Perhaps the first knowledge of silk products in Europe was due to the conquest of Persia and portion of India by Alexander the Great, who came in contact with the Chinese, or some people who lived beyond India, and who had probably worn silken garments. To these people the Greeks gave the general name of the _Seres_. This name was not only given to the people beyond India by the Romans, but to the silkworm itself. Aristotle, Virgil, Dionysius the Geographer, and later Pausanias, mention the _seer_ or spinning-worm, from which the rich and valuable Oriental garments were made. Pliny says that the Assyrians made silk from the _bombyx_ and taught the art to the inhabitants of the island of Cos. Pamphile, the daughter of Plates, made the finest woven silk in the island of Cos. It is supposed that in the first instance the raw material found its way from China, through India, Persia, and Arabia, to the Grecian Isles, and eventually to Italy and Western Europe. In European countries silk at first was mixed with wool or linen, and garments of this material were worn by the Romans. The thin gauze-like silken garments of Cos were of a pure quality and were imported to Rome in the second century and were reckoned worth their weight in gold. About this time great quantities of the raw silk were brought from the East by the overland route and by sea, and in the end of the fourth century silk had become so cheap as to be within the reach of the common people (Marcellinus, A.D. 380). Tyre and Berytus were the chief seats of silk manufacture from which the Roman markets were supplied. In the year 552 an event is recorded that revolutionised the manufacture of silk in Europe. The story is related that two monks, either Greeks or Persians, were sent as ambassadors to China, and there learnt the arts and methods of silk production from the natives. They succeeded in secretly conveying in their hollow cane walking-sticks a quantity of silkworms’ eggs which they brought to Constantinople, where they were hatched in warm manure, and the grubs were fed on the leaves of the mulberry-tree. Very soon after this a royal factory was set up in the palace at Constantinople. Women weavers were pressed into the Emperor’s service, and a state monopoly was set up for the manufacture of silk fabrics. The introduction of the silkworm did not cheapen the price of silk; on the contrary, the production of the royal looms were sold at excessive prices, and far beyond those paid for the material before the silkworm rearing period in Europe. The court of the Eastern Empire did not hold the silk-weaving monopoly long, for very soon after the secret of the rearing of the worms spread to the Peloponnesus and the isles of Greece, where, from the sixth to the middle of the twelfth centuries, Europe was supplied with nearly all the silk it required.