This is a fabulously marked and rather large copper. It can appear like a small bright fritillary in flight, and is always a pleasure to see.

There are two subspecies in France, alciphron (the nominate form) and gordius (the southern subspecies). The alciphron male has a violet suffusion all over the upperside, giving the species its name. The female alciphron is basically dark brown with the usual female copper upf black markings in the cell and post-discal areas with distinctive uph orange marginal lunules. Females have a more curved shape at the hindwing base (as compared to the slightly squarer shape of the male - this seems true for most coppers).

The male gordius has less distinctive black marks, which are quite suffused purple especially on the upf, but without the overall purple sheen of alciphron.

The female gordius is very different to the nominate alciphron. It is quite large and bright, with a pattern much closer to the male but without the purple suffusion. It sometimes has blue centres to the uph submarginal black spots, just visible in the enlarged version of 1255.

The female underside has a very attractive orange unf and grey unh with an orange border. The male seems to have less orange on the unf, but the undersides of both sexes are quite variable as indicated in these photographs.

T&L says that gordius is the subspecies that occurs in the mountains and gives an altitude range of 800-2000m. I personally doubt this. Whilst it is without doubt the subspecies that occurs in the mountains, it also seems to be the predominant (or exclusive) subspecies across southern France, occurring at quite low altitudes. I have only seen alciphron in the area around Bordeaux (before I had a camera), but gordius in every other southern location and every image on this page is gordius.

observations

a male, with the black spots indistinct, and some quite suffused on the upf.

a male, quite fresh and with more of a purple suffusion than 1241.

a female, generally quite lightly marked and with the uph black submarginal spots having blue centres.

I think the extensive unf orange suggests a female, as does the curvature of the hindwing, although this is not entirely clear from the camera angle. It seems quite lightly marked on the unf and generally quite a strong orange feel to the whole underside.

It has been suggested by an expert that 2161 may well be a female Purple-edged Copper (L. hippothoe), presumably eurydame, on the basis of the light markings and that the unh post-discal spot in s6 is aligned with the others, whereas for others on this page this spot is clearly not aligned. Against that, the images for hippothoe show quite a wide variation in the alignment of this post-discal series with some showing the non-alignment and others being perfectly in line, so it appears that this feature is unreliable for hippothoe, but whether the same is true for alciphron is possible but not necessarily so; but in all of my photographs of alciphron this alignment holds true. However, the T&L image of female gordius shows the s6 spot as absent. It is also exceptionally orange, much more so than any other hippothoe I have ever seen (and I have seen hippothoe in a wide variety of locations), but this might just be geographical differences. The T&L image of female hippothoe shows only a light unf orange flush. Either the post-discal spots are highly unusual or the colour is; the consistency of other alciphron post-discal spots suggests that 2161 is not alciphron, but I leave it here in the (probably vain) hope that someone somewhere can shine more light on this.