ANTIQ UE MARBLES. U% 



sively 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. Pausanias calls it Crocean stone. 

 The Preach discovered the quarries near the ancient Crocese, on the road 

 from Sparta to G-ythium, and about two miles from the modern 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 Statins 

 and Sidonius call it a grass-green. Eurycles, the Spartan architect, used 

 this stone in decorating the baths of iJ^eptune at Corinth ; and it was quar-- 

 ried to a large extent by the Romans, who enriched the monuments of 

 Greece, Italy and Gaul, with it. 



The Augustan and Tiberian marbles, so fashionable in Eome under those 

 emperors, were obtained in Egypt. They are breccias composed of frag- 

 ments 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 Hammamat, show that they were worked in the sixth dynasty 

 of Manetho. A green marble called Memphites was quarried near Memphis 

 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 

 with small red and black spots and white fragments of entrocM; the marmo 

 verde pagliaco, yellowish green; and leek marble, of the color of a leek; but 

 they exist only in small fragments, and their quarries are unknown. An- 

 other variety of green marble was found in the island of Tenos. 



A blue marble is said to have been obtained in Libya. The island 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 variegated marbles, and its quarries fur- 

 nished many varieties closely resembling the famous marbles of other lo- 

 calities. Strabo says it produced the Carystian, Deucalian, Synnadic, and 

 Hierapolitic marbles. The quarries of Tenos are still worked to some 

 extent, but those of Scyros aud Naxos remain almost as the ancients left 

 them. 



Of the black marbles of antiquity that now called nero antieo^ or black 

 antique, was the most celebrated. It is more intensely black than any mar- 

 ble now quarried, the black marbles of Franco appearing almost gray he- 

 side it. It occurs only in sculptured pieces, and its origin is unknown •. 

 but Faujas discovered a quarry which bad been worked by the ancients, 



