24 
Field Museum of Natural History 
preted this process into the above passage of Pliny, 
and this speculative hypothesis has been adopted by 
many others without reason. There is no evidence 
whatever to the effect that the method of coloring 1 
agates artificially was known to the ancients, and the 
fact remains that no such agate of classical antiquity 
has ever been found. 
The Physiologus, a very popular Greek natural 
history, which originated at Alexandria in the second 
century A.D. and was subsequently translated into all 
European languages, contains a story about the agate 
and the pearl, which does not occur elsewhere. It is 
said that the divers avail themselves of an agate in 
searching for pearls. They fasten a piece of agate to 
a rope which is let down into the sea. The agate turns 
into the direction of where a pearl is hidden, and re- 
mains there steadfast, so that they find the pearl by 
diving alongside the rope. 
Pliny mentions a valuable agate in the possession 
of Pyrrhus, the king who was so long at war with the 
Romans. On this agate were to be seen the Nine Muses 
and Apollo holding a lyre, not as a work of art, but as 
the spontaneous produce of nature, the veins in the 
stone being so arranged that each of the Muses had her 
own peculiar attribute. We must confess that either it 
must have required a high flight of imagination to 
recognize these pictures in the veins of this agate, or 
that nature had been considerably aided by art. 
It is not stated by Pliny or other ancient writers 
that agate was cut into gems, but a number of cut 
gems of agate have come down to us, and are preserved 
in museums or private collections. They go back as 
far as the Aegaean or Mycenaean age, agate gems with 
mythological subjects having been discovered at 
Vaphio. A few cameos of agate and carnelian are on 
view in Case 2 (upper left section) of the Gem Room 
[ 128] 
