The Myths and History of Red Hair: What's in a colour: xanthòs

If you are interested in the history of red hair, probably you know this sentence from the Physiognomics, a treatise attributed to Aristotle: "Blond (xanthós)-haired people have a bold spirit like lions, red (pyrrhós) -haired people are villainous like foxes". This is quite surprising, since, as we have seen in a previous post, several Greek heroes and gods are described as auburn-haired.

When referred to hair colour, the adjective xanthòs is usually translated as blond, but is that correct?

The point is that ancient Greeks (and, in part, Romans as well) classified colours in a different way than we do, because their relationship with colours was different from ours. For them, colours could not be dissociated from the sensations they aroused.

The subject was first treated in the treatise On Colours (Latin De coloribus, Greek Perì chromáton), attributed to Aristotle but sometimes ascribed to Theophrastus or Strato. The work outlines the theory that all colours (yellow, red, purple, blue, and green) are derived from mixtures of black and white. On Colours had a pronounced impact on subsequent colour theories and remained influential until Isaac Newton's experiments with light refraction. Even Goethe, in his Theory of Colours, argued that all colours derive from the meeting of light and darkness.

These are some articles to explore the subject further: How to make sense of ancient Greek colours, Was Sirius once red?, Colour as Synaesthetic Experience in Antiquity, Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome.

Basically, ancient Greeks did not separate emotions from colours. For example, they associated chloros (yellow-green) with fertility, argos (silver-white) with quick and flashing things, porphureos (purple) with swollen things and oinops (wine) with passion or melancholy (see Homer's 'wine-dark' sea). There’s something similar in modern English, in expressions like "feeling blue" or "seeing red".

So, what about xanthòs?

This colour was used to describe such things as: the sun, gold, sand, ripe wheat, the bile, fire, the coat of lions and even verdigris. Most of these things are indeed yellowish, but some are light brown and some have a tinge of red. So, the term xanthòs compassed colours that today we would call yellow, tawny, dark red, light brown, reddish brown and even auburn, as we can see here. Because, after all, "auburn" is not actually "red", like a cherry or a watermelon.

So, the translation of xanthòs as "blond" is correct, but it’s not the only translation possible.

And indeed, here is the surprise. Everybody know Boudicca had red hair, right? Well, the only description we have of her is from Cassius Dio, a Roman writing in Greek more than a hundred years after Boudicca’s death (which means he never met her). Here’s the passage.

Source

Here, Dio has added the suffix –otatos to the adjective xanthòs (having put both in feminine singular accusative form), to mean "very" or "extremely". As you can see, the translator has rendered xanthòs as tawny, and we could wonder what "very tawny" mean. Deep brown? Very light brown? We could also wonder why the translator choose tawny and not blond, for instance.

Probably what Dio wanted to do was describing the emotions Boudicca aroused than the actual colour of her hair (which he never saw, after all). I don't know who was the first one who talked about Boudicca’s red hair, but maybe this person, knowing the meaning of xanthòs and knowing where Boudicca came from, thought "red" could be a fitting translation.

However, let us examine this translation a little further. What colour is tawny when referred to human (and not lion's) hair?

Here’s "tawny hair" according to Google images.

(click to enlarge)

But since we're talking about translations, let's translate tawny into other languages. In Italian, tawny is fulvo, and here's capelli fulvi according to Google.

That’s clearly red hair, with some strawberry blonde. Fulvo is also the colour used in the Italian Bible to describe David's hair: "Quegli mandò a chiamarlo e lo fece venire. Era fulvo, con begli occhi e gentile aspetto. Disse il Signore: 'Alzati e ungilo: è lui!' (1 Sam 16.12).

As we have seen before, Cassius Dio was Roman, not Greek, and here is a table with the names of the colours of the ancient Romans. Fulvus is the number 32 (while the colour used for blond hair was flavus). Maybe Cassius Dio had this colour in mind?

But let's go on with more languages.

In German, tawny is gelbbraun (gelb=yellow), but apparently this is not a colour used to describe human hair.

In Spanish, it's rubio oscuro (dark blond).

In French, it's fauve and in this case we have a mix of red and dark blond.

So, it seems in modern languages too we "see" colours in different ways.

Interestingly, the adjective xanthòs ("ξανθὴν" in this case) was also used by the ancient historian Aelian (c. 175 – c. 235 AD), in his Varia Historia (12.14), to describe Alexander the Great's hair colour.

Unfortunately, we don't have portrait paintings of Alexander (356 BC – 323 BC) made during his lifetime, but we have mosaics.

Here's a detail from a mosaic (known as "the Lion Hunt") in the Pella Museum, dating back to the late IV century BC (Alexander is on the left).

Here's another mosaic from Pella, known as the Stag Hunt Mosaic, c. 300 BC (Alexander is on right).

And here's a detail from the famous Alexander Mosaic, also known as the Battle of Issus Mosaic, from the House of the Faun in Pompeii, which is believed to be a copy of an early 3rd-century BC Hellenistic painting.

In this case too, as in Boudicca's, the actual hair colour is anybody's guess. 😄

So, to return to the original quote, what colours did pseudo-Aristotle have in mind? Since he mentions lions and foxes, probably he had in mind the colours of their coats, but not all lions are blond, and not all foxes are red. The lions that lived in the Mediterranean area probably belonged to the species called Asiatic lion (Panthera leo persica), and as you can see, this lion can have a mane ranging from blond to dark brown, almost black.

Foxes can also be brown, or grey. These photos are from Italy, which, as you know, is not far from Greece.

This cutie is from Tuscany.

This one from Abruzzo.

And this one from Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

So, yes, probably the pseudo-Aristotle was talking of blond hair and red hair, or of chestnut hair and red hair, or blond hair and brown hair, or auburn hair and orangey hair.😁😁

To add to the confusion, we can talk a little about hair colours names. My shade of red, for example, is called copper blond (or copper gold), because for hairdressers red is not a colour in itself, but a variant either of blond (in most shades) or of brown. Basically, for hairdressers the only "natural" colours are blond, brown and black (which is in line with red hair being the result of a gene mutation).

Look at this chart.

If you look at the "copper" and "red" sections, you’ll see what I’ve just said, that is, all shades have either a blond or a brown base.

The sections "gold" and "rich gold" are also interesting. If you look at the bottom, you'll see shades so dark that probably only hairdressers would refer to them as "golden".

On the far left you have the naturals, that is, the bases. By adding a "tone" (or two tones) to the base, you can have all the shades you want. Here's an article about that.

We can conclude this long rambling with a quote from William Michael Rossetti about Fanny Cornforth, one of the Preraphaelites' favourite sitters. He wrote that "she was a pre-eminently fine woman with regular and sweet features, and a mass of the most lovely blond hair – light-golden, or 'harvest yellow'."

These are some of the paintings featuring Fanny Cornforth, and her hair, here, doesn't look very blond to me...