
[162] The Gauls in Britain wove plaids or tartans. See Rock, p. xii; Blümner, pp. 152-54; Birdwood, p. 286.
[163] Pliny, “Natural History,” book viii., 73, 74.