458 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 7 



the principal sources of fine white marble. The earliest reference to 

 this marble is a statement by Vitruvius (3) that king Mausolos of 

 Halicarnassus, the builder of the fabulous Mausoleum, used it to 

 veneer the walls of his palace, and it seems to have early acquired and 

 to have long retained a reputation for quality among the cities of 

 western and southwestern Asia Minor, where there are a number 

 of inscriptions stipulating that a particular monument (in several 

 cases the monument in question is a sarcophagus) is to be made of 

 this specific marble (4) . Despite its uniform grain and fine translucent 

 surface, it was never much in demand for statuary, no doubt on 

 account of the difficulty of getting a large enough block that was 

 free from blue discoloration. But as a building material it was 

 rivaled only by the Pentelic marble of Attica. This, the marble 

 of the Parthenon, was in some respects a finer marble, but it had two 

 serious disadvantages : there were few beds from which it was possible 

 to quarry really large blocks that were free from veins of impurities, 

 which were both unsightly and a source of structural weakness ; and 

 the location of the quarries on Mount Pentelikon meant heavy initial 

 expenditure from quarry to shipboard. Proconnesian marble suffered 

 from neither disadvantage, and it must always have been considerably 

 cheaper than its rival. 



These were not, of course, by any means the only Greek marbles 

 of this type to be quarried, some of them virtually indistinguishable 

 from Proconnesian both in quality and appearance. Few if any 

 others, however, were exploited for more than local use, certainly 

 none on a scale approaching that of the quarries of Proconnesus after 

 the great expansion of production that took place during the first 

 century A. D. The immediate result of the reestablishment of the 

 Pax Romana by Augustus, and of the great imperial building pro- 

 grams carried out both in the capital and increasingly, as time went 

 on, in the provinces, had been to create an enormously increased de- 

 mand for fine building materials. Augustus' well-known boast that 

 he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble had a solid 

 foundation of truth; and although most of the marble of his own 

 buildings came from the newly opened quarries of Luni (the modern 

 Carrara), which remained for several centuries the principal source 

 of supply for domestic Italian use, his successors made ever-increasing 

 demands upon the supplies of finer-quality marble that were available 

 in the provinces, principally in Greece and Asia Minor, although 

 there were also important quarries in North Africa ("giallo antico") 

 and Egypt (porphyries and granite) . Already by the middle of the 

 first century A. D. we begin to detect the impact of the new market 

 on the traditional sources of supply. 



