Natural History — Book XXXV

Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin

1| The nature of metals, in which wealth consists, and of the substances that grow up alongside them, has now been more or less set out, the subjects being so linked that the boundless forest of medicine, the darkness of the workshops and the fastidious subtlety of chasing, modelling and dyeing have all been told together. There remain the kinds of earth itself and of stones, a still more numerous series, each of them treated in a great many volumes, chiefly by the Greeks. For our part we shall keep to a brevity that suits our plan, while omitting nothing that is necessary or belongs to nature;

2| and first we shall say what remains to be said about painting, an art once noble — in the days when kings and peoples sought it — and one that ennobled others whom it had deigned to hand down to posterity; but now it has been driven out entirely by marble, and indeed by gold as well — and not only so that whole walls are covered, but with marble cut away and inlaid, and with veneers worked in vermiculate patterns into the likenesses of objects and animals.

3| Panels no longer please us, nor expanses that spread mountains across a bedroom: we have begun to paint with stone as well. This was invented in the principate of Claudius; in Nero's came the practice of varying the uniformity of the veneers by inserting markings that were not in them, so that Numidian marble should be marked with ovals and Synnadic picked out with purple, just as luxury would have wished them to be born. These are the reinforcements of mountains that are running short, and luxury never stops working to lose as much as it can in fires.

4| The painting of portraits, by which the truest likenesses were passed down through the ages, has died out entirely. Bronze shields are set up with silver faces, the features of the figures blurred into dull sameness; the heads of statues are exchanged — a practice long since a common joke, even in verse. So much do all men prefer that their material be gazed at rather than that they themselves be known. And meanwhile they stitch together picture galleries out of old paintings and revere other people's likenesses, while they themselves count something an honour only for its price — so that an heir may break it up and a thief's noose drag it off.

5| So it is that, with no one's likeness living on, they leave behind portraits of their money, not of themselves. The same people adorn their wrestling grounds and anointing rooms with portraits of athletes, and carry the face of Epicurus through their bedrooms and take it about with them. They sacrifice on his birthday, and every month keep a feast on the twentieth day of the moon, which they call the icades — they above all, who do not wish to be known even while they are alive. So it surely is: idleness has destroyed the arts, and since there are no portraits of minds, those of bodies are neglected too.

6| It was otherwise among our ancestors. In their atria these were the things put on display: not statues by foreign artists, nor bronzes or marbles, but faces moulded in wax were set out each in its own cupboard, so that there might be likenesses to accompany the funerals of the clan; and always, when anyone died, the whole company of his family that had ever lived was present. Family trees, moreover, ran in branching lines to the painted portraits.

7| The record rooms were filled with books and documents of deeds done in office. Outside, and around the doorways, were other likenesses of mighty spirits, with spoils taken from the enemy fixed beside them, which not even a buyer was permitted to take down; and the houses celebrated triumphs forever, even when their owners changed. This was a powerful spur, when every day the very walls reproached an unwarlike owner for entering into another man's triumph.

8| There survives the indignant speech of Messala the orator, which forbade the insertion of the alien portrait of the Laevini among those of his family. A similar cause drew from old Messala those volumes he composed on families, when he had passed through the atrium of Scipio Pomponianus and seen the Salvittones — for that had been their cognomen — creeping by testamentary adoption into the name of the Scipios, to the disgrace of the Africani. But — with the Messalas' leave be it said — even to lay false claim to the portraits of famous men showed some love of their virtues, and was much more honourable than to deserve that no one should seek one's own.

9| Nor must we pass over a new invention as well: portraits, if not of gold or silver, then at any rate of bronze, are dedicated in libraries to those whose immortal spirits speak in those very places; indeed, even portraits that do not exist are fashioned, and longing gives birth to faces that have not been handed down, as has happened in the case of Homer.

10| In my own judgement, at least, there is no greater proof of good fortune than that all people should forever long to know what a man was like. At Rome this was the invention of Asinius Pollio, who by dedicating the first library made men's talents public property. Whether the kings of Alexandria and Pergamum, who founded libraries in fierce rivalry, had begun it earlier, I could not easily say.

11| That a love of portraits once burned fiercely is attested by Atticus, Cicero's friend, who published a volume on them, and by Marcus Varro, who by a most generous invention inserted into the abundance of his volumes portraits, in some form, of as many as seven hundred illustrious people, refusing to let their features perish or the long passage of time prevail over men. He was the inventor of a gift that even the gods might envy, since he not only bestowed immortality but sent it out into every land, so that they could be present everywhere, like gods. And this, indeed, he did for others.

12| But the first to establish the private dedication of shields in a sacred or public place was, so far as I find, Appius Claudius [who was consul with Publius Servilius in the year 259 of the City]. He set up his ancestors in Bellona's temple, and wished them to be seen on high and the inscriptions of their honours to be read — a handsome thing, especially if a crowd of children in little portraits displays the offspring together like a kind of nest; there is no one who does not look on such shields with pleasure and goodwill.

13| After him Marcus Aemilius, colleague of Quintus Lutatius in the consulship, set them up not only in the Basilica Aemilia but also in his own house — and that, too, on a precedent drawn from war. For the portraits were set within shields like those with which men fought at Troy, and from this they also took the name clupei — not, as the perverse subtlety of the grammarians would have it, from cluere, 'to be renowned'. It is an origin full of valour, that the face of each man should be reproduced on the shield he had used.

14| The Carthaginians used to make shields and portraits of gold, and carried them with them. In the captured camp, at any rate, Marcius, avenger of the Scipios in Spain, found such a shield of Hasdrubal, and this shield was above the doors of the temple on the Capitol until the first fire. The great carelessness of our ancestors in this matter is noted, in that in the consulship of Lucius Manlius and Quintus Fulvius, in the year of the city 575, Marcus Aufidius, contractor for the care of the Capitol, informed the senators that the shields which for several lustra had been recorded as bronze were silver.

15| The inquiry about the beginnings of painting is uncertain and not part of the work I have undertaken. The Egyptians maintain that among themselves it was discovered six thousand years before it crossed into Greece, a vain boast, as is plain; the Greeks, however, say some that it was found at Sicyon, others among the Corinthians, all agreeing that it began with tracing a line around a man's shadow, and so the first was of that kind, the second used single colors and was called monochrome, after a more elaborate kind had been invented, and it continues to this day.

16| Linear painting was invented by Philocles the Egyptian or Cleanthes the Corinthian; it was first practised by Aridices the Corinthian and Telephanes the Sicyonian, still without any color, yet already scattering lines inside. Hence the custom also of writing beside the figures the names of those they painted. Ecphantus the Corinthian was the first to wash them over with color, of crushed tile, as they say. That he was a different man of the same name from the one whom Cornelius Nepos hands down as having followed Damaratus, father of Tarquinius Priscus, king of the Romans, into Italy when Damaratus was fleeing from Corinth from the injuries of the tyrant Cypselus, we shall presently show.

17| For painting was already perfected even in Italy. There survive at any rate to this day paintings older than the city, at Ardea in sacred buildings, than which I wonder at none so much, lasting so long in the bareness of a roofless building as if fresh. Similarly at Lanuvium, where Atalanta and Helen are painted close together, naked, by the same artist, each of the most excellent form, but the one as a maiden, and not damaged even when the ruin of the temple fell.

18| The emperor Gaius, inflamed by lust, tried to remove them, if the nature of the plaster had allowed. At Caere also there are older ones which still last, and anyone who has weighed them carefully will admit that no art was brought to completion more quickly, since it is plain that it did not exist in the Trojan times.

19| Among the Romans too this art early won honor, since the Fabii, a most distinguished family, took from it the surname Pictor, and the first of that surname himself painted the shrine of Salus in the year 450 after the city's founding, a painting that lasted to our own memory until the temple was burnt in the principate of Claudius. Most recently the painting in the temple of Hercules in the Forum Boarium by the poet Pacuvius has been celebrated. He was born of the sister of Ennius, and made that art more illustrious at Rome through the glory of the stage.

20| Afterwards it was not regarded as the work of honorable hands, unless perhaps one wishes to bring in Turpilius, a Roman knight from Venetia, of our own age, whose beautiful works still survive at Verona. He painted with his left hand, which is recorded of no one before. Titedius Labeo, an ex-praetor, who has recently died in extreme old age, and who had even held the proconsulship of the province of Narbonensis, boasted of his small panels, but the thing was mocked and was even a source of insult.

21| There was also a famous decision, not to be omitted, by leading men concerning painting, when Quintus Pedius, grandson of Quintus Pedius, consular and triumphal, who was given by Caesar the dictator as co-heir to Augustus, was mute from birth. The orator Messala, from whose family the boy's grandmother had come, judged that he should be taught painting, and the deified Augustus too approved; the boy died after making great progress in that art.

22| Distinction, however, grew especially at Rome, as I think, from Manius Valerius Maximus Messala, who first displayed a panel [painting] of the battle in which he had conquered the Carthaginians and Hiero in Sicily, on the side of the Curia Hostilia, in the year from the founding of the city 490. Lucius Scipio did the same, and placed a panel of his Asiatic victory on the Capitol, and they say that his brother Africanus took this ill, not undeservedly, since his son had been captured in that battle.

23| Lucius Hostilius Mancinus, who first broke into Carthage, likewise gave offense, not unlike this, to Aemilianus, by displaying in the forum a painting of its site and the assaults, and standing by himself while the people looked, explaining each detail; by which courtesy he obtained the consulship at the next elections. At the games of Claudius Pulcher the stage-set too caused great admiration for its painting, when ravens, deceived by the image, flew down to it on account of its likeness to roof tiles.

24| Authority for foreign panels at Rome, officially, was first of all made by Lucius Mummius, to whom his victory gave the surname Achaicus. For when in the sale of the booty King Attalus had bought a panel by Aristides, Father Liber, for 600,000 denarii, Mummius, wondering at the price and suspecting some merit in it that he himself did not know, called the panel back, Attalus complaining much, and set it up in the shrine of Ceres. This I think was the first foreign painting publicly dedicated at Rome; thereafter I see that they were also commonly placed in the forum.

25| From this comes that well-known wit of the orator Crassus when pleading beneath the Veteres; when a witness he had addressed pressed him, "Tell me then, Crassus, what sort of man do you know me to be?" "Such a man," he said, pointing to a panel on which a Gaul was most crudely depicted sticking out his tongue. In the forum there was also that painting of an old shepherd with a staff, concerning which the ambassador of the Teutons, asked how much he valued it at, replied that he would not want such a man given to him even if living and real.

26| But the dictator Caesar gave panels their chief public authority, when he dedicated the Ajax and the Medea in front of the temple of Venus Genetrix; after him Marcus Agrippa, a man closer to rusticity than to refinements. There survives at any rate a magnificent speech of his, worthy of the greatest of citizens, on making all panels and statues public property, which would have been better than driving them off into the exile of country villas. Yet that same grimness bought two panels, an Ajax and a Venus, from the people of Cyzicus for 1,100,000 sesterces. In the hottest part of his baths also he had enclosed small panels in marble, removed a little while ago when the baths were being repaired.

27| Above all, the deified Augustus set up in his forum, in its most frequented part, two panels which have a painted figure of War and of Triumph, likewise the Castors and Victory. He also set up those which we shall name in mentioning the artists in the temple of his father Caesar. The same man also, in the senate house which he was dedicating in the comitium, fixed two panels to the wall. Nemea sitting on a lion, herself carrying a palm, with an old man standing by with a staff, over whose head hangs a small panel of a two-horse chariot: Nicias wrote that he had burned this in; for that is the word he used.

28| The admiration of the other panel is that a grown son is like his old father, with the difference of age preserved, an eagle flying over carrying a snake; Philochares has attested that this work is his. Immense is the power of art, if one were to value this one panel alone, when because of Philochares the senate and people of Rome, through so many ages, look at Glaucion and his son Aristippus, otherwise most obscure! Tiberius Caesar also, an emperor of least gentleness, set up in the temple of Augustus himself those which we shall presently indicate. So far be it said of the dignity of a dying art.

29| With which single colors the first painters worked we have said, when we were treating of those pigments among the metals, which are called monochromata from the kind of painting. Who afterwards invented what, and at what times, we shall say in mentioning the artists, since to point out the natures of the colors is the first reason of the work undertaken. At length the art distinguished itself and discovered light and shadow, the difference of colors, by turns, setting each other off. Afterwards brilliance was added, different from light. What lay between these and the shadows they called tonos, but the joinings of colors and the transitions harmogen.

30| Colors, however, are either austere or florid. Each comes about by nature or by mixture. The florid are—those which the patron supplies to the painter—minium, Armenium, cinnabaris, chrysocolla, Indicum, purpurissum; the rest are austere. Of all, some are born, some are made. Born are Sinopis, rubrica, Paraetonium, Melinum, Eretria, auripigmentum; the rest are manufactured, first those we have mentioned among the metals, and besides, of the cheaper kinds, ochra, burnt cerussa, sandaraca, sandyx, Syricum, atramentum.

31| Sinopis was first found in Pontus; hence the name from the city of Sinope. It also grows in Egypt, the Balearic Islands and Africa, though the best is found in Lemnos and in Cappadocia, dug out of caves. The part that has clung to the rocks is outstanding. In the clods its color is its own, on the outside spotted. The ancients used this for brilliance. The kinds of Sinopis are three: red, less red, and in between these a middle one. The price of the best is 2 denarii; its use is with the brush, or if one wishes to color wood;

32| of that which comes from Africa, 8 asses each—they call it cicerculum—; it is redder than the rest, more useful for abaci. The price is the same for that which is called pressior, which is the darkest. Its use is for the bases of abaci; in medicine, however, it is mild [….] and in plasters and malagmata, easy to work whether in a dry composition or a liquid one, against ulcers situated in moisture, as those of the mouth and of the seat. It checks the bowels when poured in; taken as a drink in the weight of a denarius it stops women's fluxes. The same burnt dries roughness of the eyes, especially in wine.

33| Some have wished this to be understood as a kind of rubrica of second rank, for they gave the palm to the Lemnian. This is nearest to minium, much celebrated by the ancients along with the island in which it is born. It was not sold unless sealed, and hence they also called it sphragis.

34| With this they underlay minium and adulterate it. In medicine it is held a splendid thing. For smeared around the eyes it eases fluxes and pains, and keeps aegilopia from running; for those spitting blood it is given in vinegar to be drunk. It is drunk also against ailments of the spleen and kidneys and against women's purgings, and likewise against poisons and the stings of serpents, of land and sea, and therefore it is a familiar ingredient in all antidotes.

35| —Of the remaining kinds of rubrica, the Egyptian and African are the most useful for craftsmen, since they are most absorbed by plasterwork. Rubrica is born also in iron mines. It is also made from burnt ochra in new pots plastered around with clay. The longer it has burned in the kilns, the better it is. All rubrica dries, and therefore among plasters it will suit even sacred fire.

36| Half a pound of Pontic Sinopis, 10 pounds of bright sil, and 2 of Graecensian Melinum, mixed and ground together for twelve days, make leucophorum. This is the glue for gold, when it is spread on wood. Paraetonium has its name from a place in Egypt. They say it is the foam of the sea solidified with mud, and therefore tiny shells are found in it. It is made also on the island of Crete and at Cyrene. At Rome it is adulterated with Cimolian chalk, boiled down and thickened. The price of the best is 50 denarii for 6 pounds. Of the white colors it is the greasiest and the most tenacious of plasterwork on account of its smoothness.

37| Melinum is itself a white, the best on the island of Melos. What is produced on Samos painters do not use, because of its excessive greasiness; reclining, they dig the vein out there among the rocks, searching for it. In medicine it has the same use as Eretrian chalk; besides, it dries the tongue on touch and pulls out hair by a cleansing force. The price is one sesterce per pound. The third of the white colors is cerussa, whose method we have described among the lead mines. There was also an earth by itself found at Smyrna in the estate of Theodotus, which the ancients used for painting ships. Now all of it is made from lead and vinegar, as we have said.

38| Burnt cerussa was found by chance in the fire at the Piraeus, when cerussa was burned in jars. Nicias, mentioned above, first used this. The best is now held to be the Asiatic, which is also called purpurea. Its price is 6 denarii per pound. It is also made at Rome by burning marbly sil and putting it out with vinegar. Without the burnt, shadows are not made. Eretria has its name from its earth. Nicomachus and Parrhasius used this. It cools, softens and fills wounds; if boiled it is prescribed for drying, and it is useful for headaches and for detecting pus; for they understand that pus lies beneath if, smeared on from water, it at once dries.

39| Juba has handed down that sandaraca and ochra are born on the island of Topazos in the Red Sea, but from there they are not brought to us. How sandaraca is made we have said. A counterfeit is also made from cerussa cooked in a furnace. The color ought to be flame-colored. The price is 5 asses per pound.

40| If this is roasted with an equal part of rubrica mixed in, it makes sandyx, although I observe that Virgil thought it was a herb, in that verse: "Of its own accord let sandyx clothe the grazing lambs." The price is half that of sandaraca per pound. Nor are there other colors of greater weight. Among the manufactured colors is also Syricum, with which we said minium is underlaid. It is made from Sinopis and sandyx mixed.

41| Atramentum too will be among the manufactured, although there is also an earthy kind, of twofold origin. For either it exudes in the manner of a salt deposit, or an earth of sulphur color is approved for this purpose. Painters have been found who dug out charcoal from desecrated tombs. All this is troublesome and a novelty. For it is made from soot in several ways, from resin or pitch burned up, for which reason they even built workshops that do not let this smoke out. The most praised is made in the same way from pine torches. It is adulterated with the soot of furnaces and baths, which is used for writing books.

42| There are those who also cook down dried wine lees and affirm that, if that lees comes from good wine, this atramentum gives the appearance of Indicum. Polygnotus and Micon, most famous painters, made it at Athens from grape-skins, calling it tryginon. Apelles devised making it from burnt ivory, which is called elephantinum.

43| Indicum too is brought from India, of a discovery as yet unexplored by me. It is also made among dyers from the black flower which clings to the bronze vats. It is made also from burnt pine torch wood and charcoal ground in a mortar. Wonderful is the nature of cuttlefish in this respect, but none is made from them. All atramentum is finished in the sun, for books with gum, for plasterwork with glue mixed in. What has been liquefied in vinegar is washed out with difficulty.

44| Of the remaining colors, which we have said are given by the patrons on account of the greatness of their price, before all is purpurissum. Silver-chalk is dyed along with purples, and takes up that color more quickly than wool. The first is the best, soaked in a boiling cauldron with the raw drugs; the next, when it has been drawn out, has chalk added to the same liquor, and every time this is done, the quality is lessened in proportion to the number, as the liquor grows thinner.

45| Why is the Puteolan praised rather than the Tyrian or the Gaetulian or the Laconian, whence come the most precious purples? The reason is that it is dyed chiefly with hysginum and rubia, which it is forced to soak up. The cheapest is from Canusium. The price runs from 1 denarius per pound up to 30. Painters, having underlaid with sandyx, then spreading purpurissum over it with egg, produce the brilliance of minium. If they prefer to make purples, they underlay with caeruleum, then lay purpurissum over it with egg.

46| After this the greatest authority is Indicum's. It comes from India, as the slime clinging to the foam of reeds. When seen it is black, but in dissolving it gives a wonderful mixture of purple and blue. A second kind of it is what floats on the vats in the purple dye-works, and is the foam of purple. Those who adulterate it dye pigeon dung with true Indicum, or stain Selinusian chalk or ring-chalk with vitrum. It is tested with charcoal; for what is pure gives the flame of an excellent purple and, while it smokes, the smell of the sea. For this reason some think it is gathered from rocks. The price of Indicum is 20 denarii per pound. In medicine Indicum calms stiffness and attacks, and dries ulcers.

47| Armenia sends what is called by its name. It is a stone, dyed in this case too in the manner of chrysocolla, and the best is that which is closest to caeruleum and shares its color. Its pounds used to be priced at 300 sesterces each. A sand was found throughout the Spains that takes the same treatment; and so the cheapness returned to 6 denarii. It differs from caeruleum by a slight whiteness, which makes this color more delicate. Its use in medicine is only for making hair grow, and most of all on the eyelids.

48| There are still two new colors, from the cheapest: there is green, which is called Appianum and imitates chrysocolla, as if not enough lies had been told about it already; it is made from green chalk, valued at sesterces per pound. What they call anulare is white, with which women's portraits are lit up; it too is made from chalk, with glassy gems from common rings mixed in, whence it is also called anulare.

49| Of all colors, purpurissum, Indicum, caeruleum, Melinum, auripigmentum, Appianum and cerussa love a ground of chalk and refuse to be laid on a wet surface. Waxes are dyed with these same colors for those pictures which are burnt in, a kind foreign to walls but familiar to fleets, and now to merchant ships too, since we even paint the dangers, let no one wonder that pyres too are painted, and it pleases those who are to fight to death, or at least to slaughter, to be carried in splendor. In contemplating so many colors of such great variety, one comes to wonder at antiquity.

50| With four colors only those immortal works were made—of the whites, Melinum; of the sils, the Attic; of the reds, Pontic Sinopis; of the blacks, atramentum—by Apelles, Aetion, Melanthius and Nicomachus, most famous painters, when single panels of theirs were sold for the wealth of towns. Now, when purples are migrating onto walls and India is contributing the slime of her rivers and the blood of dragons and elephants, no painting is famous. All things, therefore, were better then, when there was less abundance. So it is, since, as we said above, watch is kept over the prices of things, not of the mind.

51| And I shall not omit the madness of our own age in painting. The emperor Nero had ordered himself painted as a colossus on a linen cloth of 120 feet, a thing unknown up to this time. This painting, when it was finished in the Maian gardens, was struck by lightning and burned up along with the best part of the gardens.

52| His freedman, when giving a gladiatorial show at Antium, covered the public porticoes with paintings, as is agreed, with true likenesses of all the gladiators and attendants rendered. For many generations now this has been the highest spirit in painting, but to paint gladiatorial shows and display them in public began with Gaius Terentius Lucanus. He gave thirty pairs in the forum over three days for his grandfather, by whom he had been adopted, and placed a painted panel in the grove of Diana.

53| Now I shall run through the celebrated artists in this art in the greatest possible brevity, for such a full account is not part of the work undertaken; and so it will suffice to have named some of them even in passing and incidentally in mentioning others, except for the famous achievements of works which it will be right to touch upon, whether they survive or have perished.

54| The care of the Greeks is not consistent with itself in this part, in celebrating painters many Olympiads later than sculptors and workers in relief, and first in the 90th Olympiad, although Phidias himself is said to have been a painter at the beginning, and a shield painted by him at Athens, and besides it is agreed that in the 83rd his brother Panaenus lived, who painted the inside of the shield of Minerva at Elis, which Colotes had made, a pupil of Phidias and his helper in making the Olympian Jupiter.

55| What of this, that it is likewise agreed that the panel of the painter Bularchus, on which was the battle of the Magnetes, was paid for in gold by Candaules, king of Lydia, last of the Heraclidae, who was also called Myrsilus? So great already was the dignity of painting. This must have happened around the age of Romulus, for Candaules died in the eighteenth Olympiad or, as some report, in the same year as Romulus, unless I am mistaken, the glory of the art being already manifest then, and indeed its perfection.

56| If this must be accepted, it is apparent at once that the beginnings were much older, and that those who painted in monochrome, whose date is not handed down, lived somewhat earlier: Hygiaenon, Dinias, Charmadas, and Eumarus of Athens, who first in painting distinguished male from female, and dared to imitate all figures, and Cimon of Cleonae, who developed his discoveries. He invented catagrapha, that is, oblique images, and to form faces in various ways, looking back or up or down; he marked out the limbs by their joints, brought out the veins, and besides invented folds and hollows in garments.

57| Panaenus indeed, the brother of Phidias, even painted the battle of the Athenians against the Persians at Marathon. So much had the use of colors already become common and so far was the art perfected that in that battle he is said to have painted the leaders as portraits, of the Athenians Miltiades, Callimachus, Cynaegirus, of the barbarians Datis and Artaphernes.

58| Nay more, a contest in painting was also established while he flourished at Corinth and Delphi, and he competed first of all, with Timagoras of Chalcis, and was defeated by him at the Pythian games, as appears from an old poem of Timagoras himself, there being an undoubted error of the chronologers. Others also after these were famous before the 90th Olympiad, as Polygnotus of Thasos, who first painted women in transparent dress, covered their heads with many-colored headbands, and contributed most to painting as the first, since he began to open the mouth, show the teeth, and vary the face from its ancient rigidity.

59| There is a panel of his in the portico of Pompey, which had been before his senate house, on which it is doubtful whether he painted a man going up with a shield or going down. At Delphi he painted a temple, and at Athens the portico which is called the Poecile, free of charge, while Micon painted part of it for pay. His authority was even greater, since the Amphictyones, which is the public council of Greece, decreed him free hospitality.—There was also another Micon, who is distinguished by the surname Minor, whose daughter Timarete herself also painted.—

60| In the 90th Olympiad, however, there were Aglaophon, Cephisodorus, Erillus, Euenor, father of Parrhasius and teacher of that greatest painter, of whom we shall speak in his own years, all of them already illustrious, yet not such that the account should linger on them, as it hurries to the luminaries of the art, among whom Apollodorus of Athens first shone, in the 93rd Olympiad. He first began to render the appearances of things, and first rightly brought glory to the brush. His is the priest adoring and the Ajax struck by lightning, which is seen today at Pergamum. And before him no panel of anyone is shown that holds the eyes.

61| After him Zeuxis of Heraclea entered the opened doors of the art in the 95th Olympiad's fourth year, and brought to great glory the brush, which was already daring something—for let us speak of him still—placed by some wrongly in the 89th Olympiad, though Demophilus of Himera and Neseas of Thasos must have lived then, since it is uncertain which of them was his teacher.

62| Against him Apollodorus, mentioned above, made a verse, that Zeuxis carried off with him the art taken from them. He also acquired such wealth that, in a display of it at Olympia, he showed off his own name woven in gold letters in the checks of his cloaks. Afterwards he began to give his works away, saying that they could not be exchanged for any price worthy enough, as the Alcmena to the people of Agrigentum, the Pan to Archelaus.

63| He made also a Penelope, in which he seems to have painted character, and an athlete, and in that was so pleased with himself that he wrote beneath it a verse that became famous, that someone would sooner envy it than imitate it. Magnificent is his Jupiter on a throne with the gods standing by, and the infant Hercules strangling 2 serpents, with his mother Alcmena looking on in terror, and Amphitryon.

64| He is criticized, however, as being rather heavy in heads and joints, though otherwise so great in his care that, when about to make a panel for the people of Agrigentum, which they were to dedicate publicly in the temple of Juno Lacinia, he inspected their maidens naked and chose five, to render in the painting what was most praised in each. He also painted monochromes in white. His contemporaries and rivals were Timanthes, Androcydes, Eupompus, Parrhasius.

65| This last is reported to have come down into a contest with Zeuxis, and, when the other had brought in grapes painted with such success that birds flew to the stage, he himself brought in a linen curtain painted with truth so exactly represented that Zeuxis, swelling with pride at the judgment of the birds, demanded that the curtain at last be removed and the picture shown; and when he understood his error, he yielded the palm with ingenuous shame, since he himself had deceived birds, but Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.

66| It is reported that afterwards Zeuxis also painted a boy carrying grapes, and when birds flew to them, he came forward with the same ingenuousness, angry at his work, and said, "The grapes I painted better than the boy; for had I perfected this as well, the birds ought to have been afraid." He made also works in clay, the only ones left in Ambracia when Fulvius Nobilior was transferring the Muses from there to Rome. By the hand of Zeuxis at Rome there is a Helen in the porticoes of Philip, and in the shrine of Concord a Marsyas bound.

67| Parrhasius, born at Ephesus, himself also contributed much. He first gave symmetry to painting, first the liveliness of the face, the elegance of hair, the beauty of the mouth, and, by the admission of artists, won the palm in the outlines. This is the highest subtlety of painting. For to paint bodies and the middle of things is indeed a great work, but one in which many have won glory; to make the extremities of bodies and enclose the limit of a painting as it ends is rarely achieved with success in art.

68| For the outline ought to go round itself and so end that it promises other things behind it and shows even what it conceals. This glory was conceded to him by Antigonus and Xenocrates, who wrote on painting, proclaiming it, not only admitting it; and many other traces of his drawing survive on his panels and parchments, from which artists are said to make progress. Yet he seems less when compared with himself in rendering the middle parts of bodies.

69| He painted the Demos of the Athenians also with an ingenious conception. For he showed it variable: wrathful, unjust, inconstant, and the same placable, merciful, compassionate; boastful [….], lofty, humble, fierce and fleeing, and all things at once. He also painted a Theseus, which was at Rome on the Capitol, and a ship's captain in a breastplate, and on one panel, which is at Rhodes, Meleager, Hercules and Perseus; this was three times scorched by lightning there and not obliterated, which in itself increases the marvel.

70| He painted also an archigallus, a picture which the emperor Tiberius loved, and, as Deculo reports, valued at 6,000,000 sesterces, he shut it up in his bedchamber. He painted also a Thracian nurse with the infant in her arms, and Philiscus, and Father Liber with Virtue standing by, and two boys, in whom the carefreeness and simplicity of their age are seen, likewise a priest with a boy standing by holding an incense box and a garland.

71| There are also two most famous pictures by him, a hoplite in a contest running down so that he seems to sweat, another laying down his arms so that he is perceived to gasp. Praised also are Aeneas and Castor and Pollux on the same panel, likewise Telephus, Achilles, Agamemnon, Ulysses. A prolific artist, but one than whom no one has used the glory of his art more insolently, for he even usurped surnames, calling himself habrodiaetus, and in other verses the prince of the art and one who had brought it to completion, above all that he was sprung from the stock of Apollo, and that the Hercules which is at Lindus was painted by him such as he had often seen him in sleep, and,

72| When he had been defeated by a large vote by Timanthes at Samos over an Ajax and the judgment of the arms, he used to say that he took it ill on the hero's account, because for a second time he had been beaten by an unworthy man.—(He painted also, on smaller panels, wanton scenes, refreshing himself with this kind of petulant jest).—

73| For Timanthes had very much ingenuity. His is the Iphigenia celebrated in the praises of orators, in which, when she stands at the altar about to perish, having painted all the bystanders sad, and especially her uncle, and having used up every image of grief, he veiled the face of the father himself, which he could not show worthily.

74| There are other examples of his ingenuity too, such as the sleeping Cyclops on a very small panel, whose size, even so, he wished to express, and painted beside him Satyrs measuring his thumb with a thyrsus. And in the works of this one man more is always understood than is painted, and, though his art is the highest, his ingenuity is nevertheless beyond his art. He painted also a hero, a work of utmost perfection, embracing the art of painting men itself, a work that now stands at Rome in the temple of Peace.

75| Euxinidas in this age taught Aristides, an outstanding artist, and Eupompus taught Pamphilus, the teacher of Apelles. Of Eupompus there is a victor holding a palm after a gymnastic contest. His own authority was so great that he divided painting: the kinds, which before him were two—they called them Helladic and Asiatic—became three on account of him, who was a Sicyonian, the Helladic being divided: Ionic, Sicyonian, Attic.

76| Of Pamphilus there are a Kinship, and the battle at Phlius and the victory of the Athenians, likewise Ulysses on a raft. He himself was a Macedonian by birth, but [….] first in painting educated in all letters, especially arithmetic and geometry, without which he denied that the art could be perfected, and taught no one for less than a talent—500 denarii a year—which fee both Apelles and Melanthius paid him.

77| By his authority it was brought about, first at Sicyon, then in all Greece, that freeborn boys were first of all taught graphice, that is, drawing on boxwood, and that this art was received into the first rank of the liberal arts. There was always indeed this honor for it, that the freeborn practised it, then that persons of respectability did, with a perpetual prohibition that slaves should not be taught. Therefore neither in this nor in toreutice are the works of anyone who has been a slave celebrated.

78| Famous also in the hundred and seventh Olympiad were Aetion and Therimachus. Of Aetion the noted pictures are Father Liber, likewise Tragedy and Comedy, Semiramis from a slave girl winning a kingdom, an old woman carrying torches, and a new bride remarkable for her modesty.

79| But all those born before and to be born afterward Apelles of Cos surpassed, in the hundred and twelfth Olympiad. He contributed to painting almost more by himself than all the others, having also published volumes which contain that teaching. In his art his chief quality was charm, though the greatest painters were of the same age; when he admired their works, he used to say, praising them all, that there was lacking in them that grace of his own, which the Greeks call charis; everything else had fallen to them, but in this alone no one was his equal.

80| And he claimed another glory, when he admired a work of Protogenes, of immense labor and of care anxious beyond measure; for he said that everything was equal between himself and him, or better in Protogenes, but that in one thing he excelled, that he knew how to take his hand off a panel, a memorable precept that excessive diligence often does harm. He was a man of no less simplicity than of art. To Melanthius he yielded in composition, to Asclepiodorus in measures, that is, how far each thing ought to be from each.

81| A clever thing happened between Protogenes and him. Protogenes was living at Rhodes, where Apelles had sailed, eager to know the works of a man known to him by reputation alone, and at once made for his workshop. Protogenes himself was away, but a panel of ample size, fitted on a frame, was guarded by an old woman alone. She answered that Protogenes was out, and asked whom she should say had sought him. "This one," said Apelles, and seizing a brush he drew a line of extreme fineness in color across the panel.

82| And when Protogenes returned, the old woman told him what had been done. They say that the artist, at once contemplating the fineness, said that Apelles had come, that so perfect a work could not fall to any other; and that he himself drew in another color a still finer line over that very line, and as he went away instructed the old woman, if the other came back, to show it and add that this was the man he was seeking. And so it happened. For Apelles returned, and blushing to be beaten, split the lines with a third color, leaving no more room for fineness.

83| But Protogenes, confessing himself beaten, flew down to the harbor seeking his guest, and it was decided that the panel should be handed on to posterity as it was, to the amazement of all, but especially of artists. I hear that it was destroyed in the earlier fire of Caesar's house on the Palatine, having been seen before at Rhodes, containing over a wide space nothing but lines that escape the sight, among the outstanding works of many looking like a blank, and by that very fact alluring and more noble than any work.

84| Apelles had besides a constant habit of never letting a day be so occupied that he did not exercise his art by drawing a line, which came from him into a proverb. He also used to put his finished works out on a platform for passers-by, and, himself hiding behind the panel, listened for the faults that were noticed, preferring the crowd as a more careful judge than himself;

85| They say that he was criticized by a shoemaker because in a pair of sandals he had made one loop fewer on the inside; and when the next day the same man, proud of the correction of his earlier admonition, was finding fault about the leg, Apelles looked out indignant and warned that a shoemaker should not judge above the sandal, which too went into a proverb. For he had affability also, on account of which he was the more agreeable to Alexander the Great, who frequently came to his workshop—for, as we have said, Alexander had forbidden by edict to be painted by anyone else—but when Alexander in the workshop discoursed ignorantly at length, he courteously urged him to silence, saying that he was being laughed at by the boys who were grinding the colors.

86| So great was the authority of right against a king otherwise quick to anger. Yet Alexander showed him honor by a most famous example. For when he had ordered Apelles to paint naked, in admiration of her form, a woman dear to him above all his concubines, by name Pancaspe, and had perceived that, while obeying, the painter had been taken with love, he gave her to him as a gift, great in spirit, greater in command over himself, and no less by this deed than by another victory,

87| because he conquered himself, and gave to the artist not only his bed but also his affection, not moved even by regard for the beloved, though she had been now the king's, now the painter's. There are those who think that the Venus Anadyomene painted by him was taken from her as model. Apelles, kind even to his rivals, was the first to establish Protogenes' standing at Rhodes.

88| He was held cheap by his own people, as domestic things commonly are, and when Apelles asked at what price the finished works could be had, Protogenes had named some small sum; but Apelles demanded fifty talents each, and spread the report that he was buying them to sell as his own. This affair roused the Rhodians to understand the artist, and he did not part with them except to those who raised the price. He painted portraits of such indistinguishable likeness that—incredible to tell—Apion the grammarian left in writing that a certain man who divined from the face of men, those they call metoposcopi, said from them either the years of death to come or those of life past.

89| He had not been in favor in the retinue of Alexander with Ptolemy, in whose reign, driven to Alexandria by force of storm, a royal buffoon having been suborned by the fraud of his rivals, he was invited, and came to dinner; and when Ptolemy was angry and pointed to his own summoners, so that he might say by which of them he had been invited, he snatched an extinguished charcoal from the hearth and drew on the wall an outline of the face, the king at once recognizing the face of the buffoon, though it was only begun.

90| He painted also a portrait of King Antigonus, who was deprived of one eye, the first to think of a method of hiding blemishes; for he made it in profile, so that what was lacking in the body might seem rather to be lacking in the picture, and showed only that part of the face which he could have shown entire. Among his works there are also portraits of the dying. Which are the most famous it is not easy to say.

91| The Venus emerging from the sea, which is called Anadyomene, the deified Augustus dedicated in the shrine of his father Caesar; while she is so greatly praised in Greek verses, she is overcome by the ages, but made illustrious. No one could be found to restore her damaged lower part, but the very injury turned to the glory of the artist. This panel aged with decay, and Nero in his principate put another in its place, by the hand of Dorotheus.

92| Apelles had begun another Venus also for the people of Cos, intending to surpass even that earlier one of his own. Death begrudged it when a part had been finished, nor was anyone found to succeed to the work according to the outlines laid down. He painted also Alexander the Great holding a thunderbolt in the temple of Ephesian Diana, for twenty talents of gold. The fingers seem to stand out and the thunderbolt to be outside the panel—let readers remember that all this was done with four colors—; the pay for this panel he received in gold coin, by measure, not by count.

93| He painted also the procession of the megabyzus, priest of Ephesian Diana, Clitus hastening to war on horseback, and his armor-bearer handing him the helmet he asks for. How often he painted Alexander and Philip it is superfluous to count. His Habron at Samos is admired; at Rhodes Menander, king of Caria, likewise Antaeus; at Alexandria Gorgosthenes the tragic actor; at Rome the Castor and Pollux with Victory and Alexander the Great, likewise the image of War with hands bound behind the back, Alexander triumphing in a chariot.

94| Both of these panels the deified Augustus had dedicated in the busiest parts of his forum, in a moderate simplicity; the deified Claudius thought it better, with the face of Alexander cut out of both, to add portraits of the deified Augustus. They think that by the same hand there is also in the temple of Diana a Hercules seen from behind, so that, which is most difficult, the painting shows his face more truly than it promises. He painted also a naked hero, and by that picture he challenged nature herself.

95| There is also his horse, or there was, painted in a contest in which he appealed from men to dumb four-footed animals. For feeling that his rivals prevailed by canvassing, he showed the pictures of each to horses led in: only to Apelles' horse did they neigh, and this has happened also afterwards, always, so that that test of art is paraded.

96| He made also Neoptolemus on horseback against the Persians, Archelaus with wife and daughter, Antigonus in a cuirass advancing with a horse. Those more expert in the art prefer above all his works the same king seated on a horse, and Diana mixed in a chorus of sacrificing maidens, in which he seems to have surpassed the verses of Homer describing this very thing. He painted also what cannot be painted, thunder, lightning bolts and flashes; they call them Bronte, Astrape and Ceraunobolia.

97| —His discoveries benefited others too in the art; one thing no one has been able to imitate, that he spread over his finished works an atramentum so thin that the very coat, while it called up the reflection of all the colors and guarded them from dust and dirt, appeared to one looking only when the hand was brought near; but it also had a great principle of lighting, so that the brightness of the colors should not offend the eye of those looking as if through a lapis specularis, and so that from a distance the same thing should secretly give austerity to colors that were too florid.

98| His contemporary was Aristides of Thebes. He first of all painted the mind and expressed the feelings of man, which the Greeks call ethe, likewise the disturbances of the mind, a little harsher in his colors. His works [….] a town being captured, an infant creeping toward the breast of a mother dying from a wound, and the mother is understood to feel and to fear that, her milk dead, he may lick blood. This panel Alexander the Great had transferred to Pella, his native land.

99| The same man painted a battle with the Persians, embracing a hundred men in that panel, having contracted for each one ten minae from Mnason, the tyrant of the Elateans. He painted also chariots running, and a suppliant almost with a voice, and hunters with their catch, and Leontion of Epicurus, and an anapauomene on account of her brother's love, likewise Liber and Ariadne, seen at Rome in the temple of Ceres, a tragic actor and a boy in the temple of Apollo,

100| the charm of which panel perished through the ignorance of a painter to whom the praetor Marcus Junius had entrusted it for cleaning on the day of the Apolline games. There was seen also in the temple of Fides on the Capitol his old man teaching a boy with a lyre. He painted also a sick man, praised without end, and he was so strong in his art that King Attalus is said to have bought one panel of his for a hundred talents.

101| At the same time, as has been said, Protogenes also flourished. His native place was Caunus, of a people subject to the Rhodians. Extreme poverty at the beginning, and the greatest intensity in his art, and therefore smaller fertility. Who taught him they do not think is established; some say that he painted ships even until his fiftieth year; the proof being that when at Athens, in the most frequented place, he was painting the propylon of the shrine of Minerva, where he made the famous Paralus and Hammonias, whom some call Nausicaa, he added small warships in what painters call parergia, so that it might appear from what beginnings his works had come to the summit of display.

102| The palm among his panels is held by the Ialysus, which is dedicated at Rome in the temple of Peace. While painting it, he is said to have lived on soaked lupines, because in this way he supported hunger and thirst together and did not clog his senses with excessive sweetness. Over this painting he laid color four times, as three reserves against injury and age, so that when the upper wore away the lower would succeed. In it there is a dog wonderfully made, one that chance painted as well. He did not judge himself to express in it the foam of a panting animal, though in all the rest, which was most difficult, he had satisfied himself.

103| The art itself, however, displeased him: it could not be reduced, and it seemed excessive and to depart too far from truth, the foam being painted, not born from the mouth. In anxious torment of mind, since in painting he wanted what was true, not what was like truth, he had wiped it off and changed the brush many times, in no way approving it to himself. Finally, angry with the art, because it was perceived, he dashed a sponge at the hateful spot of the panel. And it put back the colors it had removed just as his care had wished, and in the picture chance made nature.

104| By his example Nealces too is said to have had a similar success with the foam of a horse, with a sponge likewise dashed, when he was painting a poppyzon restraining it. Thus Protogenes showed fortune also. Because of this Ialysus, in order not to burn the panel, King Demetrius, although only from that side could he capture Rhodes, did not set fire to it, and in sparing the picture the opportunity of victory fled from him.

105| Protogenes was then in his little garden in the suburbs, that is, in Demetrius' camp, and, not interrupted by the battles, did not break off at all the works begun, except when summoned by the king; and when asked in what confidence he was working outside the walls, he replied that he knew the king's war was with the Rhodians, not with the arts. The king set guards for his protection, glad that he preserved the hands which he had spared, and, so as not to call him away too often, himself, an enemy, came to him, and leaving the vows of his victory, among arms and the blows on the walls, watched the artist; and this report follows the panel of that time, that Protogenes painted it under the sword:

106| This is the Satyr whom they call anapauomenos, holding pipes, so that nothing may be lacking to the security of that time. He made also Cydippe and Tlepolemus, Philiscus, writer of tragedies, meditating, and an athlete and King Antigonus, the mother of Aristotle the philosopher, who urged him to paint the deeds of Alexander the Great for the eternity of the subject—an impulse of mind and a certain desire of art carried him rather to these—; last he painted Alexander and Pan. He made also statues in bronze, as we have said.

107| In the same age there was Asclepiodorus, whom Apelles admired for symmetry. To him the tyrant Mnason gave for the twelve gods thirty minae each, and to Theomnestus twenty each for the heroes.

108| To these must be added Nicomachus, son and pupil of Aristides. He painted the Rape of Proserpina, a panel which was on the Capitol in the shrine of Minerva above the chapel of Youth, and, on the same Capitol, one that the commander Plancus had set up, Victory carrying a four-horse chariot up on high. He first added the cap to Ulysses. He painted also Apollo and Diana, and the Mother of the Gods sitting on a lion,

109| likewise the famous Bacchae with Satyrs creeping up on them, and a Scylla, which now stands at Rome in the temple of Peace. Nor was there anyone quicker in that art. For they say that he was hired to paint by Aristratus, tyrant of the Sicyonians, who was making a monument to the poet Telestes, with a day fixed in advance by which it was to be finished, and that he had come not long before it, the tyrant being fired to punishment, and in a few days finished it, with speed and wonderful art.

110| —He had as pupils his brother Ariston and his son Aristides and Philoxenus of Eretria, whose panel, to be put behind none, painted for King Cassander, contained the battle of Alexander with Darius. The same man painted also a Wantonness, in which three Sileni are revelling. He, following the speed of his teacher, found out certain still shorter shortcuts in painting.

111| —To these is added also Nicophanes, elegant and neat to such a degree that few are compared with him in charm; the buskin and the gravity of the art are far from Zeuxis and Apelles.—(Apelles' pupil Perseus, to whom he wrote about this art, had been of this age).—Of Aristides of Thebes the pupils were also his sons Niceros and Ariston, whose work is a Satyr crowned, with a cup; his pupils were Antorides and Euphranor, of whom we shall presently speak.

112| For it is fitting to add those famous in the lesser painting with the brush, of whom was Piraeicus, to be put behind few in art: by purpose, I do not know whether he distinguished himself, since, following lowly subjects, he nevertheless won the highest glory in lowliness. He painted barbers' shops and cobblers' shops and little asses and provisions and the like, and for this was surnamed rhyparographos, "painter of filth"; in these he is of consummate pleasure, since they sold for more than the greatest works of many.

113| On the other hand, says Varro, the panel of Serapion under the Veteres covered all the balconies. He painted stage scenery excellently, but could not paint a man. In contrast, Dionysius painted nothing else than men, and for that reason was surnamed anthropographos, "painter of men".

114| Callicles also made small works, likewise Calates with comic panels, and Antiphilus both. For he painted both the famous Hesione and Alexander and Philip with Minerva, which are in the school in the porticoes of Octavia, and in the porticoes of Philip, Father Liber, Alexander as a boy, Hippolytus terrified at the bull let loose, and in Pompey's portico Cadmus and Europa. The same man for jests painted a man named Gryllus in a ridiculous dress, whence this kind of picture is called gryllus. He himself was born in Egypt and learned from Ctesidemus.

115| It is proper not to be silent about the painter of the temple at Ardea, especially since he was given citizenship there and a poem, which is on the painting itself, in these verses: "Worthy things to the worthy. Marcus Plautius, who is renowned as sprung from broad Asia, adorned with paintings in this place the temple of Queen Juno, wife of the highest, and now and always for this art Ardea praises him"; and these are written in ancient Latin letters,

116| nor must Studius be cheated, in the age of the deified Augustus, who first introduced the most pleasant painting of walls, villas and porticoes and topiary works, groves, woods, hills, fishponds, canals, rivers, shores, whatever one might wish, with various figures of people strolling there or sailing or approaching villas by land on little asses or in vehicles, then people fishing, fowling or hunting or even gathering the vintage.

117| In his exemplars there are famous villas with a marshy approach, women carried on shoulders for a wager with men slipping about, those carried trembling, and besides very many such witticisms of most amusing salt. The same man began to paint seaside towns on open-air walls, of a most agreeable appearance and at the least expense.

118| But there is no glory for artists except those who painted panels. The more venerable appears the prudence of antiquity. For they did not adorn walls for owners only, nor houses that would stay in one place, which could not be rescued from fires. Protogenes was content with a hut in his little garden; in Apelles' plastered walls there was no painting. It was not yet pleasing to color whole walls; the art of all of them kept watch for cities, and the painter was a common possession of the lands.

119| —There was also Arellius, celebrated at Rome a little before the deified Augustus, had he not corrupted the art by a notable disgrace, always pandering to whatever woman he was burning with love for, and on that account painting goddesses, but with the likeness of his beloveds. And so in his painting the harlots could be counted.

120| There was also recently Famulus, a grave and severe painter, and at the same time swollen with florid manner. His was a Minerva who looks at the one looking at her, from whatever angle she was looked at. He painted for a few hours of the day, and that too with gravity, in that he was always in his toga, even on scaffolding. The Golden House was the prison of his art, and therefore no other examples of it greatly survive. Next in authority after him came Cornelius Pinus and Attius Priscus; they painted the temples of Honor and Virtue for the Emperor Vespasian Augustus when he was restoring them, Priscus more like the ancients.

121| —In mentioning painting, the celebrated story about Lepidus must not be omitted, since in the triumvirate, led by the magistrates to a certain place, a woodland lodging, he complained to them threateningly the next day that sleep had been taken from him by the chorus of birds; and they put around the grove a snake painted on a very long parchment, and by that terror the birds are said then to have fallen silent and afterwards to be able to be restrained.

122| Who first thought of painting in waxes and burning in a painting is not agreed. Some think it the invention of Aristides, afterwards perfected by Praxiteles; but encaustic paintings existed somewhat older, as those of Polygnotus and Nicanor, and of Mnesilaus of Paros. Elasippus too inscribed on his picture at Aegina enekaen, "he burned it in", which he would surely not have done had encaustic not been invented.

123| Pamphilus too, the teacher of Apelles, is reported not only to have painted in encaustic but also to have taught Pausias of Sicyon, the first famous in this kind. He was the son of Bryes and at first the pupil of the same. He himself also painted walls with the brush at Thespiae, when those formerly painted by Polygnotus were being restored, and was thought to be much surpassed by the comparison, since he had competed in a kind not his own.

124| The same man also first began to paint paneled ceilings, nor was it the custom before him to adorn vaults in this way; he painted small panels, and especially boys. His rivals interpreted this as his doing because that method of painting was slow. For this reason, intending to give him a reputation for speed, he finished in one day a panel, which was called hemeresios, with a boy painted.

125| In his youth he loved Glycera, his fellow citizen, an inventor of garlands, and by competing in imitation of her he brought that art to a most numerous variety of flowers. Finally he painted her too, seated with a garland, which is among the most famous of panels, called stephanoplocos, by others stephanopolis, because Glycera had supported her poverty by selling garlands. The copy of this panel, which they call apographon, Lucius Lucullus bought for two talents [….] Dionysius at Athens.

126| Pausias, however, made large panels too, as the sacrifice of oxen seen in the portico of Pompey. This kind of painting he was first to invent, which many afterwards imitated and none equaled. Before all, when he wished to show the length of an ox, he painted it facing, not sideways, and its size is abundantly understood. Then,

127| though all who wish things to seem to stand out make them in a whitish color, and what they hide in black, he made the whole ox of a dark color and gave the body of shadow from the shadow itself, showing with great art what stands out on a level surface, and all solid in the broken. At Sicyon he too spent his life, and for a long time that was the home of painting. All the panels thence, being forfeited out of the public holdings on account of the debt of the state, the aedileship of Scaurus transferred to Rome.

128| After him Euphranor of the Isthmus stood out far above all in the 104th Olympiad, the same who has been mentioned by us among the sculptors. He made colossi and marble works and carved reliefs, apt to learn and laborious beyond all, and excelling in whatever kind and equal to himself. He seems to have been the first to express the dignities of heroes and to have taken up symmetry, but he was slighter in the whole of bodies and larger in heads and joints.

129| He also composed volumes on symmetry and colors. His works are a cavalry battle, the 12 gods, and a Theseus, concerning which he said that Parrhasius's Theseus had been fed on roses, but his own on meat. His famous panel is at Ephesus: Ulysses, in feigned madness, yoking an ox with a horse, and cloaked men thinking, and a leader sheathing a sword.

130| At the same time lived Cydias, whose panel of the Argonauts the orator Hortensius bought for 144,000 sesterces, and made a shrine for it in his house at Tusculum; and Antidotus, the pupil of Euphranor. His are a man fighting with a shield at Athens and a wrestler and a trumpeter, praised among few. He himself, more careful than prolific, and severe in colors, became most famous through his pupil Nicias of Athens, who painted women most carefully.

131| He guarded light and shadow and took the greatest care that paintings should stand out from their panels. Of his works there is the Nemea brought from Asia to Rome by Silanus, which we have said was placed in the senate house, likewise Father Liber, in the temple of Concord; and a Hyacinthus, which Caesar Augustus, delighted with it, took with him when Alexandria was captured, and for that reason Tiberius Caesar dedicated this panel in his temple, and a Danae,

132| at Ephesus the tomb of the megabyzus, priest of Ephesian Diana, at Athens the necyomantea of Homer. This he refused to sell to King Attalus for 60 talents and gave it instead to his country, abounding in wealth. He made also large pictures, among which are Calypso and Io and Andromeda; Alexander also, outstanding in the porticoes of Pompey, and a seated Calypso are ascribed to this same man.

133| Of four-footed animals he rendered dogs most successfully. This is the Nicias of whom Praxiteles, asked which of his works in marble he most approved, said: those to which Nicias had put his hand; so much did he attribute to his finishing coat. It is not sufficiently distinguished whether some make another of the same name or this same man flourish in the 112th Olympiad.

134| With Nicias is compared, and sometimes preferred, Athenion of Maroneia, pupil of Glaucion of Corinth, more austere in color and in austerity more pleasing, so that learning shines out in the painting itself. He painted in the temple at Eleusis the phylarch, and at Athens a crowd, which they called syngenicon, likewise Achilles hidden in the dress of a maiden with Ulysses detecting him, and on one panel 6 figures, and that by which he became most famous, a groom with a horse. If he had not died in his youth, no one would be compared with him.

135| There is a name too for Heraclides the Macedonian. At first he painted ships, and when King Perseus was captured he migrated to Athens. There, at the same time, was Metrodorus, a painter and also a philosopher, of great authority in both sciences. And so when Lucius Paulus, after defeating Perseus, asked the Athenians to send him the most approved philosopher possible to educate his children, and likewise a painter to adorn his triumph, the Athenians chose Metrodorus, declaring the same man most outstanding in both requirements, as Paulus too judged.

136| Timomachus of Byzantium, in the age of the dictator Caesar, painted an Ajax and a Medea, placed by him in the temple of Venus Genetrix, sold for 80 talents. The Attic talent Marcus Varro reckons at 6,000 denarii. Equally praised of Timomachus are an Orestes, an Iphigenia in Tauris, together with a Lecythion, a trainer of agility, a Kinship of famous people, cloaked men whom he painted about to speak, one standing, the other seated. The art seemed, however, to have favored him especially in the Gorgon.

137| Aristolaus, son and pupil of Pausias, was among the most severe painters; his are Epaminondas, Pericles, Medea, Virtue, Theseus, an image of the Attic people, and a sacrifice of oxen.—There are those who like also Nicophanes, pupil of the same Pausias, for a diligence which only artists understand, otherwise hard in colors and abundant in sil. As for Socrates, he rightly pleases everyone; of this kind are his daughters of Aesculapius, Hygia, Aegle, Panacea, Iaso, and the lazy man who is called Ocnos, twisting spartum, which a little ass gnaws.

138| With the foremost in each kind pointed out so far, those next to the first will not be passed over in silence: Aristoclides, who painted the temple of Apollo in Delphi. Antiphilus wins praise for a boy blowing up a fire, with the house, otherwise beautiful, glowing, and the face of the boy himself, likewise for a wool-working in which the tasks of all the women are hurried along, Ptolemy hunting, but most famous a Satyr with a panther skin, whom they call aposcopeuon; Aristophon a wounded Ancaeus, struck by a boar, with Astypalaea, the companion of his grief, and a many-figured panel in which are Priam, Helen, Credulity, Ulysses, Deiphobus and Guile.

139| Androbius painted Scyllus cutting the anchors of the Persian fleet, Artemon a Danae with the pirates wondering at her, Queen Stratonice, Hercules and Deianira, and most famous of all, those which are in the works of Octavia, Hercules from Mount Oeta in Doris, his mortality burned away, going into heaven by the consent of the gods, and the story of Laomedon around Hercules and Neptune; Alcimachus, Dioxippus, who won in the pancratium at Olympia without a throw of dust, which they call akoniti; Coenus, pedigrees.

140| Ctesilochus, pupil of Apelles, became known by a petulant picture, Jupiter depicted giving birth to Liber, wearing a headband and groaning like a woman among the goddesses acting as midwives; Cleon, a Cadmus; Ctesidemus, the capture of Oechalia and a Laodamia; Ctesicles, by an outrage against Queen Stratonice. For, received by her with no honor, he painted her rolling about with a fisherman, whom rumor had it the queen loved, and displayed that panel in the harbor of Ephesus, himself carried off under sail. The queen forbade its removal, the likeness of both being wonderfully rendered. Cratinus painted comic actors at Athens in the Pompeion; Eutychides, a two-horse chariot: Victory drives it.

141| Eudorus is noted for a stage scene—the same man also made statues in bronze—, Hippys for a Neptune and Victory. Habron painted a Friend and Concord and images of gods, Leontiscus Aratus as victor with a trophy, and a woman lyre-player, Leon a Sappho, Nearchus a Venus among the Graces and Cupids, a Hercules sad with repentance at his madness,

142| Nealces a Venus, ingenious and skilled, [….] for when he had painted a naval battle of the Persians and the Egyptians, which he wished to be understood as having taken place on the Nile [whose water is like the sea], he declared by an expedient what he could not by art: he painted a little ass drinking at the water's edge, and a crocodile lurking in ambush for it;

143| Oenias a syngenicon, Philiscus a painter's workshop with a boy blowing up a fire, Phalerion a Scylla, Simonides Agatharchus and Mnemosyne, Simus a youth resting, a fuller's workshop celebrating the Quinquatrus, and the same man an outstanding Nemesis,

144| Theorus a man anointing himself, and the same man the killing of his mother and Aegisthus by Orestes, and the Trojan war on several panels, which is at Rome in the porticoes of Philip, and a Cassandra, which is in the shrine of Concord, Leontium of Epicurus thinking, King Demetrius; Theon the madness of Orestes, Thamyras the lyre-player; Tauriscus a discus-thrower, Clytaemestra, Paniscus, Polynices claiming back his kingdom and Capaneus.

145| Among these a striking example will not be omitted. For Erigonus, the color-grinder of the painter Nealces, advanced so far himself that he left even a celebrated pupil, Pasias, brother of the sculptor Aegineta. But this is exceedingly rare and worthy of memory, that the last works of artists and unfinished panels, such as the Iris of Aristides, the Tyndaridae of Nicomachus, Timomachus' Medea and the Venus of Apelles that we have mentioned, are in greater admiration than finished ones, since in them the remaining outlines and the very thoughts of the artists are seen, and in the allurement of commendation there is the grief for the hand put out while it was at work.

146| There are still some not ignoble, though to be mentioned in passing: Aristocydes, Anaxander, Aristobulus the Syrian, Arcesilas, son of Tisicrates, Coroebus, pupil of Nicomachus, Charmantides, of Euphranor, Dionysodorus of Colophon, Dicaeogenes, who lived with King Demetrius, Euthymides, Heraclides the Macedonian, Milon of Soli, pupils of Pyromachus the sculptor, Mnasitheus of Sicyon, Mnasitimus, Aristonidas' son and pupil, Nessus, the son of Habron, Polemon the Alexandrian, Theodorus of Samos and Stadios, pupils of Nicosthenes, Xenon of Sicyon, pupil of Neocles.

147| Women also have painted: Timarete, daughter of Micon, a Diana, which is on a panel at Ephesus, of most ancient painting; Irene, daughter and pupil of the painter Cratinus, a girl, which is at Eleusis, Calypso, an old man and the juggler Theodorus, the dancer Alcisthenes; Aristarete, daughter and pupil of Nearchus, an Aesculapius. Iaia of Cyzicus, a perpetual virgin, in the youth of Marcus Varro at Rome, painted both with the brush and with the burin on ivory, chiefly portraits of women, and at Naples an old woman on a large panel, and also her own likeness in a mirror.

148| No one's hand in painting was quicker, and her art was such that she far surpassed in fees the most celebrated portrait painters of the same age, Sopolis and Dionysius, whose panels fill picture galleries. Olympias also painted some things, of whom only this is remembered, that Autobulus was her pupil.

149| In encaustic painting there were anciently two kinds, with wax and, on ivory, with the cestrum, that is, a little spit, until fleets began to be painted. A third was added, of using the brush with waxes melted by fire, a painting which is not spoiled on ships by sun or salt or winds.

150| They paint cloths also in Egypt, in a manner marvelous among few, smearing white sails, after they have rubbed them, not with colors but with drugs that absorb color. When they have done this, nothing appears on the sails, but when they are dipped in a cauldron of boiling pigment, after a moment they are drawn out painted. And it is a wonder that, though there is one color in the cauldron, from it one color and another arises in the cloth, changed by the quality of the drug that receives it, and afterwards it cannot be washed out. So the cauldron, which would undoubtedly mix the colors if it received them painted, distributes them from one, and paints while it boils, and these cloths, thus scorched, become firmer for use than if they were not burned.

151| —Of painting enough and more than enough. It would be fitting to have joined with these also plastice, of the same work, of earth. To model likenesses from clay was first discovered by Butades of Sicyon, a potter, at Corinth, through his daughter, who, taken with love for a young man, when he was leaving for abroad, outlined on the wall by lamplight with lines the shadow of his face, on which her father pressed clay and made a relief, and set it out hardened by fire with the other earthenware, and they say it was preserved in the Nymphaeum until Mummius overthrew Corinth.

152| There are those who hand down that at Samos Rhoecus and Theodorus first of all invented plastice, long before the Bacchiadae were driven out of Corinth, and that Damaratus, a fugitive from the same city, who in Etruria fathered Tarquinius, king of the Roman people, was accompanied by the modellers Euchir, Diopus and Eugrammus; that by them plastice was handed on to Italy. It was Butades' invention to add red ochre or to model from red clay, and he first placed masks on the ends of the eaves-tiles, which at the beginning he called prostypa; afterwards the same man made ectypa. Hence arose the pediments of temples too. Because of him modellers were called plastae.

153| The likeness of a man, however, from the face itself in plaster, was first of all expressed, and wax poured into that plaster mould for correcting, by Lysistratus of Sicyon, brother of Lysippus, of whom we have spoken. He also began to render likenesses; before him they strove to make them as beautiful as possible. The same man invented also taking impressions from statues, and the practice grew so far that no statues or figures were made without clay. From which it appears that this knowledge was older than that of casting bronze.

154| The most praised modellers were Damophilus and Gorgasus, the same also painters, who had adorned the temple of Ceres at Rome by the Circus Maximus in both kinds of their art, with verses inscribed in Greek by which they signified that on the right were the works of Damophilus, on the left of Gorgasus. Before this temple all things in temples were Tuscan, as Varro is authority, and from this one, when it was being rebuilt, the plaster of the walls was cut out and enclosed in framed panels, likewise the statues from the pediments were dispersed.

155| Chalcosthenes also made unbaked works at Athens, a place called Ceramicos from his workshop. Marcus Varro reports that he knew at Rome a man named Posis, by whom apples and grapes were made that no one could tell by sight from real ones. The same man extols Arcesilaus, a friend of Lucius Lucullus, whose proplasmata were wont to sell for more to artists themselves than the work of others;

156| that by him was made the Venus Genetrix in the forum of Caesar, and that before it was finished, in the haste of dedicating, it was set in place; that by Lucullus a statue of Felicitas was contracted from him for 1,000,000 sesterces, which the death of both prevented; that for Octavius, a Roman knight who wished to make a mixing bowl, a model made of plaster cost a talent. He praises also Pasiteles, who called plastice the mother of chasing and sculpture and carving and, though he was supreme in all of these, never made anything before he modelled it.

157| Moreover this art was worked up in Italy and above all in Etruria; Vulca was summoned from Veii, to whom Tarquinius Priscus gave the contract for an image of Jupiter to be dedicated on the Capitol; that he was of clay and therefore used to be painted with minium; that the four-horse chariots on the pediment of that temple were of clay, of which we have often spoken; that by this same man was made the Hercules which still keeps in the city the name of the material. For these were then the most splendid images of the gods, nor are we ashamed of those who worshipped them as such; for gold and silver they did not make even for the gods.

158| Such images still last in most places; pediments of temples indeed, numerous even in the city and in the municipal towns, of wonderful chasing and art and of lasting strength, are holier than gold, certainly more innocent. In sacred rites indeed, even among these riches, libation is made today not with murrine or crystal vessels but with earthenware ladles, through the unspeakable kindness of the Earth, if one weighs them singly, even setting aside in the kinds of crops,

159| wine, fruits, herbs and shrubs, drugs and metals, her benefits which we have described so far. Nor do the works of the potteries fail to satisfy by their constant use, with jars devised for wine, pipes for water, bath fittings, for roofs baked tiles and small bricks and foundations or what are made on the wheel, on account of which King Numa founded the seventh guild, of potters.

160| Nay, many have preferred to be laid to rest after death in earthenware coffins, as Marcus Varro, in the Pythagorean manner in leaves of myrtle and olive and black poplar. The greater part of mankind uses earthen vessels. Samian ware is still praised for table use. Arretium in Italy keeps this fame, and for cups alone Surrentum, Hasta, Pollentia, in Spain Saguntum, in Asia Pergamum.

161| Tralles has its own works there, and in Italy Mutina, since peoples are made famous in this way too, and these also are carried across seas and lands to and fro, from the notable workshops of the wheel. At Erythrae two jars are shown to this day in a temple, consecrated for their thinness, from a contest between pupil and master as to which would draw out the thinner clay. To the Coan ware belongs the greatest praise for this, to the Hadrian for strength, and with some there are even examples of severity about it.

162| We find that Quintus Coponius was condemned for bribery because he had given an amphora of wine as a gift to a man who had the right of voting. And so that some authority may come to earthenware even from luxury: the tripatinium, says Fenestella, was the name for the highest splendor of dinners; one dish was of murenae, a second of lupi, a third of mixed fish, morals clearly now sinking, so that we can nevertheless rank them above even the philosophers of Greece, since at the auction of the heirs of Aristotle seventy dishes are reported to have been sold.

163| When we were speaking of the nature of birds and said that one dish of Aesopus the tragic actor cost 100 sesterces, I do not doubt that readers were indignant. But, by Hercules, Vitellius in his principate made a dish of 1,000,000 sesterces, for the making of which a furnace had been built in the fields, since luxury has come to the point that even earthenware costs more than murrine.

164| Because of this dish Mucianus in his second consulship reproached, in a complaint, the marshes of dishes to the memory of Vitellius, though it was no fouler than the dish by whose poison, in the case of the defendant Asprenas, the accuser Cassius Severus charged that 130 guests had died.

165| Towns also are made famous by these, as Regium and Cumae. The Galli, as the priests of the gods' Mother are called, cut off their manhood with a Samian potsherd, and not otherwise without destruction, let us believe Marcus Caelius, who charged it as a grave reproach that a tongue should be cut off in this way, as if he himself were already then abusing the same Vitellius. What does life not devise, even using broken potsherds, so that they last more firmly, pounded with lime added, which they call Signina! In this kind it devised even pavements.

166| But there are other inventions of the earth itself. For who can sufficiently wonder that the worst part of it, and therefore called dust, in the hills of Puteoli is set against the waves of the sea, and immersed at once becomes a single stone unconquerable by the waves and stronger daily, especially if it is mixed with Cumaean rubble?

167| The nature of the earth is the same in the region of Cyzicus too, but there it is not dust but the earth itself, cut out to whatever size one pleases and sunk in the sea, which is drawn out as stone. The same is said to happen around Cassandrea, and in a fresh spring at Cnidus within eight months earth turns to stone. From Oropus indeed to Aulis, whatever of the earth is touched by the sea is changed into rock. Not much different from the dust of Puteoli is the finest sand from the Nile in one part of it, not for sustaining seas and breaking waves, but for subduing bodies in the pursuits of the palaestra.

168| From there at any rate it was brought to Patrobius, freedman of the emperor Nero. Nay, I find that this was commonly carried for Craterus and Leonnatus and Meleager, leaders of Alexander the Great, with the rest of military supplies, being about to say no more on this part, no more, by Hercules, than on the use of earth in ceromata, by whose exercise our youth loses the strength of the mind in gaining that of the body.

169| What of this? In Africa and Spain, are not walls of earth, which they call formaceous, since they are stuffed rather than built in a frame with 2 boards put around on each side, lasting for ages, uncorrupted by rains, winds, fires, and firmer than any rubble? Spain even now looks upon the watchtowers of Hannibal and earthen towers set on the ridges of mountains. Hence too the nature of turf is suited to camp ramparts and, against the onrush of rivers, to embankments. Who does not know that the wattles of walls are plastered with clay and raised with unbaked bricks?

170| Bricks are not to be drawn from a sandy or gravelly, and much less a stony soil, but from chalky and whitish earth, or from red ochre, or even from a sand, at least a coarse one. They are best shaped in spring, for at the solstice they become cracked. For buildings they approve none but two-year-old, since the mixture itself of them also ought to be soaked before they are shaped.

171| Their kinds are three: the Lydian, which we use, a foot and a half long and a foot broad, the second the tetradoron, the third the pentadoron. For the ancient Greeks called the palm doron, and therefore gifts dora, because they were given by the hand; so they are named from four and from five palms, as the case may be. The width is the same. The smaller is used in private works, the larger in public in Greece. At Pitane in Asia and in the states of farther Spain, Maxilua and Callet, bricks are made which, when dried, do not sink in water. For they are of pumice-like earth, when it can be worked, most useful.

172| The Greeks, except where building could be made of flint, preferred walls of brick. For they are eternal, if made to the plumb line. Therefore they built both public works and royal houses so: the wall at Athens which looks toward Mount Hymettus, and at Patrae the temples of Jupiter and of Hercules, although they surrounded them with stone columns and architraves, the royal house of Attalus at Tralles, likewise that of Croesus at Sardis, which they made the gerusia, the house of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, which last even now.

173| From Lacedaemon, indeed, a work of plasterwork cut out from brick walls, enclosed in wooden frames on account of the excellence of its painting, was carried to Rome by Murena and Varro in their aedileship to adorn the comitium. Although the work was marvelous in itself, its transport was admired still more. In Italy too there is a brick wall at Arretium and at Mevania. At Rome buildings of this kind are not made, because a wall of a foot and a half does not bear more than one storey, and it is provided that a common wall be not made thicker, nor does the principle of party walls allow it.

174| Let this be said about bricks. Among the remaining kinds of earth, however, the nature of sulphur is perhaps the most wonderful, by which very many things are mastered. It is produced in the Aeolian islands between Sicily and Italy, which we have said are on fire, but the most famous is on the island of Melos. In Italy too it is found, in the Neapolitan and Campanian territory, in the hills which are called Leucogaei. There it is dug out of tunnels and finished by fire. There are 4 kinds:

175| the live, which the Greeks call apyron, is born solid, alone—for the rest consist of a liquid and are made by being cooked in oil—; the live is dug out and is translucent and green. Of all the kinds physicians use this one only. The second kind they call glaeba, familiar only in the workshops of fullers. The third kind too has only one use, for fumigating wools, since it confers whiteness and softness. This kind is called egula; the fourth, from rock, is prepared chiefly for making lamp wicks; for the rest it has such force that placed on fire it detects comitial disease by its smell. Anaxilaus too played a trick with it, adding it to a cup of wine and carrying it around with a coal beneath, the reflection of the blazing flame pouring out a dreadful pallor like that of the dead at banquets.

176| Its nature heats, ripens, but also disperses gatherings in the body, and for this reason it is mixed into plasters and malagmata of that kind. It is also wonderfully helpful for the kidneys and loins in pain when applied with fat; with the resin of terebinth it takes away lichenes of the face, and leprous sores; harpax it is called, from the speed of its offering, for it must be torn off at once.

177| It helps asthmatics too, by licking, and those who cough up pus, and against the stings of scorpions. Live sulphur mixed with nitrum and ground with vinegar and smeared on removes vitiligines, likewise nits, and, mixed with vinegar and sandaraca, on the eyelids. It has also a place in religious rites, for expiating houses by fumigation. Its force is perceived even in hot waters, and nothing else is kindled more easily, from which it appears that a great force of fires is in it. Thunderbolts and lightning flashes also have the smell of sulphur, and their very light is sulphurous.

178| And the nature of bitumen is near. In one place it is a slime, in another an earth, slime emerging from the lake of Judaea, as we have said, earth in Syria around Sidon, a maritime town. Both of these thicken and come together into density. There is indeed liquid bitumen, such as the Zacynthian and that which is brought from Babylon; there too a white is produced. The Apolloniatic is liquid, all of which the Greeks call pissasphalton, from the evidence of pitch and bitumen.

179| A fat kind, of oily liquid, is produced also in Sicily at a spring of Agrigentum, tainting a stream. The inhabitants collect it with the panicles of reeds, to which it clings very quickly in this way, and use it for the light of lamps in place of oil, and also for scab in beasts of burden. There are those who ascribe naphtha also, of which we spoke in the second volume, to the kinds of bitumen, but its burning nature and kinship with fires are far removed from all use.

180| The test of bitumen is that it should shine as much as possible and be heavy, strong-smelling, moderately black, since it is adulterated with pitch. Its force is that of sulphur: it stops, disperses, contracts, glues. Kindled, it puts serpents to flight by its smell. For suffusions of the eyes and white spots the Babylonian is reported effective, likewise for leprous sores, lichenes and itchings of the body. It is also smeared on for gout. All its kinds, moreover, turn back troublesome hairs of the eyes, and cure toothaches when ground in with nitrum.

181| It soothes an old cough and shortness of breath when drunk with wine; it is given in the same way to dysentery patients too and stops the bowels. Drunk with vinegar, however, it disperses and draws off clotted blood. It relieves pains of the loins and likewise of the joints; applied with barley meal it makes a plaster peculiar to it by name. It stops blood, closes wounds, glues sinews. For quartan fevers they also use a drachma of bitumen and as much of hedyosmum worked up with an obol of myrrh.

182| Burnt, it detects comitial diseases. By its smell, with wine and castoreum, it disperses suffocations of the womb; by fumigation it presses back prolapses; drunk in wine it brings on women's purgings; in other use it is smeared on bronze vessels and strengthens them against fire. We have said also that bronze used to be dyed with it and statues smeared. It served also for the use of lime, the walls of Babylon being soldered together in this way. It is liked in the smiths' workshops for dyeing iron, for the heads of nails and for many other uses.

183| Nor is the work of alum smaller or so very different, which is understood to be a brine of the earth. There are many kinds of it too. In Cyprus there is a white and a blacker, with a slight difference of color, though the use is great, since for dyeing wools in a bright color the white and liquid is most useful, and on the contrary for dark or dusky ones the black. Gold also is cleansed with the black.

184| All of it is made from water and slime, that is, from the nature of earth sweating out its moisture. Collected in channels in winter, it is ripened by the summer suns. What of it was early-ripening becomes whiter. It is produced in Spain, Egypt, Armenia, Macedonia, Pontus, Africa, and on the islands Sardinia, Melos, Lipara and Strongyle. The most highly praised is in Egypt, the next in Melos. This too has two kinds, liquid and thick. The test of the liquid kind is that it be clear and milky, free of any roughness when rubbed, with a certain small spark of heat. This they call phorimon. Whether it has been adulterated is detected with the juice of the pomegranate; for the pure kind in a mixture [….]. The other kind is pale and rough and which is stained by gall, and for that reason they call it paraphoron.

185| The power of liquid alum is to bind, to harden, to eat away. Mixed with honey it heals sores of the mouth, pimples and itches. This treatment is carried out in the baths, with 2 parts of honey and a third of alum. It allays the odor of the armpits and of sweat. It is taken in pills against ailments of the spleen and to drive blood out through the urine. It also cures scab, when natron and melanthium are mixed in.

186| Of solid alum the Greeks call one kind schiston, splitting into certain greyish filaments, for which reason some have preferred to call it trichitis. It is made from the stone from which copper too is made, which they call chalcitis, as a kind of sweat of that stone coagulated into a foam. This kind of alum dries less and checks less the useless moisture of the body, and poured into the ears it is of great benefit; or smeared on, it is also good for sores of the mouth and for the teeth, and if it is held in the mouth with the saliva. It is suitably put into eye medicines and into those for the private parts of either sex. It is cooked in dishes until it ceases to liquefy. The other kind, which they call strongyle, is the more sluggish.

187| This too has two kinds: the spongy, which is easily dissolved by any moisture and is wholly condemned; and the better, which is pumice-like, like a sponge with channels of holes, round by nature, closer to white, with a certain richness, without grit, crumbling, and not staining black. This is cooked by itself over pure charcoal until it becomes ash.

188| The best of all is what they call Melian, from the island, as we have said. None has greater power either of binding or of blackening or of hardening, none is denser. It reduces roughness of the eyes; burnt, it is more useful for holding back eye-discharges, and so too for itches of the body. It also stops blood, whether drunk or smeared on externally. It is smeared on with vinegar where hairs have been plucked out, and softens them as they grow back into down.

189| The whole power of all the kinds lies in binding, whence the Greeks have the name. For that reason they are very suitable for ailments of the eyes, and with fat they check flows of blood. With fat it restrains the putrefying of sores, and so too it dries the sores of infants and the eruptions of the dropsical; with the juice of the pomegranate it treats ailments of the ears; it treats roughness of the nails, hardness of scars, pterygia and chilblains; with vinegar, or burnt with an equal weight of gall, it treats phagedaenic sores; with the juice of vegetables, leprous eruptions; with 2 parts of salt, creeping ailments; and mixed with water, nits and the other animals of the hair.

190| So too it benefits burns and scurf of the body, with pitch whey. It is also poured in for sufferers from dysentery, and it compresses the uvula and tonsils in the mouth. For all the uses we have named in the other kinds, it is understood to be more effective when brought from Melos; for as to the remaining uses of life, how great its importance is in finishing hides and wools has been shown.

191| After these we shall treat the kinds of earth that pertain to medicine by themselves. There are 2 Samian earths, which are called collyrium and aster. The merit of the former is that it be fresh and very smooth and sticky to the tongue; the latter is more clodlike; both are white. They are burnt and washed. There are those who prefer the former. They benefit those who spit blood; and they are mixed into plasters that are compounded for drying, and also into eye medicines.

192| Eretria has the same number of varieties, for it is white and ash-colored, and the ash-colored is preferred in medicine. It is approved by softness, and by the fact that if it is drawn across bronze it gives a violet color. Its power and manner of use in healing have been stated among the pigments.

193| All earth is washed (for we shall say it in this place): water is poured over it and it is dried in the sun, then ground again with water and set aside until it settles and can be divided into lozenges. It is cooked in pots that are shaken frequently.

194| Among medicines there is also Chian earth, whitish. Its effect is the same as that of Samian; its use is chiefly for the skin of women. The same is true of Selinusian earth. This is of a milky color and is very quickly dissolved in water; the same dissolved in milk is used to touch up whitewash on plasterwork. Pnigitis is very like Eretrian, only in larger clods and sticky. Its effect is the same as that of Cimolian, only weaker. Ampelitis is very like bitumen. The test of it is whether, taken up with oil, it melts in the manner of wax, and whether a blackish color remains when it is roasted. Its use is for softening and dispersing, and for these purposes it is added to medicines, especially in preparations for darkening the eyelids and for dyeing the hair.

195| There are several kinds of chalk. Of these, two of Cimolian chalk pertain to physicians, a white one and one inclining to purpurissum. The power of both is to disperse swellings and to stop flows, taken up with vinegar. Smeared on, it also restrains abscesses and parotid swellings, and the spleen, and pustules; but if aphronitrum and cyprus and vinegar are added, it treats swellings of the feet, provided that this treatment is done in the sun and after 6 hours is washed off with salt water. With cyprus and wax added it benefits swellings of the testicles.

196| Chalk also has a cooling nature: smeared on, it checks excessive sweating, and taken with wine in the baths it likewise keeps pimples down. The Thessalian is the most highly praised. It is also found in Lycia, near Bubon. Cimolian earth has another use as well, on clothing. For the Sardinian kind, which is brought from Sardinia, is used only on white garments and is useless on coloured ones, and it is the cheapest of all the kinds of Cimolian; the Umbrian is more valuable, and so is the kind they call 'saxum'. The peculiarity of saxum is that it swells when soaked;

197| and so it is bought by weight, the other by measure. The Umbrian is used only for polishing garments. Nor shall I be reluctant to touch on this subject too, since there exists the Metilian law addressed to fullers, which the censors Gaius Flaminius and Lucius Aemilius gave to be put before the people.

198| So much did everything concern our ancestors. The procedure, then, is this. First the garment is washed with Sardinian earth, then fumigated with sulphur; next, if it is of a genuine colour, it is scoured with Cimolian. For a counterfeit colour is detected, turns black and runs under the sulphur; but genuine and costly colours Cimolian softens, and with a certain lustre brightens them when they have been dulled by the sulphur. For white garments saxum is more useful after the sulphur, but it is harmful to colours. Greece uses Tymphaean gypsum instead of Cimolian.

199| Another chalk is called silversmiths' chalk, because it restores the sheen to silver; but there is a very cheap kind which our ancestors made it the custom to use for drawing the line in the circus that marks victory, and for marking the feet of slaves for sale who had been brought from overseas. Such were Publilius Antiochius, founder of the mime stage, his cousin Manilius Antiochus, founder of astrology, and likewise Staberius Eros, founder of grammar, whom our great-grandfathers saw brought in on the same ship.

200| But why should anyone mention these men, who are commended by the honour of letters? Men so marked were seen on the auction-stand: Chrysogonus, Sulla's freedman, Amphion of Quintus Catulus, Hector of Lucius Lucullus, Demetrius of Pompey, and Auge of Demetrius — though she too was believed to be Pompey's — Hipparchus of Mark Antony, Menas and Menecrates of Sextus Pompey, and others after them whom there is now no point in listing, men enriched by the blood of Roman citizens and the licence of the proscriptions.

201| This is the badge of the slave-dealers' herds and the reproach of insolent fortune. We ourselves have seen such men rise so high in power that we saw the insignia of a praetor decreed to them by the senate at the bidding of Agrippina, wife of Claudius Caesar, and saw them all but sent back with laurelled fasces to the place from which they had come with chalked feet.

202| There are, besides, kinds of earth with special properties of their own, of which we have already spoken; but their nature must be recorded in this place too. Earth from the island of Galata and from around Clupea in Africa kills scorpions; Balearic and Ebusan earth kills snakes.

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