ANTIQUE MARBLES, 73 



The rnarmor Lacedcemonimn^ Laconicum, or Spartum^ of the 

 Romans has always been regarded as a species of verde-antique niar- 

 ble. Clarke says that it differed from the Atracian only in being 

 variegated with black or dark -green serpentine instead of with white. 

 But M. Boblaye, the mineralogist of the French commission to the 

 Morea, has proved pretty conclusively that it was not a marble but a 

 true porphyry, and probably identical with the ophites of the ancients, 

 which Pliny says was so called from its resemblance to the skin of a 

 serpent (o^tf). Pausanias calls it Crocean stone (Kpo/ccwv XWog). 

 The French discovered the quarries near the ancient Croceae, on the 

 road from Sparta to Gythium, and about two miles from the mod- 

 ern village of Levetzova, in Laconia. The stone is of a dark grass- 

 green, strewed with little parallelograms of a lighter green, sometimes 

 approaching white and sometimes yellow. Procopius compares its 

 color to emerald, and Statius and Sidonius call it a grass-green. 

 Eurycles, the Spartan architect, used this stone in decorating the 

 baths of Neptune at Corinth ; and it was quarried to a large extent 

 by the Romans, who enriched the monuments of Greece, Italy, and 

 Gaul, with it. 



The Auo-ustan and Tiberian marbles, so fashionable in Rome nn- 

 der those emperors, were obtained in Egypt. They are breccias com- 

 posed of fragments of greenstone, gneiss, and porphyry, cemented 

 with a calcareous paste. They are similar in color, a bright green, 

 spotted and streaked with dark green, reddish gray, and white; the 

 only difference being, according to Pliny, that in the Augustan the 

 figures undulate and curl to a point, while in the Tiberian the streaks 

 are not involved, but lie wide asunder. It is probable that these 

 marbles were quarried in the mountains between Thebes and the 

 Red Sea. Inscriptions in the ancient quarries there, near the well 

 of Haramamat, show that they were worked in the sixth dynasty of 

 Manetho. A green marble called Memphites was quarried near Mem- 

 phis in Egypt. 



There were many other varieties of green marble known to the 

 ancients, such as the red-spotted green antique, having a dark-green 

 ground marked Avith small red and black spots and white fragments 

 of entrocM ; the marmo verde paglioco, yellowish green; and leek 

 marble, of the color of a leek; but they exist only in small fragments, 

 and their quarries are unknown. Another variety of green marble 

 was found in the island of Tenos. 



A blue marble is said to have been obtained in Libya. The isl- 

 and of Naxos yields a dark blue elegantly striped with white, Tenos 

 a light blue veined with dark blue, and Scyros many kinds of blue 

 and violet breccias, with other colors variously disposed. Scyros 

 was one of the chief places whence the ancients derived their varie- 

 gated marbles, and its quarries furnished many varieties closely re- 

 sembling the famous marbles of other localities. Strabo says it pro- 



