deries were by the Romans attributed to the Phrygians. All
gold work was vaguely supposed to be theirs, as all other embroidery
was included in the craft of the Plumarii in Rome.

It has been disputed whether needlework in gold preceded the weaving
of flat gold or thread into stuffs, or whether it was an
after-thought, and an enrichment of such textiles. I imagine that the
embroidery was the first, and that the after-thought was the art of
weaving gold. Babylonian embroideries appear to be of gold wire, as we
see them in the Ninevite marbles.

An instance of the way golden embroideries were displayed among the
Greeks is that of the Athenian peplos, which, as I have already said
(p. 32), was worked by embroideresses under the superintendence of two
Arrhephorae of noble birth. It was either scarlet or saffron colour,
and blazed with golden representations of the battles of the giants,
or local myths and events in the history of Athens.[325]

The art of the Phrygians, who gave their name in Rome to all golden
thread-work, has come down to us through the classic "auriphrygium"
and the "orphreys" of the Middle Ages. Semper thinks that the flat
gold embroidery was the first invented.[326]

The Phrygians had attained to the utmost perfection in tissue ornament
when the Romans conquered them, and finding their art congenial to the
growing luxury of Rome, they imported and domesticated it; both the
people and their work retaining their national designation. Pliny,
ignorant of the claims of the Chinese, gave to the Phrygians the
credit of being the inventors of all embroidery.[327] The garments
they thus decorated were called "phrygionae," and the work itself "opus
Phrygium." The term "auriphrygium," at first given to work in gold
only, was in time applied to all embroidery that admitted gold into
its composition; and hence the English mediaeval term, "orphreys."

All the gold stitches now called "passing" came from Phrygia; Semper
attributes all the "mosaic stitches" to the Phrygians, calling them
"opus Phrygionium."[328] Gold stitches are splendidly exemplified in
the embroidered mantle of St. Stephen, of the ninth century. The only
somewhat earlier piece of mediaeval gold embroidery with which I am
acquainted is the dalmatic of Charlemagne in the Vatican, richly
embroidered in fine gold thread; and the mantle of the Emperor Henry
II. in the Museum at Munich, worked by his Empress Kunigunda, who
appears to have been somewh