> you can think of "royal purple" being so expensive that only the real elite have access to it. Depends on the timeframe, those Purple Islands shellfish were

> you can think of "royal purple" being so expensive that only the real elite have access to it. Depends on the timeframe, those Purple Islands shellfish were juicy at the very beginning, I think got selectively bred (by accident) to have very very little purple. Purple was originally a substance, like cocaine or gold or blue paint. Later got called purple dye. At the beginning there was no other purple anything anywhere (porphyry marble but that's different, and not the same shade, same root though). Not even the elite, the king and maybe his family too. Elites wore red, Patrician (one of the meanings, it's a double entendre) is those who wore red. During the Republic wearing purple was a death wish. Caesar I think didn't refuse fast enough at one point, something like that. Then during the Empire--I think right away--purple was back. At least in porphyry it was back. I think in clothes and perhaps statue paint? Late Empire it was by far the most expensive substance. Like a pound of silk dyed purple was worth twelve people's lives. And there were different shades, not like now where it's like what's the RGB hex of that color squirt squirt squirt here it is, #123456, or #abcdef. It's not the real deal.