C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/528414/WORKINGFOLDER/BDL/9780521110426INT.3D 1 [1–35] 9.9.2009 9:12PM INTRODUCTION What colour is flauus? Hippolyte, sic est: Thesei uultus amo illos priores quos tulit quondam puer, cum prima puras barba signaret genas … quis tum ille fulsit! presserant uittae comam et ora flauus tenera tinguebat pudor. Yes, Hippolytus: Theseus’ face I love, those looks he had long ago as a boy, when his first beard signalled his pure cheeks … Then how he shone! Headbands encircled his hair, and yellow shame (flauus pudor) tinged his tender face. Seneca, Phaedra 646–9, 651–2 candida uestis erat, praecincti flore capilli, flaua uerecundus tinxerat ora rubor. Shining white was your clothing, your locks were bound round with flowers, a modest blush (rubor) had tinged your yellow cheeks (flaua ora). Ovid, Heroides 4.71–2 1 Sixty years ago, Eric Laughton drew attention to a problem that occasionally arose in the translation of the Latin colour term flauus. 2 This is a term that dictionaries conventionally describe as a loose equivalent of our category ‘yellow’. 3 Laughton however argued that ‘yellow’ was an altogether unsatisfactory translation for flauus pudor and flaua ora in the contexts cited above, but instead they referred exclusively and unambiguously to the ‘blond’ 1 All translations are my own. As this introduction will demonstrate, the translation of Latin colour terms is far from straightforward; for this reason, all translations of colour offered within the texts I cite should be considered provisional rather than definitive. 2 Laughton (1948) and (1950). 3 So the Oxford Latin Dictionary , s.v. flauus, where ‘yellow’ is its primary meaning. André (1949) 128–9 considers flauus first in his study of ‘Le Jaune’. 1