What colour is traditionally associated with Roman Emperors?
Purple is the correct answer. It was the most expensive dye in the ancient world. The only ancient source for purple dye was a shellfish known as the murex, which was found in the waters around the Lebanese city of Tyre. It required a harvest of thousands of the creatures just to dye one toga! “A Toga’s worth of Tyrian purple die, about 1.5 grams, required the beating, drying and extracting of mucus from the hypobranchial gland of some twelve thousand Murex mollusks.” 12,000 is alot of shellfish! And all from one small country (Lebanon). So you can see why it was so expensive and only available to kings and emperors!
