A Little Book on Colors

The back of a hare is pullus.

What Pullus (dusky/dark grey) is, the color of the earth itself shows: for the greater part of it is pullus. Therefore, since it is cast upon the dead, the ancients wished that those who mourned should be clothed in Pullis garments, similar to the earth. The back of a hare is also properly Pullus: for which reason, taught by the guidance of nature itself, the hare, timid in its fear, seeks the fresh earth from the plow, and lying there sometimes, hidden by nothing, it very often hides itself from hunters and the very dogs passing by, who are searching for almost everything keenly, by the benefit of its color alone: and, as we said of the hare in a certain epigram,

Whom the flight from the dogs' mouths does not snatch, nor shadow hide,
The earth of the same color covers him while motionless beneath the sky.

Natiuus.

This color is prepared by no art or expense. For it comes forth in this way by nature, whence it is also called Natiuus (native/natural), different from that of which we have spoken. And now we Cosentini, among whom many traces of antiquity appear—inasmuch as the praeficae (hired mourners) praise the dead just as they once did, and the Silicernium (funeral feast) is in use, and no one is buried without the kiss of his kin—we call the funeral garment of both sexes Natiuum, when it is black, and in women joined in marriage, Cyaneum (blue), which the Greeks, as has been said, once used at funerals. It is also called Hispanus and Baeticus, and even Mutinensis. For in those places that kind of wool is seen. Pullus is, I believe, a diminutive name from purus (pure), just as Ralla is formed from Rara regarding a type of garment, opella from opera, and also tellus from terra: so that lana Pulla is "pure wool," not stained by any other color, but content with its own and ingenuous one.