In Farsi they’re called Sepidāj, these green-blooded, porous-boned relatives of squid. Some think, and Wikipedia takes them at their word, that the animal’s name in a few Latinate languages was borrowed from Farsi. Stranger linguistic things have happened. In Greece, you can buy them in the markets labeled Σουπιες — “soupies” — and what with the Greeks and Persians* battling each other and taking vocabulary as spoils from time to time, the word could have ended up in Latin from either source.
As Romans evolved culturally and became Italians and invented Italian food, seppia found their way involuntarily into pots of risotto. At times the seppia’s ink, a deep rich brown in color and used as a camouflaging defense after the manner of squids, found its way into the pot too, adding color and flavor.
That ink or at least the pigment extracted from it, found its way into painter’s pots as well. The common cuttlefish thus lent its name to a color, and indirectly — through the vicissitudes of the technological history of photography — to a mood connoting a delicate antiquarianism, quaint images of times three generations ago, poised on the verge of the deep forgotten past.
And what better day to meditate on the word “sepia” than on Cephalopod Awareness Day?
* After all, one man’s Mede is another man’s… oh, never mind. Best that old stolen joke vanish without a thrace.
