Dabei belegen beispielsweise Adjektive, die sich auf den Farbstoff Purpur beziehen, ihre Bedeutsamkeit in der poetischen Tradition. Auch wenn die Forschung mittlerweile die Komplexität des Themas Farbe in der antiken Dichtung erkannt hat, wurde der Dichtung als Schlüsselrolle bei der Farbkonzeption bislang wenig Beachtung geschenkt. In frühen Studien zu den Farbenbezeichnungen in der Antike galt oft die Dichtung als unzuverlässige Quelle. This very process of creative imitatio may have played a significant role in the emergence of abstract, modern colour categories. In Roman elegy, colour semantics are the product of a rich intertextual dialogue with earlier Greek verse. The ancients themselves considered Homer as the highest authority regarding colour. As shows the example of adjectives referring to purple dye, the significance of colour terms often lies in the poetic tradition.
Although scholars have been more sensitive to the complexity of colour use in ancient verse in the last decades, the key role of poetry in ancient conceptions of colours has yet to be fully recognised. In the long quest for the true meaning of ancient colour terms, poetry has often been perceived as an unreliable source. The key aspects of symbolism portrayed through clothing in these texts as examined by this thesis include portrayals of virtues and vices, honor and shame, divine power, righteousness, status, and ethnicity. It then moves on to investigate symbolic elements of clothing in the character portrayals of Jesus and key portrayals of other figures in the Gospel of Luke. This thesis is attentive to potential constraint of culture and literary genre by investigating key elements of character portrayal through clothing in Virgil's Aeneid, Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars, and Josephus' Jewish Antiquities.
Utilizing Paul Ricoeur's theory of symbols and Roland Barthes communication theory of clothing, this thesis considers the cultural and material world of clothing in 1st century BC to 2nd century AD as it bears on the literary use of clothing symbolism within the cultural literary world contemporary to Luke's gospel, and the literary-symbolic world created by the texts under investigation. This investigation considers both the symbolic meaning conveyed by the clothing regarding literary characters portrayed by that clothing, as well as the semantic bearing this symbolism has on the story or narrative in which the characters are functioning. This work investigates the use of clothing in conveying symbolic meaning in Greco-Roman literature and the Gospel of Luke.
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