Note 523 — ADDITIONAL NOTES.
Reading edition
Sericum ad usus antehac nobilium nunc etiam inferiorum sine ulla discretione. Ammian. l. 23. c. 6. Although silken garments were then so common, Ammianus still describes silk, as Virgil and Pliny had done three centuries earlier, as a sort of woolly substance (lanugo, canities frondium) which was combed from a tree in China.