ANTIQUE MARBLES. 71 



and slabs of siirprising magnitude and beauty, approaching the aha- 

 bastrite marble in variety of colors, were conveyed thence to Kome 

 notwithstanding the long land-carriage of more than 100 miles to the 

 place of shipment. The quarries are entirely surrounded by tracliytic 

 hills, to which, says Hamilton, the marble " owes its crystalline and 

 altered character, being to all appearance a portion of the older sec- 

 ondary limestone caught up and developed by the protruded volcanic 

 rocks, and crystallized by igneous action." 



The alabastrites marble of the ancients, or onychites, was not a 

 marble proper, bit a hard carbonate of lime, identical in composition 

 with stalagmite, the modern alabaster. It was quarried, says Piiny, 

 near Thebes, in Egypt, and Damascus. "When first brought to Eome 

 it was considered almost a precious stone, and was made into cups 

 and small ornaments, such as the feet of couches and chairs. When 

 Balbus decorated his theatre, in the time of Augustus, with four small 

 columns of this stone, it was noted as an unprecedented occurrence ; 

 but, in tlie reign of Claudius, Callistus, a freedman of that emperor, 

 adorned his banquet hall with thirty large columns of alabastrites. 

 The ancient quarries were reopened by Mehemet Ali, Viceroy of 

 Egypt, to obtain material to build his mausoleum at Cairo. The four 

 magnificent pillars of this marble that support the baldacchino over 

 the altar in the church of San Paolo fuori le Mura, in Rome, were 

 presented by him. Each is a monolith forty feet long. 



Of the yellow marbles of antiquity, that called by the Italians 

 giallo antico is the rarest and most beautiful. There are several 

 varieties of it, varying in tint from a cream-yellow to the deepest 

 chrome-yellow, sometimes shading into red and purple hues. Some 

 is as bright as gold [giallo dorato), some of an orange-shade {gicdlo 

 capo), and some, extremely rare, of a canary-color {giallo paglia). 

 The ancient writers compared it to safiron, to sunlight, ^nnd to ivory 

 grown yellow with age. Some of it is variegated with black or dark- 

 yellow rings. The grain is exceedingly fine. Its colors are derived 

 entirely from carbonaceous matter. Among the finest existing speci- 

 mens of this marble are the large columns in the Pantheon at Rome, 

 and a single pair in the Arch of Constantine. The giallo antico was 

 called marnior Numidicum by the Romans, but the precise site of the 

 quarries is not yet ascertained. M. Fournel believes that the yellow 

 marble of Philippeville, Algeria, which closely resembles it in varying 

 tints, is identical with it. The island of Melos and Corinth also pro- 

 duced yellow marbles, and in the time of Justinian a marble of a 

 fiery yellow was quarried in the neighborhood of Jerusalem. 



Among the most celebrated marbles of the ancient wo)-ld was the 

 rosso antico, or red antique. Its color passes from a red, almost scar- 

 let, to a wine-lees or blood-red, which is divided by parallel layers 

 of white, and sometimes also intersected by a network of delicate 

 black veins. Its variation in tint is probably according to the quan- 



