404 Cameo of Augustus in the Blacas Collection. 



middle ages, people believed that the ancient intaglios and 

 cameos, which were often found in digging the ground on 

 ancient sites, were natural objects, and that engraving on 

 them was a mere natural indication of the special power or 

 quality each possessed. Some of the mediaeval writers believed 

 that the fidus Achates of Roman fable was nothing but a pre- 

 cious agate, on which depended the fortunes of JEneas. 



We know nothing of the first beginnings of the art of 

 engraving upon precious stones, but it appears to have come 

 from the East. Pliny, who is our chief authority on these 

 matters, mentions an edict of Alexander the Great, forbidding 

 the engraving of his portrait on a smaragdus (supposed to be 

 the emerald) by any other professor of the art but Pyrgoteles. 

 We seem from this justified in supposing that, in the age of 

 Alexander, the art of engraving on gems was extensively prac- 

 tised in Greece. Less than a century before Christ, Mithri- 

 dates, the celebrated king of Pontus, possessed a dactyliotheca, 

 or museum of signet rings. With Augustus and the earlier 

 Eoman emperors, the possession of these dactyliothecae became 

 a great subject of pride, and the Romans displayed a sort of 

 wild extravagance in their taste for possessing cameos and 

 intaglios, and in the immense sums they gave for them. The 

 first who formed a dactyliotheca at Rome was Scaurus, the 

 stepson of the dictator Sylla, but all we know of it is the 

 statement of Plinjr, that it was much inferior to that of Mith- 

 ridates, which latter was transferred to Rome by Pompey the 

 Great, the conqueror of Mithridates, and presented by him to 

 the capitol. 



The contents of the dactyliothecae appears to have been little 

 appreciated by the Barbarians, and, after the fall of the empire of 

 the West, the taste for this branch of art was carried to Byzan- 

 tium, whence it returned to Western Europe in the fifteenth 

 century. Yet the people of the middle ages, with that mys- 

 teriously superstitious regard for them already noticed, sought 

 eagerly to be possessed of them. It is very common to find a 

 great baron or knight, or an ecclesiastic, sealing his charter or 

 other document with a seal in which an ancient intaglio is set 

 instead of an ordinary mediaeval seal. Perhaps he thought 

 that, being an object of comparative rarity, the possession of 

 it was something to be proud of; but it is probable also, that 

 he looked upon it as possessing some superior power which gave 

 him protection or security. In this belief, catalogues of 

 intaglios and cameos, with lists of their several qualities, or 

 virtues, were published, and are sometimes found in mediaeval 

 manuscripts. But the ecclesiastics made the greatest profit 

 of them in this point of view, for they collected them in 

 their churches and monasteries, gave out that they were en- 



