This is the oldest coin in my collection, though my collection is still very small. Furius Purpurio AR Denarius 169-158 BC Rome mint 18mm 4.03g. Obv: helmeted head of Roma right, X behind. Rev: Luna wearing crescent on head, driving galloping biga right, murex shell above. PVR, ROMA below. Crawford 187/1; Sydenham 424; Furia 13.
I try to collect RR coins whenever I can. This one looks to be in fine condition. One of the things I always look for are the devices scattered about. The murex shell on this one is fantastic.
The murex shell seems to be a nice visual play on the moneyer's name. Purple dye is made from murex mollusks; moneyer name Purpurio. Googling didn't shed much light on the man other than that he may be the son of L. Furius Purpurio, consul in 196 BCE. Maybe the name was originally given due to the family's ties to the purple dye trade?
I was using a different Latin word for purple, "purpura". As in our language, there appear to be many words for the same color or similar hues. I recall seeing various other moneyers who used visual analogs for their names. For instance, C. Vibius C.F. Pansa uses the god Pan on many of his issues. It would be interesting to go the the Republican moneyers' coins to see which ones have clever name/image pairings.
The purple dye that came from the murex shell was extremely expensive and banned from use by anyone except the emperor during the imperial period. But also, urine was a main ingredient in making the dye and it had a terrible smell according to some writings found from the time. They've done experiments to find out how the Romans made the dye and have found it takes about 20 murex shells just to make little more than a tea spoon of it. No wonder it was expensive and guess the status it implied made it worth the smell to them.
This was one of my first coins and feel lucky to have gotten it just simply from how little i knew of anything to do with roman coins at the time. But this one is hard to photograph because it had been cleaned completely of its patina. Which I couldn't tell from the picture. I ended up feeling a little disappointed that the centuries of natures coloring had been stripped away. Was still so new to collecting that I didn't even know I'd have that reaction. That said I still do really enjoy this coin.
I believe puniceus is the color you get when you beat human skin but purpura is what results from dying with extracts of berries or shellfish. Translating from one language to another is never a one to one simple task. If it were, Internet language translators would not be the joke that they are. We also need to recall that purple was a lot more than a color to the Romans but a statement of wealth and power sufficient to support wearing clothing dyed with expensive substances. We do use the terms like 'born to the purple' or 'assuming the purple' but you will have trouble finding a modern politician or member of the royal family wearing a purple suit (with the possible exception of the singer formerly known as Prince).
