Natural History — Book XXXVI

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

1| The nature of stones remains, that is, the chief madness of our morals, even if gems, together with amber, crystallus and murrina, are passed over in silence. For everything we have treated up to this volume may be thought to have been brought into being for the sake of man; but mountains Nature had made for herself, as a kind of framework for holding firm the inward parts of the earth, and at the same time for taming the onrush of rivers, breaking the waves and restraining the least quiet of her parts with the hardest of her materials. We quarry these and haul them away for no other reason than our pleasures — mountains which it was once a marvel even to have crossed.

2| Our ancestors held it almost a portent that the Alps had been crossed by Hannibal and afterwards by the Cimbri; now the Alps themselves are cut into a thousand kinds of marble. Headlands are laid open to the sea, and the world is levelled flat; we carry away what had been set in place as boundaries to divide nations, ships are built for the sake of marble, and mountain ridges are carried this way and that over the waves, the most savage part of nature — and with still more indulgence than when a vessel for cold drinks is sought in the clouds and rocks nearest the sky are hollowed out so that men may drink ice.

3| Let each man think to himself, when he hears the prices paid for these things and sees the masses that are carted and dragged along, how much happier many people's lives are without them. That mortals should do such things — or rather, to speak more truly, suffer them — for what uses, for what pleasures, except to lie among spotted stones! As if the darkness of the nights, half of every man's life, did not rob them of these joys!

4| As one reflects on these things, a sense of shame even for antiquity comes over one. There survive the censorial laws of the Claudii forbidding dormice and other things too trivial to mention to be served at dinners; but no law was ever passed forbidding the importing of marble, or the crossing of seas for that purpose.

5| Someone may perhaps say: 'That is because it was not being imported.' That is false. In the aedileship of Marcus Scaurus men saw 360 columns carried to the stage of a temporary theatre that was to remain in use for scarcely one month, and the laws were silent. But of course they were indulging public pleasures. And why that very thing? By what road do vices creep in more than by public ones? By what other way did ivory, gold and gems come into private use? Or what have we left for the gods at all?

6| But let it be granted that they indulged public pleasures. Did they keep silent even when the largest of those columns, of Lucullean marble and no less than thirty-eight feet tall, were set up in the atrium of Scaurus? Nor was this done in secret or by stealth. The contractor for the sewers forced him to give security against possible damage when they were being hauled up to the Palatine. With so bad an example, then, would it not have been more useful to protect morals? They kept silent while such huge masses were dragged into a private house, past the earthenware pediments of the gods!

7| Nor can Scaurus be thought to have crept up on a city that was inexperienced in this evil and off its guard, as a kind of first beginner in the vice. Already Lucius Crassus, the famous orator, who was the first to own columns of foreign marble, on that same Palatine — Hymettian columns, however, no more than six of them and none longer than twelve feet — had for that reason been called 'the Palatine Venus' by Marcus Brutus in the course of a quarrel.

8| No doubt they let these things pass because morals had been defeated; seeing that the things they had forbidden were forbidden in vain, they preferred to have no laws at all rather than laws made void. This and what follows will prove that we are better men. For who today has an atrium with columns of such size? But before we speak of marbles, we think the worth of the men who worked in them should be set first. First, then, we shall review the artists.

9| The first of all to become famous for carving marble were Dipoenus and Scyllis, born on the island of Crete while the Medes were still in power and before Cyrus began to reign in Persia, that is, at about the fiftieth Olympiad. They moved to Sicyon, which was long the home of all such workshops. The Sicyonians had commissioned statues of the gods from them at public expense; before these were finished, the artists complained that they had been wronged and went off to the Aetolians.

10| At once famine fell on Sicyon, and barrenness, and dreadful grief. When they sought a remedy, Pythian Apollo answered: if Dipoenus and Scyllis should complete the statues of the gods. This was obtained with great payments and much deference. The statues were of Apollo, Diana, Hercules and Minerva — and this was afterwards struck by lightning.

11| When these men were living, there had already been on the island of Chios the sculptor Melas, then his son Micciades, and after him the grandson Archermus, whose sons Bupalus and Athenis were the most famous of all in that art in the time of the poet Hipponax, who certainly lived in the 60th Olympiad. And if anyone traces their family back as far as the great-grandfather, he will find that the origin of the art began with the beginning of the Olympiads.

12| Hipponax had a notably ugly face; for this reason they wantonly exhibited a joke portrait of him to circles of laughing people. Hipponax, indignant, unsheathed the bitterness of his verses to such effect that some believe he drove them to the noose. That is false. For afterwards they made many statues in the nearby islands, for example on Delos, and beneath them they inscribed a verse declaring that Chios was renowned not only for its vines but also for the works of the sons of Archermus. The people of Iasus also show a Diana made by their hands.

13| In Chios itself people tell of a face of Diana, their work, set up on high, whose expression those who enter think sad, and those who leave think cheerful. At Rome there are statues of theirs on the pediment of the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, and on almost all the buildings erected by the deified Augustus. Their father's works, too, were to be found both on Delos and on the island of Lesbos.

14| Ambracia, Argos and Cleonae were indeed filled with works of Dipoenus. But all of them used only the white marble from the island of Paros, a stone that began to be called lychnites, since it was quarried by lamplight in tunnels, as Varro is our authority, though many whiter kinds were found afterward, and recently even in the quarries of the people of Luna. But in the Parian quarries a marvel is reported: when a clod of a single stone was split apart by the wedges of the men dividing it, the image of a Silenus was found to have come to light inside.

15| It must not be left out that this art was much older than painting or statuary, both of which began with Phidias in the eighty-third Olympiad, about 332 years later; and they report that Phidias himself also carved marble, and that a Venus of his at Rome, in the works of Octavia, is of exceptional beauty.

16| Alcamenes of Athens, it is certain, he taught, and he was among the foremost in renown; his are many works at Athens in sacred temples, and the famous Venus outside the walls, which is called Aphrodite in the Gardens. Phidias himself is said to have put the finishing hand to this.

17| A pupil of the same man was Agoracritus of Paros, who was a favorite by reason of his age, and so he is said to have given most of his own works to his master's name. The two pupils, moreover, competed with each other in making a Venus, and Alcamenes won, not by the work, but by the votes of the citizens, who favored their own man against a foreigner. For this reason Agoracritus is said to have sold his statue on the condition that it should not be at Athens, and to have called it Nemesis. It was set up at Rhamnus, a village of Attica, and Marcus Varro preferred it to all statues. There is also in the same city, in the shrine of the Great Mother, a work of Agoracritus.

18| That Phidias is the most famous among all nations that understand the renown of the Olympian Jupiter no one doubts, but so that even those who have not seen his works may know that he is deservedly praised, we shall bring forward small proofs, and of his genius only. For this purpose we shall not use the beauty of the Olympian Jupiter, nor the size of the Minerva he made at Athens, though she is 26 cubits tall (she is made of ivory and gold), but on her shield he engraved the battle of the Amazons, on the swelling circuit of it; on the hollow side of the same shield, the fights of the gods and the Giants; and on her sandals, those of the Lapiths and Centaurs. So fully was every smallest detail capable of art for him.

19| What is engraved on the base, moreover, they call the birth of Pandora: the gods at her birth [….] are 20 in number. The Victory is especially marvelous, and experts admire also the serpent and, under the very spear point, the bronze sphinx. Let these things be said in passing about an artist who can never be praised enough, and at the same time so that it may be known that his magnificence was equal in small things too.

20| The age of Praxiteles we have given among the statuaries; he surpassed even himself in the glory of marble. His works are at Athens in the Ceramicus, but before all is the Venus, not only of Praxiteles but of the whole world, which many sailed to Cnidus to see. He had made two and was selling them at the same time, one of veiled appearance, which for that reason the people of Cos, whose right of choice it was, preferred when he offered both at the same price, thinking it severe and modest; the one they rejected the Cnidians bought, with an immense difference in fame.

21| King Nicomedes afterward wished to buy it from the Cnidians, promising to pay off the whole debt of the community, which was huge. They preferred to endure everything, and not without reason; for by that statue Praxiteles made Cnidus renowned. Its little shrine is entirely open, so that the image of the goddess can be viewed from every side, made, as is believed, with her own favor. Nor is the admiration less from any side. They say that a certain man, seized by love, hid himself at night and clung to the statue, and that a stain is the witness of his desire.

22| There are at Cnidus other marble statues also by famous artists: a Father Liber by Bryaxis, and another by Scopas, and a Minerva; and there is no greater proof of the Venus of Praxiteles than that among these it alone is remembered. By the same hand is also the Cupid that Cicero threw in Verres's face, the one on account of which Thespiae used to be visited, now set up in Octavia's schools; by the same, another, nude, at Parium, a colony on the Propontis, the equal of the Cnidian Venus in renown and in outrage; for Alcetas of Rhodes fell in love with it and left in this one too a similar trace of passion.

23| At Rome the works of Praxiteles are a Flora, a Triptolemus, a Ceres in the Servilian gardens, the images of Good Event and Good Fortune on the Capitol, likewise Maenads and those they call Thyiads and Caryatids, and Sileni in the monuments of Asinius Pollio, and an Apollo and a Neptune.

24| The son of Praxiteles, Cephisodotus, was also heir to his art. Praised of his is the famous group of wrestlers at Pergamum, with fingers pressed into the body more truly than into marble. At Rome his works are a Latona in the shrine on the Palatine, a Venus in the monuments of Asinius Pollio, and, inside the porticos of Octavia, in the temple of Juno, an Aesculapius and a Diana.

25| The praise of Scopas rivals theirs. He made the Venus and the Pothos who are worshipped at Samothrace with the most sacred rites, likewise the Palatine Apollo, a seated Vesta praised in the gardens of Servilius and two campteres around her, whose pair are in the monuments of Asinius, where also is a canephoros by the same.

26| But held in the greatest esteem is the group in the shrine of Gnaeus Domitius in the Flaminian circus: Neptune himself and Thetis and Achilles, Nereids sitting on dolphins and sea monsters or sea horses, likewise Tritons and the chorus of Phorcus and pistrices and many other sea creatures, all by the same hand, a splendid work even if it had been the work of a whole life. Now, however, besides the works mentioned above and those we do not know, there is still a seated colossal Mars by the same hand in the temple of Brutus Callaecus beside the same circus, and in the same place a nude Venus, surpassing that Venus of Praxiteles and destined to make renowned any other place.

27| At Rome, indeed, the multitude of works, and by now the forgetting of them, and still more the heaps of duties and business, all draw people away from contemplation, since such admiration belongs to those with leisure and to great stillness of place. For this reason the artist is unknown even of that Venus which the Emperor Vespasian dedicated in the works of his Peace, a work worthy of the fame of the ancients.

28| There is equal uncertainty in the temple of Apollo Sosianus whether Scopas or Praxiteles made the dying children of Niobe; likewise Father Janus, dedicated in his own temple by Augustus and brought from Egypt, by which of the two hands it is, now indeed even hidden by gold. Similarly in the hall of Octavia the question arises about the Cupid holding a thunderbolt; this alone is affirmed, that it is Alcibiades, foremost in beauty at that age.

29| Many things in the same school give pleasure without known authors: four Satyrs, of whom one holds out Father Liber veiled by a mantle over his shoulders, another Libera likewise, a third checks the crying of an infant, a fourth with a mixing bowl quenches the thirst of the other, and two Breezes making sails of their own garment. Nor is the question less in the Saepta, who made Olympus and Pan, and Chiron with Achilles, especially since fame judges them worthy of a capital security.

30| Scopas had as rivals in the same age Bryaxis and Timotheus and Leochares, of whom we must speak together, since they engraved the Mausoleum in equal shares. This is the tomb made by his wife Artemisia for Mausolus, the petty king of Caria, who met his death in the 107th Olympiad's second year. That this work should be among the seven wonders, these artists especially brought about. It extends from south and north sixty-three feet, shorter on the fronts, 440 feet in its whole circuit; it rises in height 25 cubits and is surrounded by 36 columns. They called the circuit the pteron.

31| On the east Scopas engraved, on the north Bryaxis, on the south Timotheus, on the west Leochares, and before they completed it the queen died. They did not, however, withdraw until it was finished, judging it by now a monument of their own glory and of their art; and to this day the hands compete. A fifth artist also joined. For above the pteron a pyramid equals the lower part in height, drawing itself together in twenty-four steps to the peak of a turning-post; at the top is a marble four-horse chariot, which Pythis made. This, added, completes the whole work at a height of 140 feet.

32| By the hand of Timotheus is the Diana at Rome, on the Palatine, in the shrine of Apollo, whose statue Avianius Evander restored its head to. In great admiration are the Hercules of Menestratus and the Hecate at Ephesus in the temple of Diana behind the shrine, in the contemplation of which the temple wardens warn people to spare their eyes; so great is the radiance of the marble. (Not to be put after them are also the Graces in the entrance of the Athenians, which Socrates made, he being another than the painter, though some think he is the same.) For the old drunken woman of that Myron who is praised in bronze is at Smyrna, among the most celebrated.

33| Asinius Pollio, as he was of keen vehemence, so too wished his monuments to be looked at. In them are Centaurs carrying Nymphs, by Arcesilaus; Thespiads, by Cleomenes; Oceanus and Jupiter, by Heniochus; Appiads, by Stephanus; Hermeroses, by Tauriscus, not that engraver but the man of Tralles; a Jupiter Hospitalis, by Papylus,

34| a pupil of Praxiteles; Zethus and Amphion and Dirce and the bull and the binding rope, from the same stone, works brought from Rhodes, by Apollonius and Tauriscus. These two made a contest over themselves between their parents, professing that they seemed to be Menecrates's but were in fact Artemidorus's natural sons. In the same place a Father Liber by Eutychides is praised, and at the portico of Octavia an Apollo by Philiscus of Rhodes in his own shrine, likewise Latona and Diana and the nine Muses and another Apollo, nude.

35| The one who holds the lyre in the same temple Timarchides made; inside the porticos of Octavia, in the temple of Juno, the goddess herself was made by Dionysius, and another by Polycles; the Venus in the same place by Philiscus, the other statues by Praxiteles. The same Polycles and Dionysius, sons of Timarchides, made the Jupiter that is in the nearest temple; the Pan and Olympus wrestling at that same spot, by Heliodorus, which is the second famous group of wrestlers in the world; the Venus washing herself, Daedalsas; the standing one, Polycharmus.

36| From the honor paid it is apparent that the work of Lysias was held in great authority, which on the Palatine, above the arch, the deified Augustus dedicated in honor of Octavius his father in a little shrine adorned with columns, that is, a four-horse chariot and car and an Apollo and Diana from one stone. In the gardens of Servilius I find praised an Apollo by Calamis, that engraver, boxers by Dercylides, and Callisthenes the writer of histories by Amphistratus.

37| Nor after this is there fame of many more, the renown of some who excel in their works being obstructed by the number of artists, since neither does one man take the glory nor can several be named equally, as in the Laocoon, which is in the house of the Emperor Titus, a work to be preferred to all in both the art of painting and that of statuary. Out of one stone, he and his sons and the wondrous coils of the snakes, by decision of a council, the highest artists Hagesander and Polydorus and Athenodorus of Rhodes made.

38| Similarly the Palatine houses of the Caesars were filled with most approved statues by Craterus with Pythodorus, by Polydeuces with Hermolaus, and by another Pythodorus with Artemon, while Aphrodisius of Tralles stands alone. Diogenes of Athens decorated the Pantheon of Agrippa; on the columns of that temple the Caryatids are esteemed as works of rare quality, as are the statues set on the pediment, but on account of the height of the place these are less celebrated.

39| Without honor, and in no temple, is the Hercules to whom the Carthaginians had sacrificed a human victim every year, standing on the ground in front of the entrance to the Portico of the Nations. There were also set up Thespiads at the temple of Felicitas, one of whom a Roman knight, Iunius Pisciculus, loved, as Varro relates, an admirer also of Pasiteles, who also wrote five volumes on the famous works in the whole world.

40| Born in the Greek coast of Italy and given Roman citizenship together with those towns, he made an ivory Jupiter in the temple of Metellus, by which one goes to the Campus. It happened to him, when in the dockyards where the African wild beasts were, he was looking through a cage and engraving a lion, that a panther burst out of another cage, to the no light danger of that most careful artist. He is said to have made a good many works; what he made is not recorded by name.

41| Varro also praises Arcesilaus, saying that he himself had a marble lioness of his, and winged Cupids playing with her, of whom some held her tied up, others forced her to drink from a horn, others put little slippers on her, all from one stone. The same writer states that the fourteen nations that stand around Pompey were made by Coponius.

42| I find that Canachus too, praised among the statuaries, made works in marble. Nor is it fitting that Saurus and Batrachus be forgotten, who made the temples enclosed within the porticos of Octavia, themselves Spartans by nation. Some think that they were also very powerful in means and built them at their own expense, hoping for an inscription, and that when this was refused they nevertheless claimed it in another way. There are certainly even now carved on the bases of the columns, as proof of their names, a lizard and a frog.

43| In the temple of Jupiter, the painting and all the remaining furnishings from these consist of feminine subjects; for it had been made for Juno, but when the statues were being carried in, the bearers are said to have exchanged them, and this was kept out of scruple, as if the gods themselves had thus divided the seats. Therefore in the temple of Juno too there is the furnishing that ought to have been Jupiter's. There are also those who gained fame in tiny marble works: Myrmecides, whose four-horse chariot with its driver a fly covered with its wings, and Callicrates, whose ants' feet and other limbs cannot be made out.

44| Let this be said about the carvers of marble and the greatest renown of artists, in the course of which treatment it comes to mind that spotted marble then had no authority. They made works also from Thasian, equal to the marble of the Cyclades islands, and from Lesbian; this is a little more livid. Many-colored spots, however, and the whole apparatus of marbles, even Menander, a most careful interpreter of luxury, was the first to touch, and rarely.

45| At last they used columns in temples, and not for the sake of splendor (for such things were not yet understood), but because they could not otherwise be set up more firmly. So the temple of Olympian Jupiter at Athens was begun, from which Sulla had carried columns to the buildings of the Capitol. Yet there was a difference between stone and marble already in Homer too;

46| for he speaks of one struck by a marble rock, but only so far; even royal houses, when at their most splendid, he adorns, besides bronze, gold, electrum and silver, with ivory only. The first to show these many-colored spots, as I judge, were the quarries of the Chians, when they were building walls, with the witty remark of Marcus Cicero upon it (for they were showing it to everyone as magnificent): I should wonder much more, he said, if you had built in Tiburtine stone. And, by Hercules, there would have been no honor at all for paintings, certainly not so great, without some authority of marbles.

47| Whether the cutting of it into slabs was the invention of Caria, I do not know. The most ancient, so far as I shall find, is at Halicarnassus, where the house of Mausolus was adorned with Proconnesian marble, with walls of brick. He died in the 107th Olympiad, in its second year, 403 from the founding of the city of Rome.

48| Cornelius Nepos relates that the first at Rome to cover the whole walls of his house on the Caelian Hill with a veneer of marble was Mamurra, a Roman knight born at Formiae, prefect of engineers to Gaius Caesar in Gaul, so that nothing might be lacking in unworthiness, the thing being invented by such an author. For this is the Mamurra torn apart in the poems of Catullus of Verona, whose own house, as the fact is, said more clearly than Catullus that he had whatever Long-haired Gaul had had. For the same Nepos adds that he was the first to have in his whole house no column except of marble, and all of them solid, of Carystian or Lunensian.

49| Marcus Lepidus, colleague of Quintus Catulus in the consulship, was the first of all to place thresholds of Numidian marble in a house, to great reproach. He was consul in the year of the city 676. This is the first trace I find of Numidian marble imported, not however in columns or veneers, as with the Carystian above, but in a block and in the humblest use, thresholds. Four years after this Lepidus, Lucius Lucullus was consul, who gave his name, as is evident from the fact, to Lucullan marble, being greatly delighted with it, and was the first to bring it to Rome; it is black otherwise, while the rest are recommended by spots or colors.

50| It is produced on the island of Melos, and this is almost the only marble that took its name from a lover. Among these first, as I judge, the stage of Marcus Scaurus had marble walls; I could not easily say whether of cut slabs or polished from solid blocks, as is today the temple of Jupiter Tonans on the Capitol. For I do not yet find traces of cut marble in Italy.

51| But whoever first discovered how to cut it and divide it for luxury was of a ruthless mind. It is done with sand, and seems to be done with iron, the saw pressing the sand along a very thin line and by the very drawing back and forth doing the cutting. The Ethiopian sand is most approved, for this too has been added, that what would cut marble should be sought all the way from Ethiopia, indeed even among the Indians, where it was unworthy of strict morals even to seek pearls.

52| The Indian is next in praise; but the Ethiopian is softer; it cuts with no roughness, while the Indian does not polish equally, but those who polish marbles are told to rub with it after it has been burnt. Naxian has a similar fault, and so has the Coptic, which is called Egyptian. These were the ancient kinds for cutting marbles. Later one was found, no less to be approved, from a certain shallow of the Hadriatic Sea, laid bare by the tide, by an observation not easy to make.

53| Now, however, the fraud of craftsmen has dared to cut with any sand from all the rivers, a loss which very few understand. For coarser sand wears with looser segments and eats away more marble and leaves greater work of roughness to the polishing; thus the cut slabs are made thinner. Again, Theban is suited to polishings, and that which is made from porus stone or from pumice.

54| For polishing marble statues, and for engraving and filing gems also, Naxian was long preferred before others. So are called the whetstones born in the island of Cyprus. Those brought from Armenia afterward overcame them. The kinds and colors of marbles it is not fitting to tell, with so great knowledge of them, nor is it easy to enumerate them in so great a multitude. For in what place, taking each in turn, is there not found a marble of its own? And yet the most celebrated kinds have been told over the circuit of the lands, with their peoples.

55| Not all, moreover, are produced in quarries, but many are scattered under the earth, and are of the most precious kind, such as the Lacedaemonian green, more cheerful than all, as also the Augustan and then the Tiberian, first discovered in Egypt in the principates of Augustus and Tiberius. Their difference from ophites is that the latter is like the spots of serpents, whence it also took its name, while these gather their spots in a different way, the Augustan curled in waves into whorls, the Tiberian with whiteness scattered, not rolled up.

56| And no columns are found of ophites except quite small ones. There are two kinds of it: a soft, of white, and a hard, of blackish. Both are said to relieve headaches when bound on, and also the strokes of serpents. Some order the whitish to be bound on those who are frenzied and lethargic. Against serpents, moreover, of those some especially praise the one they call tephrias, from the color of ashes. It is also called Memphites, from the place, of a gem-like nature. Its use is to be ground and, for those things that are to be burnt or cut, smeared on with vinegar; the body is thus made numb and does not feel the pain.

57| Porphyrites is red, in the same Egypt; from the same, with white points intervening, one is called leptopsephos. The quarries suffice for cutting masses of whatever size. From it statues were brought to Rome from Egypt for Claudius Caesar by his procurator Vitrasius Pollio, the novelty not much approved; no one afterward at least imitated it.

58| Egypt found also in Ethiopia the stone they call basanites, of the color and hardness of iron, whence it also gave it the name. Never has a larger one been found than the one dedicated in the temple of Peace by the Emperor Vespasian Augustus as an image of the Nile, with sixteen children playing around it, by whom are understood as many cubits of the greatest rise of that river as it grows. A not unlike one is told of at Thebes, dedicated in the shrine of Serapis, to a statue, as they think, of Memnon, which they report, touched by the rays at each daily sunrise, crackles.

59| Onyx our elders thought is born only in Arabia's mountains and nowhere else, Sudines said in Carmania. Cornelius Nepos relates that it was a great marvel when drinking vessels were first made from it, then feet of couches and chairs, when Publius Lentulus Spinther had shown amphorae of it of the size of Chian jars, and after five years then he had seen columns of 32 feet in length.

60| There was variation in this stone afterward too, for as a notable marvel Cornelius Balbus placed four moderate ones in his theater; we have seen 30 larger ones in the dining room which Callistus, one of the freedmen of Claudius Caesar, known for his power, built for himself. Some call this stone alabastrites; they hollow it out also for perfume vessels, since it is said to keep them best uncorrupted.

61| The same, burnt, suits plasters. It is produced around Egyptian Thebes and Damascus in Syria. This one is whiter than the others, but the most approved is in Carmania, next in India, and now indeed also in Syria and Asia, the cheapest and without any shine in Cappadocia. Those of honey color are approved the most, spotted in whorls and not translucent. Faults in them are a horn color or a white one, and whatever is like glass.

62| Many think that lygdinos, found on Paros in a size that does not exceed dishes and mixing bowls, differ little from it in trustworthiness for perfumes; formerly they used to be brought only from Arabia; they are of exceptional whiteness. Great is the honor also of two of contrary nature to each other: the corallitic, found in Asia, in size not beyond two cubits each, in whiteness next to ivory and with some resemblance to it. From the opposite side is the black Alabandic, named from its land, although it is born also at Miletus, yet tending more toward purple in appearance. The same is melted by fire and poured for the use of glass.

63| Theban stone, speckled with golden drops, is found in the part of Africa ascribed to Egypt, suited, by a certain natural usefulness, to small whetstones for grinding eye salves; around Syene in the Thebaid there is syenites, which they formerly called pyrrhopoecilon.

64| Kings made beams from it in a kind of rivalry, calling them obelisks, dedicated to the godhead of the Sun. The likeness of his rays is in the shape, and so it is signified by the Egyptian name. The first of all to establish this was Mespheres, who was king in the City of the Sun, commanded by a dream; this very thing is inscribed on it, for those carvings and figures that we see are Egyptian letters.

65| Afterward other kings also cut them out. Sesothes set up four in the above-mentioned city, forty-eight cubits each in length, and Rhamses, in whose reign Ilium was taken, one of 140 cubits. The same [….] when they had departed from there, where the palace of Mnevis had been, set up another, of 120 cubits in length, but of prodigious thickness, eleven cubits on each side. This work they say 120,000 men made.

66| The king himself, when it was about to be raised, and fearing that the machines would not suffice for the weight, in order to announce a greater danger to the care of the craftsmen, bound his own son to the top, so that his safety, among those who were working at it, might benefit the stone as well. Out of this admiration for the work it came about that when king Cambyses was storming that town, and the fires had reached the foundations of the obelisk, he ordered them put out, he who had had no respect for the city, out of reverence for the massive work.

67| There are also two others, one set up by Zmarres, the other by Phius, without inscriptions, forty-eight cubits each. At Alexandria Ptolemy Philadelphus set up one of eighty cubits. King Necthebis had cut it out plain, and more work was found in carrying it down and setting it up than in cutting it out. Some relate that it was carried down by the architect Satyrus on a raft, Callixenus that it was by Phoenix, the Nile being led by a canal right up to the lying obelisk,

68| and two ships spread wide in breadth, loaded with foot-sized bricks of the same stone, reckoned at double the obelisk's weight by a twofold measure, in such a way that they went under the obelisk, which hung by its ends on the banks on each side; afterward, when the bricks had been taken out, the lightened ships received the burden; it was set up, moreover, on six die-shaped blocks from the same mountain, and the craftsman was given 50 talents. This was placed in the Arsinoeum by the king mentioned above, as a gift of love to his wife, who was also his sister, Arsinoe.

69| From there, since it was in the way of the dockyards, a certain Maximus, prefect of Egypt, moved it to the forum, its top cut off, wishing to add a gilded pinnacle, which he afterward gave up. And there are two others at Alexandria at the harbor in the temple of Caesar, which king Mesphres cut out, forty-two cubits each. Above all there came the difficulty of carrying them down to Rome by sea, and the ships became a great spectacle.

70| The deified Augustus had dedicated the ship that had brought the former to Puteoli, for the sake of the marvel, in permanent dockyards; it was consumed by fire. The deified Claudius, after preserving it for some years, sank the ship in which Gaius Caesar had brought one, more wonderful than all that have ever been seen at sea, and in the ship itself, towers having been built up of dust at Puteoli, brought it to Ostia for the sake of the harbor. From this there is another care, for ships that go up the Tiber, by which experiment it became clear that this river has no less water than the Nile.

71| That obelisk, however, which the deified Augustus set up in the great circus was cut out by king Psemetnepserphreus, in whose reign Pythagoras was in Egypt, of 85 feet and three-quarters, besides the base of the same stone; but the one in the Campus Martius, nine feet smaller, by Sesothis. Both inscribed, they contain an interpretation of the nature of things according to the philosophy of the Egyptians.

72| To the one in the Campus the deified Augustus added a wonderful use for finding the shadows of the sun and thus the lengths of days and nights, a stone pavement having been laid to the length of the obelisk, with which the shadow would be equal on the sixth hour of the day of the winter solstice completed, and little by little, along the rules that are inlaid in bronze, would decrease day by day and again increase, a thing worthy of being known, by the ingenuity of the mathematician Facundus Novus. He added a gilded ball to the point, at whose top the shadow would be gathered into itself, the point otherwise throwing it out of measure, the reasoning, as they say, having been understood from a man's head.

73| This observation has for nearly 30 years now not agreed, whether by the discordant course of the sun itself and some change of the sky, or because the whole earth has been moved somewhat from its center (as I learn is detected in other places too), or because by the tremors of the city the gnomon has been twisted there alone, or because by floods of the Tiber a settling has been caused in the mass, although the foundations are said to have been driven into the earth to the height of the load placed upon them.

74| The third is at Rome in the Vatican, in the circus of the emperors Gaius and Nero (of all, one alone was broken in the moving), which Nencoreus, son of Sesosis, had made. Of the same king there remains also another, of a hundred cubits, which, when his sight was restored after blindness, he consecrated to the Sun on the instruction of an oracle.

75| Let the pyramids too be mentioned in passing, in the same Egypt, an idle and foolish display of the money of kings, since the reason for making them is reported by most to be that they might not leave money to successors or to rivals plotting against them, or that the common people might not be idle. There was much vanity of those men about this.

76| Traces of several begun pyramids remain. One is in the Arsinoite nome, two in the Memphite, not far from the labyrinth, of which also we shall speak, and as many where the lake of Moeris was, that is, a great ditch, but one told among the Egyptians among the wonders and memorable things. The tops of these are said to stand out of the water by 200 cubits. The remaining three, which have filled the world with their fame, are plainly visible from every side to those sailing up, and are placed in the part of Africa on a rocky and barren mountain between the town of Memphis and what we said is called the Delta, less than 4 miles from the Nile, from Memphis 7,500, by a village close by which they call Busiris; in this they are accustomed to climb them.

77| In front is the sphinx, which should be told of even more, about which they are silent, the divinity of the neighbors. They think that king Harmais is buried in it and want it to seem brought in; it is, however, worked from the natural rock. The face of the monster is honored with rubrica. The circuit of the head across the forehead measures a hundred and two feet, the length is 143 feet, the height measured from the belly up to the top of the asp on the head is 61½.

78| The largest pyramid consists of stone from the Arabian quarries. 360,000 men are reported to have built it in 20 years. The three, however, were made in 88 years and 4 months.

79| Those who have written about them (there are Herodotus, Euhemerus, Duris of Samos, Aristagoras, Dionysius, Artemidorus, Alexander Polyhistor, Butoridas, Antisthenes, Demetrius, Demoteles, Apion), among all these it is not agreed by whom they were made, by a most just chance, the authors of so great a vanity having been forgotten. Some of them have reported that 1,600 talents were spent on radishes and garlic and onions.

80| The largest occupies seven iugera of ground. At equal intervals of the four angles, the sides measure 783 feet each; the height from the peak to the ground measures 725 feet, the circuit of the peak 16½ feet. The single intervals of the second, through the four angles, take in 757½ feet. The third, smaller indeed than those mentioned, but much more to be looked at, rises of Ethiopian stones, 363 feet between the angles.

81| No traces of buildings exist, the sand around being pure far and wide, like lentils, such as is in the greater part of Africa. The sum of the inquiries is by what method the rubble was laid under to so great a height. Some say that natron and salt were heaped up as the work rose, and when it was finished dissolved by irrigation from the river; others, that bridges built of bricks made of mud, and when the work was done the bricks distributed to private houses, for they do not think the Nile could have watered it, being much lower. In the largest pyramid there is inside a well of 86 cubits; they think the river was let in there.

82| The measure of their height, and of every like thing, Thales of Miletus found how to take, by measuring the shadow at the hour when it is usually equal to the body. These are the wonders of the pyramids, and the last of them, that no one may wonder at the wealth of kings, is that the smallest of them, but the most praised, was made by the courtesan Rhodopis. She was once the fellow slave and companion of Aesop, the philosopher of fables, the greater wonder being that such wealth was gathered by a courtesan's trade

83| Another tower made by a king on the island of Pharos, which holds the harbor of Alexandria, is also magnified, which they report cost 800 talents, with the great spirit, not to omit anything, of King Ptolemy, in that he permitted the name of Sostratus of Cnidus, the architect, to be inscribed in the very structure. Its use is to show fires to ships' night course, to give notice of shoals and the entrance of the harbor, such as now blaze in several places, as at Ostia and Ravenna. The danger is in the continuity of the fires, lest it be thought a star, since from far off the appearance of flames is similar. This same architect is reported to have made, first of all, a hanging walkway at Cnidus.

84| Let us speak also of the labyrinths, the most portentous work of human expense, yet not, as may be thought, false. It lasts even now in Egypt in the Heracleopolite nome, the first one made, 3,600 years ago, as they report, by king Petesuchis or Tithoes, although Herodotus says that the whole work was of 12 kings and of Psammetichus the last. They interpret the reasons for making it variously: Demoteles, that it was the palace of Moteris; Lyceas, the tomb of Moeris; several, that it was built sacred to the Sun, which is most believed.

85| From this at any rate there is no doubt that Daedalus took the pattern of that labyrinth which he made in Crete, but imitated only the hundredth part of it, which contains the windings of the paths and the meetings and inextricable retracings, not (as we see in pavements and in boys' games on the field) containing in a short strip many miles of walking, but with frequent doors put in to deceive the meetings and to turn back to the same wanderings.

86| This was the second labyrinth after the Egyptian one, the third in Lemnos, the fourth in Italy, all roofed with vaults of polished stone, the Egyptian one (which I indeed marvel at) with an entrance of stone from Paros and with columns, the rest of syenites, in masses put together which not even the ages could dissolve, the Heracleopolites helping, who looked at the work with wondrous hatred.

87| It is not possible to relate the layout of that work and its single parts, since it is divided into regions and prefectures, which they call nomes, 21 vast houses being assigned to their names, and besides it contains the temples of all Egypt's gods, and over this has enclosed Nemesis in 40 little shrines, and several pyramids of forty ulnae, each holding six arourae at the base. Already wearied with going, they come to that inextricable wandering of the ways,

88| Moreover there are upper rooms lofty on slopes, and porticos are descended by ninety steps each; inside are columns of porphyrites stone, images of the gods, statues of kings, monstrous figures. Some of the houses are so situated that for those opening the doors a terrible thunder arises inside, and in the greater part the passage is through darkness. Again, outside the wall of the labyrinth there are other masses of buildings; they call it the pteron. From there other underground houses are made by tunnels dug through.

89| Only a few things there were restored, by Chaeremon alone, the eunuch of king Necthebis, 500 years before Alexander the Great. This too is reported, that the vault was supported by beams of spina boiled in oil, while squared stones were rising into arches.

90| Of the Cretan labyrinth enough has been said. The Lemnian, like that one, was more memorable only for 150 columns, whose drums hung so balanced in the workshop that they were turned on the lathe by a boy rotating them. The architects were Zmilis and Rhoecus and Theodorus, natives. And relics of it remain even now, while of the Cretan and the Italian there remain no traces.

91| For it is fitting to speak also of the Italian, which Porsina, king of Etruria, made for himself for the sake of his tomb, so that the vanity of foreign kings should also be surpassed by Italians. But since the fabulousness exceeds everything, we shall use in this exposition the words of Marcus Varro himself: "He was buried beneath the city of Clusium, in which place he left a monument of squared stone, square, each single side thirty feet, fifty high. In this square base there is inside an inextricable labyrinth, into which if anyone has entered without a ball of flax thread he cannot find the way out.

92| Above this square stand five pyramids, four in the corners and one in the middle, wide at the bottom, seventy-five feet each, high, a hundred and fifty, so tapering that on the top a single bronze disk and a hat are placed on all of them, from which bells fitted to chains hang, which, stirred by the wind, carry their sounds far, as was once done at Dodona.

93| Above this disk four pyramids stand on top, one each, a hundred feet high. Above these on a single floor, five pyramids." Varro was ashamed to add their height; Etruscan fables report it was the same as that of the whole work up to them, he having sought, in mad folly, glory at an expense that would profit no one, and besides having worn out the strength of his kingdom, so that nonetheless the praise of the artist might be greater.

94| A hanging garden is also read of, indeed a whole town, Egyptian Thebes, the kings being accustomed to lead armed armies out beneath it with none of the townspeople noticing; even this is less marvelous than that a river runs through the midst of the town. If these things had been so, it is beyond doubt that Homer would have said so, when he proclaimed a hundred gates there.

95| A true object of admiration among Greek magnificence is the temple of Ephesian Diana, made in 120 years by the whole of Asia. They made it on marshy ground, so that it should not feel earthquakes or fear chasms, and again, so that the foundations of so great a mass should not be placed on a slippery and unstable ground, they laid under them trodden charcoal, then fleeces of wool. The length of the whole temple is 425 feet, the width 225, the columns 127, made by single kings, 60 feet in height, of which 36 are carved, one by Scopas. The architect Chersiphron was in charge of the work.

96| The crowning marvel was that the architraves of so great a mass could be raised; he achieved this with sacks full of sand, a gentle slope heaped up above the tops of the columns, gradually emptying the lowest ones, so that the work settled little by little in its place. This was most difficult at the very lintel, which he was placing on the doors; for that was the greatest mass, and it did not settle in its bed, the artist, in his anguish, resolving at last on death.

97| They report that in that thought, wearied, in the time of night, in sleep, he saw before him the goddess for whom the temple was being made, urging him to live: she had set the stone in place. And so it appeared on the next day; it seemed corrected by its own weight. The remaining ornaments of that work take up the space of several books, and have nothing to do with the showing of nature.

98| The shrine at Cyzicus also lasts, in which the artist put under all the joints of the polished stone a gold thread, to dedicate an ivory Jupiter inside, with a marble Apollo crowning him. The joints therefore shine through with the finest hairlike threads, and refresh the statues with a gentle breath, and besides the artist's genius, the material itself, hidden though it is, is understood in the price of the work.

99| In the same town there is a stone called the Fugitive; the Argonauts had used it as an anchor and left it there. This, which often ran away from the prytaneum (so the place is called), they bound with lead. In the same city near the gate that is called Thracian, seven towers multiply the voices they receive by a numerous rebounding. The name Echo has been given to this marvel by the Greeks.

100| And this indeed happens by the nature of places, and mostly of valleys; there it happens by chance, but at Olympia by art, in a marvelous manner, in the portico which for that reason they call the heptaphonon, since the same voice is given back seven times. At Cyzicus they also call a large building the buleuterium, with the timberwork so arranged without any iron nail that the beams are taken out without props and put back. The same is held sacred at Rome on the Sublician bridge, since it was torn away with difficulty when Horatius Cocles was defending it.

101| But it would be fitting to pass over also to the marvels of our city, and to examine the teachable forces of 800 years, and so to show that the circle of the lands was conquered. That this has happened almost as many times as marvels are related will be clear; but gathered in the totality and cast into one heap, no other greatness will arise than if some other world were being told of in one place.

102| And not to count among great works the Circus Maximus built by Caesar the dictator, three stadia in length, one in breadth, but with the buildings four iugera, with seating for 250,000: shall we not count among magnificent ones the basilica of Paulus, marvelous with columns from Phrygia, and the forum of the deified Augustus and the temple of Peace of the Emperor Vespasian Augustus, the most beautiful of works that the world ever saw? Nor the roof of the voting hall made by Agrippa, though Valerius of Ostia, architect, had before roofed a theater at Rome for the games of Libo?

103| We marvel at the pyramids of kings, when Caesar the dictator bought merely the ground for building the forum for 100,000,000 sesterces, and, if any expense moves minds taken by avarice, Clodius, whom Milo killed, lived in a house bought for |C̅X̅L̅V̅I̅I̅ sesterces.

104| This I indeed marvel at no differently from the madness of kings; and so I count even Milo himself, who owed 70,000,000 sesterces of debt, among the prodigies of the human mind. But then the old men marveled at the vast space of the rampart, the substructions of the Capitol, and besides the sewers, the greatest work of all to tell of, mountains having been tunneled and, as we related a little before, the city hanging and sailed beneath by Marcus Agrippa in his aedileship after his consulship.

105| Seven rivers collected in channels pass through, and, forced by their headlong course in the manner of torrents to sweep and carry off everything, moreover stirred up by the mass of rains, they shake the shallows and the sides; at times the Tiber, poured backward, is taken in, and the different onrushes of waters fight inside, and yet a firmness, braced against them, withstands.

106| Masses so great are dragged from above without the hollows of the work giving way, ruins fall headlong of their own accord or are driven in by fires, the ground is shaken by earthquakes, yet they last, from Tarquinius Priscus, 700 years, almost unassailable, an example not to be omitted, even more memorable since it has been left out by the most celebrated writers of history.

107| When Tarquinius Priscus was making this work with the hands of the common people, and it was uncertain whether the labor was greater or longer, death being sought for themselves everywhere, as the Quirites fled the weariness of it, that king found a new remedy, unthought of before and after, to fix the bodies of all who had so died to crosses, to be looked at by the citizens and at the same time to be torn by wild beasts and birds.

108| For this reason the shame proper to the Roman name, which has often saved lost situations in battles, came to help then too, but at that time [….] blushing after life, since it shamed the living, as though it were going to shame the dead. He is reported to have made the size of the hollows such as to let through a wagon heavily loaded with hay.

109| Small are all the things we have said, and all to be compared with a single marvel, before I touch on the new. In the consulship of Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Catulus, as is agreed among the most careful authors, no house was more beautiful at Rome than that of Lepidus himself, but, by Hercules, within 35 years the same did not hold the hundredth place.

110| Let anyone who wishes reckon in this estimate the mass of marbles, the works of painters, the royal expenses, and the hundred houses competing with the most beautiful and most praised, and afterward surpassed by countless others down to this day. Surely fires punish luxury, and yet it cannot be brought about that our ways understand that anything is more mortal than man himself.

111| But two houses surpassed all of them. Twice we have seen the whole city ringed with the houses of the emperors Gaius and Nero, of the latter indeed, that nothing might be lacking, a golden one. No doubt it was in such a way that those who made this empire so great had lived, going out from the plow or the hearth to subdue nations and bring back triumphs, whose fields too took up a smaller measure than the sitting rooms of those men!

112| The thought arises, indeed, what portion of these were those sites which they decreed at public expense to unconquered commanders for building houses; and the highest honor of them was, as in Publius Valerius Publicola, the first consul with Lucius Brutus, after so many merits, and in his brother, who twice in the same magistracy had defeated the Sabines, that it was added by decree that the doors of their house should open outward and the door be thrown back on to the public way. This was the most distinguished mark among triumphal houses too.

113| I shall not allow those two to enjoy even this glory of fame, and we shall show that even their madness was surpassed by the private wealth of Marcus Scaurus, whose aedileship I am inclined to think did most to cast down morals, and whether Sulla's greater evil was not the great power of his stepson rather than the proscription of so many thousands.

114| In his aedileship he made the greatest work of all that ever were made by human hand, not for a temporary delay, but even with a purpose of eternity. This was a theater; it had a triple stage in height, of 360 columns, in that state which had not endured six Hymettian columns without reproach to a most eminent citizen. The lowest part of the stage was of marble, the middle of glass, a kind of luxury unheard of even afterward, the top of gilded panels; the columns, as we said, the lowest, of thirty-eight feet each.

115| The bronze statues between the columns, as we indicated, were 3,000 in number; the auditorium itself held 80,000 people, though that of the theater of Pompey, with the city so many times multiplied and the population so much greater, suffices amply for 40,000 to sit. The remaining equipment was so great in Attalic cloth, painted panels, and other stage furnishing that, when what overflowed from the delights of daily use had been carried back to his Tusculan villa, the villa, set on fire by angry slaves, was burnt down at a loss of 30,000,000 sesterces.

116| The contemplation of so prodigal a mind takes the thought away and forces it to turn aside from the intended path, and it links on another, greater madness, in wood. Gaius Curio, who died in the civil war on the Caesarian side, at the funeral games for his father, being unable to surpass Scaurus in wealth and equipment (for whence had he a stepfather Sulla and a mother Metella, the buyer-up of proscribed estates? whence a father Marcus Scaurus, so often foremost of the state and a pocket for the plunder of provinces from Marius's fellowship? since now not even Scaurus himself could be equal to himself, when he certainly had this reward of that fire, with things brought together from the circle of the lands, that no one afterward was equal to that madness

117| of his), Curio therefore had to use his own genius and think of something. It is worth the effort to know what he devised, and to rejoice in our morals, and, with the manner reversed, to call ourselves the elders. He made two very large theaters of wood, side by side, each hung on a revolving balance of a single pivot, in both of which, with the morning show of the games given with their backs to each other, so that the stages should not drown one another out, they were suddenly turned around (as is agreed, after the first days even with some people sitting in them), and with their horns coming together into themselves he made an amphitheater and gave gladiators' fights, carrying around the Roman people itself, more truly bound by oath.

118| For what would anyone marvel at first in this: the inventor or the invention, the craftsman or the author, someone who dared to devise this or to undertake it or to order it? Above all will be the madness of a people daring to sit on so treacherous and unstable a seat. Behold, this is that conqueror of the lands and tamer of the whole world, who divides nations and kingdoms, sends laws to foreigners, a certain portion of the immortal gods for the human race, hanging on a machine and applauding at its own danger!

119| What cheapness of lives is that, or what complaint about Cannae! How much harm could have happened! That cities are swallowed by gaping of the earth is the public grief of mortals: behold the whole Roman people, as if placed on two boats, held up by two pivots, and watching itself fight to the finish, about to perish at some moment if the machines were dislocated!

120| And by this favor is sought in tribunician assemblies, so that he may shake the hanging tribes; what would he not dare on the rostra before those whom he had persuaded of this! For to those who confess the truth, the whole Roman people fought it out at the funeral games at the tomb of his father. He varied this magnificence of his, the pivots being wearied and thrown into disorder, and with the form of an amphitheater kept, on the last day he gave athletes with the two stages set apart through the middle, and the platforms suddenly snatched away in the opposite direction, he brought out on the same day victors from among his gladiators. And Curio was not a king nor a commander of nations, not remarkable in wealth, as one who had nothing in his property besides the discord of the leading men.

121| But let wonders unconquered by true reckoning be told. Quintus Marcius Rex, ordered by the senate to restore the conduits of the waters Appia, Anio and Tepula, brought in a new one, called by his own name, with tunnels driven through mountains, within the time of his praetorship; Agrippa, however, in his aedileship, with the Virgo water added and the rest collected and repaired, made 700 basins, besides 500 fountains, 130 reservoirs, many of them splendid in decoration, and on these works he set up 300 statues in bronze or marble, 400 columns of marble, and all of it within the span of a year. He himself adds, in the record of his aedileship, that games were also given for fifty-nine days and that 170 baths were provided free, which now at Rome have grown to an endless number.

122| The most recent expense, of a work begun by Gaius Caesar and finished by Claudius, surpassed the preceding aqueducts, since from the 40th milestone to such a height that all the hills of the city were watered, the Curtian and Caerulean springs and the New Anio flowed in, |M̅M̅M̅| D sesterces being spent on that work.

123| And if anyone has reckoned more carefully the abundance of waters in public, in baths, pools, channels, houses, gardens, suburban villas, the lengths of the water coming, the arches built, the mountains pierced through, the valleys leveled, he will confess that nothing was more to be marveled at in the whole circle of lands.

124| Of the same Claudius I, for my part, would count among the most memorable things, although abandoned through the hatred of his successor, the mountain pierced through to let out the Fucine lake, at an indescribable expense indeed and with a multitude of workmen through so many years, when either the collected water, by which the mountain was earthy, was drained up to the top by machines, or flint was cut, and how great things were done inside, in darkness, which cannot be conceived by the mind except by those who saw them, nor told in human speech!

125| For I pass over the work of the harbor of Ostia, likewise roads cut through mountains, the Tyrrhenian sea shut off from Lucrinus by moles, so many bridges made at such expense. And among very many other marvels of Italy itself, Papirius Fabianus, most expert in the nature of things, is authority that marbles grow in the quarries; the quarrymen also affirm that those wounds of the mountains fill up of their own accord. If these things are true, there is hope that luxury will never be lacking.

126| To one turning aside from marbles to the remarkable natures of the other stones, who would doubt that the magnet meets us first? For what is more marvelous, or in what part of nature is there greater wickedness? It had given a voice to rocks, as we said, answering a man, indeed even speaking against him. What is more sluggish than the stiffness of stone? Behold, it grants it senses and hands. What is more combative than the hardness of iron?

127| Nature has granted it feet and ways. For it is drawn by the magnet stone, and that subduer of all materials runs toward some void I know not what, and, as it comes nearer, leaps up, is held and clings in an embrace. For this reason they call it by another name sideritis, and some Heraclion. The magnet was named from its discoverer, as Nicander is authority (on Ida, as I find, for they are found here and there also, in Spain too); he is said to have discovered it when the nails of his sandals and the point of his staff stuck to it while he was pasturing herds. Sotacus shows five kinds of magnet:

128| the Ethiopian, and one from Magnesia, which borders Macedonia, on the right for those going from Euboea to Iolcus; the third in Hyettus in Boeotia, the fourth around Alexandria Troas, the fifth in Magnesia of Asia. The first difference is whether it is male or female, the next is in color. For those found in Macedonian Magnesia are red and black, the Boeotian have more of the red color than of the black. The one found in the Troad is black and of the female sex and for that reason without strength, the worst however is in Magnesia of Asia, white and not attracting iron and like pumice. It has been found out that they are better the more they are blue.

129| The palm is given to the Ethiopian, and its weight is paid back in silver. It is found in Zmiris of Ethiopia; so a sandy region is called. There also is the haematites magnet, of blood color and giving back blood if it is ground, but also saffron. In attracting iron haematites does not have the same nature as the magnet. A proof of the Ethiopian is that it draws another magnet to itself.

130| All these, however, are good in medicines for the eyes, each in its own measure, and they most of all check eye discharges. Burnt and ground, they also heal burns. Another magnet again, in the same Ethiopia, not far off, drives away and spurns all iron. About both natures we have spoken more often. They report that a stone from the island of Syros floats, and the same crumbled sinks.

131| At Assos in the Troad the sarcophagus stone is split by a cleaving vein. It is agreed that bodies of the dead laid in it are consumed within the 40th day, the teeth excepted. Mucianus is authority also that mirrors and strigils and clothes and shoes brought in for the dead become stone. Rocks of the same kind are both in Lycia and in the east, which, bound on even to the living, eat away the body.

132| Milder, however, for keeping bodies and not consuming them, is chernites, very like ivory, in which they say Darius was laid, and like Parian in whiteness and hardness, only less heavy, which is called porus. Theophrastus is authority also for a translucent stone in Egypt, which he says is like Chian. Perhaps it was so then, since they both cease and new ones are found. The Assian one, salty to the taste, relieves gout, the feet being put into a vessel hollowed out of it. Besides, all ailments of the legs are cured in those quarries, whereas in all mines the legs are damaged.

133| Of the same stone there is what is called the flower, soft into meal, similarly effective for some things. It is like red pumice. Mixed with Cyprian wax it heals ailments of the breasts, while with pitch or resin it disperses scrofulous swellings and abscesses. It helps also consumptives by licking. With honey it brings old sores to scars, eats away excrescences, and dries suppurations resisting treatment from the bite of beasts. A poultice is made of it for the gouty, mixed with bean-meal.

134| The same Theophrastus and Mucianus believe there are some stones that give birth; Theophrastus, that fossil ivory too is found, white and black, and that bones are born from the earth and bony stones are found. Palm-shaped ones are found around Munda in Spain, where Caesar the dictator defeated Pompey, and this every time you break one.

135| There are also black ones, whose authority has come into marbles, as the Taenarian. Varro reports that black ones from Africa are firmer than those in Italy; on the other hand, that white Coran ones are harder than Parian; the same, that Lunensian flint is cut with a saw, the Tusculan splits apart in fire, the dark Sabine, with oil added, even shines. The same says that revolving mills were invented at Volsinii; we find some even moved of their own accord among the prodigies.

136| Nowhere is this one produced more useful than in Italy, and it is a lapis, not a saxum. In some provinces, however, it is not found at all. There are some in this kind that are softer, and are even smoothed by a whetstone, so that to those looking from afar it can seem to be ophites, and there is no other firmer, since the nature of the stone, like wood, does not endure rains and suns or winters, in some kinds and others. There are also those that do not tolerate the moon and those that with age draw rust or change a white color with oil.

137| Some call the millstone pyrites, since there is very much fire in it, but there is another, only more spongy, and still another pyrites resembling bronze. They want it found in Cyprus in the mines around Acamas, one of silver color, the other of golden. They are cooked in various ways, by some a second and third time in honey until the liquid is used up, by others first on live coals, then in honey, and afterward washed like bronze. Their use in medicine is to heat, dry, disperse, thin and turn hardnesses into pus. They are also used raw and pounded for scrofulous swellings and boils.

138| Some make still one kind of pyrites having the most fire. These, which we call living, are the heaviest, and are most necessary to scouts of camps. Struck with a nail or another stone, they give out a spark, which, taken up by sulphur or dry fungi or leaves, gives fire quicker than it can be said.

139| The ostracitae have the likeness of a potsherd. Their use is in place of pumice for smoothing the skin. Drunk, they stop blood, and smeared on with honey they heal sores and pains of the breasts. Amiantus, like alum, loses nothing in fire. It resists all poisonings, particularly those of the Magi.

140| Geodes they call from its character, because it has enclosed earth; it is most useful in medicines for the eyes, and likewise for ailments of the breasts and testicles. The melitinus stone gives out a sweet juice, honeyed. Pounded and mixed with wax, it cures eruptions of phlegm and spots of the body and ulceration of the throat; it removes epinyctides; laid on in a fleece, it relieves pains of the womb.

141| The gagates stone has its name from a place and from the river Gages in Lycia. They say too that at Leucolla it is cast out by the sea and gathered within 12 stadia. It is black, flat, pumice-like, light, not much different from wood, brittle, heavy in smell if it is ground. Earthenware inscribed with it is not erased; when it is burnt it gives out a sulphurous smell; and, marvelous to say, it is kindled by water and put out by oil.

142| It drives away serpents in this way, and restores the strangulations of the womb. By fumigation it detects the sonticus disease and virginity. The same, boiled in wine, cures the teeth, and mixed with wax, scrofulous swellings. The Magi are said to use this in the divination they call axinomantia, and they say it is not burned through if what one wishes will come to pass.

143| Spongite stones are found in sponges and are marine. Some call them tecolithi, since they cure the bladder; drunk in wine they break stones. The Phrygian stone has the name of a people; it is, however, a pumice-like clod. It is first burnt, sprinkled with wine, blown with bellows until it reddens, and again quenched in sweet wine three times, useful only for dyeing clothes.

144| Schistos and haematites have a kinship. Haematites is found in mines; burnt, it imitates the color of minium; it is burnt like the Phrygian, but is not quenched in wine. An adulterated haematites is distinguished by reddish veins and a friable nature. It suits eyes suffused with blood wonderfully.

145| Drunk, it stops women's flows. Those who have spat blood drink it too with the juice of the pomegranate. It is also drunk as effective in ailments of the bladder, and in wine against the strokes of serpents. All the same things are weaker in the one they call schiston. For ailments of the eyes the one like saffron is handier, and is peculiar for filling the hollows of sores in woman's milk, and it admirably restrains protruding eyes. This is the opinion of those who have written most recently;

146| Sotacus, among the most ancient authors, reports five kinds of haematites besides the magnet. He gives the first place among them to the Ethiopian, most useful in medicines for the eyes and in those which he calls panchresta, and likewise for burns. The second kind, he says, is named androdamas, black in color, remarkable for weight and hardness, and from that to have taken its name and to be found especially in Africa; it draws to itself silver, bronze, iron.

147| The test of it, he says, is on a whetstone of basanite stone, for it gives out a blood-colored juice, and it is a remedy of special merit for ailments of the liver. The third kind he makes the Arabian, of similar hardness, scarcely giving out a juice on a water whetstone, sometimes like saffron. Of the fourth kind he says it is called hepatites as long as it is raw, but miltites when cooked, useful for burns, and for everything more useful than rubrica; of the fifth kind, schiston, checking hemorrhoids in a drink.

148| All haematites, however, ground in oil, in a weight of 2 drachmas, are to be drunk by people fasting for ailments of the blood. The same man reports a schiston and a stone of another kind than haematites, which he calls anthracites; it is born in Africa, black, and rubbed on water whetstones gives from the part that was by the root a black color, from the other part one of saffron. It is itself useful in medicines for the eyes.

149| The aetite stones have great fame from the character of their name. They are found in the nests of eagles, as we said in the tenth book. They say they are found in pairs, a male and a female, and that without them the eagles we mentioned do not lay, and for that reason there are only pairs; their kinds are four: one born in Africa, small and soft, having inside itself, as in a womb, a sweet white clay. They think this friable one of the female sex, but the male, which is born in Arabia, hard, like gall or somewhat reddish, having in the womb a hard stone.

150| The third is found in Cyprus, in color like those born in Africa, larger however and flattened; the rest have a round shape. It has in the womb pleasing sand and little stones, itself so soft that it is even crumbled by the fingers. Of the fourth kind it is called Taphiusian, born near Leucas in Taphiusa, which place is on the right for those sailing from Ithaca to Leucas. It is found in rivers, white and round. In its womb is a stone called callimus, and nothing earthy.

151| The aetites, bound on pregnant women or on four-footed animals in the skins of sacrificed animals, hold back births, and are not to be removed unless they are in labor; otherwise the womb falls out. But unless they are taken away from women in labor, they would not give birth at all.

152| There is also a Samian stone in the same island where we praised the earth, useful for polishing gold, and in medicine for ulcers of the eyes with milk in the manner said above, and against old watering of the eyes. Drunk, it helps also against ailments of the stomach, relieves vertigo and restores disturbed minds. Some think it is usefully given also for the falling sickness and for difficulties of urine. And it is mixed into acopa. It is approved by weight and whiteness. They also say births are held back when it is bound on. The Arabian stone,

153| like ivory, burnt, is suited to tooth powders. Particularly it heals hemorrhoids with lint of linen cloths or laid on linen pads.

154| The nature of pumice stones must not be passed over either. Eaten-away rocks in buildings are called by that name, those they call musaea, hanging down to render the likeness of a cave by art, but those pumices that are in use for smoothing the bodies of women, and now indeed of men, and, as Catullus says, books, are most praised in Melos, Nisyros and the Aeolian islands.

155| The test is in whiteness and least weight, and that they be as spongy and dry as possible, easy to grind and not gritty in rubbing. Their power in medicine is to thin and to dry, by a threefold burning, so that they are heated on pure charcoal and as many times quenched in white wine. They are then washed like cadmia, and when dried are stored in a place as little damp as possible. The use of the meal made from them is chiefly in medicines for the eyes:

156| they gently cleanse ulcers of the eyes and fill them, and mend scars. (Some, after the third burning, prefer to grind them cooled rather than quenched, in wine.) They are added also to malagmata, most useful for ulcers of the head and of the private parts. Tooth powders are made of them also. Theophrastus is authority that drinkers in a contest of drinking take this meal beforehand, but are in danger unless they are altogether filled by drink, and that there is so great a nature of cooling that musts cease to ferment when pumice is added.

157| Authors have taken care over the stones of mortars too, and not only of medicinal ones or those pertaining to pigments. The Etesian stone they preferred in these to others, next the Theban, which we called pyrropoecilon (some call it psaranus), third the chrysites from chalazius, but for physicians that of basanites. For this stone gives out nothing from itself. Those stones that give out a juice are thought useful in medicines for the eyes; for that reason Ethiopian ones are especially approved for these.

158| They report that the Taenarian stone and the Phoenician and haematites are beneficial in those medicines which are compounded from saffron; from another Taenarian, which is black, and from Parian stone, one not equally useful to physicians, and a better one from Egyptian alabastrites or from white ophites. For this is a kind of ophites, from which they make vessels and even jars.

159| In Siphnos there is a stone that is hollowed and turned into vessels useful for cooking food or for the uses of edibles, which we know also happens with the green stone from Comum in Italy, but in the Siphnian one it is singular that when heated with oil it turns black and hardens, being by nature most soft. So great is the difference of qualities, for the chief examples of softness are across the Alps. In the province of Belgica they cut a white stone with a saw, as wood is cut, and even more easily, only for the purpose of tiles and roof-tiles or, if one likes, what they call pavonacea kinds of roofing.

160| And these indeed are cuttable, but the specularis, since this too holds the name of stone, splits by a much easier nature into any thin slabs one likes. Hither Spain alone formerly gave this, and not all of it, but within 100 paces around the city of Segobriga; now also Cyprus and Cappadocia and Sicily, and recently it has been found in Africa, all however to be put after those of Spain; the Cappadocian ones are the largest in size, but dark.

161| There are also small ones in the Bononian part of Italy, the flaw bound by the embrace of flint, whose nature however appears similar. In Spain it is dug up from wells of deep depth, and also is found enclosed in rock under the earth and extracted or cut out, but for the most part of a mined nature, complete in itself in the manner of rubble, never yet larger than five feet in length. That this moisture of the earth is frozen by a certain breath of the earth, in the manner of crystallus, and hardens into stone is clearly apparent from this, that when wild beasts have fallen into such wells, the marrow in their bones after one winter is fixed into the same nature of stone.

162| It is found also sometimes black, but the white has a wondrous nature, though its softness is known, in enduring suns and frosts, and it does not grow old, if only injury is absent, since this happens also in rubble of many kinds. They found another use in its shavings and scales, to strew the Circus Maximus for the Circus games, so that whiteness may be a recommendation.

163| In the reign of Nero a stone was found in Cappadocia with the hardness of marble, white and translucent even in the part where tawny veins had cut across, called phengites from its character. With this he had built the temple of Fortune, which they call that of Sejanus, consecrated by King Servius, enclosed by the golden house; therefore even with the doors shut by day there was daylight there in a manner other than that of the specularia, as though the light were enclosed, not transmitted. Juba is authority that in Arabia too there is a stone translucent like glass, which they use instead of specularia.

164| Now it would be fitting to have passed to the stones of the workmen, and first whetstones for sharpening iron. There are many kinds of them: the Cretan long held the greatest praise, the second the Laconian from Mount Taygetus, both requiring oil. Among water-whetstones the Naxian had the greatest praise, next the Armenian, of which we spoke. Those from oil and water, the Cilician are strong; those from water, the Arsinoitic.

165| Some have also been found in Italy that draw an edge with water, most keen in effect, and likewise across the Alps, which they call passernices. The fourth way is with human saliva: these are the ones that serve well in barbers' shops. The Laminitanian ones from Hither Spain are foremost in that kind.

166| Of the remaining multitude of stones, tufa is useless for buildings through its perishability and softness. Some places nevertheless have no other, as Carthage in Africa. It is eaten away by the breath of the sea, crumbled by the wind, beaten by rain. But they protect it with care by pitching the walls, since it is eroded even by the lime of the plaster, and it was wittily said that they use pitch on roofs, lime on wines, since that is how they season musts.

167| Others are soft, around Rome, the Fidenate and the Alban. In Umbria also and Venetia a white stone is cut with a toothed saw. These, workable in the building, endure labor also, under a roof at least; by spray and frost and rime they break into shards, and are not strong against the sea breeze. The Tiburtine, strong against everything else, splits in heat.

168| Black flints are best, in some places also reddish ones. Elsewhere indeed white ones too, as in the Tarquinian, in the Anician quarries around Lake Volsinii and in the Statonian, which not even fire harms. The same, carved also in monuments, remain uncorrupted against age too; from them are made molds, in which bronzes are cast. There is also a green stone vehemently resisting fire,

169| but nowhere abundant, and where it is found it is a lapis, not a saxum. Of the rest, the pale one is rarely useful in rubble, the round one is strong against injuries but unreliable for structure unless bound with much bracing. Nor is the riverine more certain, always as if wet.

170| The remedy with a doubtful stone is to take it out in summer and not insert it in a roof before two years, when it is tamed by the weather. Those parts of it that have been damaged are more usefully fitted to underground structure; those that have withstood it may safely be committed even to the open sky.

171| The Greeks build from hard stone or flint leveled, like brick walls. When they have so done, they call the kind of structure isodomon; but when the courses are built of unequal thickness, pseudisodomon. The third is emplecton; only the faces are dressed, the rest they place as it chances.

172| It is necessary that alternate joinings be made, so that the middle stones hold the joints of those before, in the middle of the wall too, if the matter allows; if not, at least at the sides. To stuff middle walls with broken rubble they call diatonicon. The reticulate structure, in which they build most frequently at Rome, is liable to cracks. A structure must be made to the square and the level and must answer to the plumb line.

173| Cisterns are to be built of 5 parts of pure sharp sand, 2 of the most vehement lime, with fragments of flint not exceeding a pound in weight; thus the floor and walls similarly are to be rammed with iron-shod bars. It is more useful for them to be double, so that in the first the impurities settle and through a strainer pure water passes into the next.

174| Lime from mixed stone Cato the Censor disapproves; from white is better. That from hard stone is more useful for structure; from porous, for plasterwork; for both it is condemned from flint. The same is more useful from quarried stone than from stone collected from river banks, more useful from millstone, because its nature is somewhat richer. A marvelous thing: after it has burned, it is kindled by waters. There are three kinds of sand:

175| pit-sand, to which a fourth part of lime ought to be added, and to river or sea sand a third. If a third part of ground potsherds is added too, the material will be better. From the Apennine to the Po pit-sand is not found, nor across the seas.

176| The cause of the ruins of the city is chiefly this, that through theft of lime the rubble is put together without its own binding. Mortar also, the older it is, the better. In the laws of ancient buildings it is found that the contractor shall not use any fresher than three years old; therefore no cracks disfigured their plasterwork. Plasterwork, unless it has been laid on with three coats of sand and two of marble dust, never has enough brilliance. In damp places, and where salt would spoil it, it is more useful to coat first with potsherd mortar.

177| In Greece, for plasterwork, they work the sand coat too, which they are going to lay on, first in a mortar with wooden bars. The test of marble stucco is in the working, until it does not stick to the hoe; on the contrary, in whitewash work, that the slaked lime stick like glue; it ought to be slaked only from a lump. At Elis stands a temple of Minerva, in which Panaenus, the brother of Phidias, laid on plaster kneaded with milk and saffron, as they report; for that reason, if saliva is rubbed on it with the thumb today, it gives back the smell and taste of saffron.

178| The same columns set more densely seem thicker. Their kinds are four: those that have a sixth part of the height in the lowest thickness are called Doric; those with a ninth, Ionic; with a seventh, Tuscan; the Corinthian have the same ratio as the Ionic, but a difference, since the capitals of the Corinthian have the same height as is gathered from the lowest thickness, and for that reason they seem slenderer; for in the Ionic the height of the capital is a third part of the thickness.

179| The ancient ratio was that the height of the columns be a third part of the widths of the shrine. In the temple of Ephesian Diana, which was the earlier one, bases were first put under the columns and capitals added, and an eighth part of the height was approved for the thickness, and that the bases have half the thickness and a seventh part be taken off the thickness at the top. Besides these there are those called Attic columns with four corners, with equal interval of sides.

180| Lime has a great use in medicine also. Fresh lime is chosen, not sprinkled with waters. It burns, disperses, draws out, and restrains the first onsets of creeping ulcers; when mixed with vinegar and rose oil and rubbed on, then tempered with wax and oil of roses, it brings to a scar. For dislocations also it cures with liquid resin or pig's fat with honey, and by the same composition scrofulous swellings.

181| Maltha is made of fresh lime. The lump is quenched in wine, then pounded with pig's fat and fig, a double softening. This is the most tenacious of all things and surpasses the hardness of stone. What is to be coated with maltha is rubbed over with oil beforehand.

182| A thing akin to lime is gypsum. It has several kinds. For it is both cooked from stone, as in Syria and at Thurii, and dug from the earth, as in Cyprus and Perrhaebia; from the top of the soil also is the Tymphaic. The stone that is cooked ought not to be unlike alabastrites or marbly stone. In Syria they choose the hardest for this and cook it with cow dung, so that it may burn more quickly. Of all, however, it is found that the best is made from specular stone or one having such a scale.

183| Wet gypsum must be used at once, since it sets very quickly; yet again it allows itself to be pounded and dissolved into meal. The use of gypsum is most welcome in whitework, in figures and cornices of buildings. A famous example is that Gaius Proculeius, supported by the intimacy of Augustus Caesar, in a pain of the stomach drank gypsum and killed himself.

184| Pavements have their origin among the Greeks, worked with the art and method of painting, until lithostrota drove it out. Most famous in this kind was Sosus, who laid at Pergamum what they call the unswept house, since the leavings of a dinner and what is usually swept away from pavements he had made as though left behind, of small tesserae dyed in various colors. Marvelous there is a dove drinking and darkening the water with the shadow of its head; others sun themselves, scratching themselves on the lip of a drinking cup.

185| Pavements first made, I believe, are those we now call barbaric and subtegulanean, in Italy rammed with rammers. This at least can be understood from the name itself. At Rome the scutulate pavement was first made in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus once the third Punic war had begun; pavements, however, were frequent before the Cimbric war, and of the great favor of minds toward them the famous verse of Lucilius is the indication: With the craft of pavement and the worm-like inlay.

186| Open-air floors the Greeks invented, roofing houses with such, a kind easy in a warm region, but deceptive wherever rains freeze. It is necessary that two layers of planking be laid under, crosswise, and that their ends be nailed down so that they are not twisted, and that to new rubble a third part of ground potsherds be added, then the rubble, in which 2 fifths of lime are mixed, be rammed to a foot's thickness,

187| then a thick core be laid on, 6 digits, and a large tessera be set, not less than 2 digits deep, but a slope be kept of ten feet by a sescuncia, and it be carefully skimmed with a whetstone. To plank it with oak boards they think useless, because they warp; rather even to lay ferns or straw beneath is better, so that less of the force of the lime may reach. It is necessary also that a round stone be put under. In a similar way herringbone potsherd floors are made.

188| One more kind, the Greekish, must not be neglected: on a rammed ground there is thrown rubble or a potsherd pavement; then, charcoal having been densely trodden, a material of gravel and lime and ash mixed is laid on in thickness of half a foot, made true to the rule and the level, and it is an earthen form; if it has been polished with a whetstone, it holds the use of a black pavement.

189| Lithostrota were begun already under Sulla; with very small slabs at least there survives to this day what he made in the shrine of Fortune at Praeneste. Pavements, driven then from the ground, passed into vaulted ceilings with glass. This too is a new invention; Agrippa at least in the baths he made at Rome painted the earthenware work in the hot rooms with encaustic and adorned the rest with whitewash, without doubt going to make the vaults glass if this had been invented earlier or if it had come from the walls of the stage of Scaurus, as we said, into vaults. For which reason the nature of glass must also be indicated.

190| The part of Syria that is called Phoenicia, adjoining Judaea, has within the roots of Mount Carmel a marsh which is called Candebia. From this the river Belus is believed to rise, flowing into the sea in a space of five miles near the colony Ptolemais. It is slow in its course, unwholesome to drink, but sacred for rites, muddy, deep in its shallow, and shows its sands only when the sea has withdrawn; for rolled by the waves they shine, their dirt worn off.

191| Then they are also believed to be bound by the bite of the sea, not useful before. It is a stretch of shore of no more than five hundred paces, and for many ages this was the only place for producing glass. The story is that a ship of merchants in natron, having been driven ashore, while they were scattered along the shore preparing a meal and there was no chance of stones for raising the cooking pots, they put lumps of natron from the ship under them, and when these were kindled, the sand of the shore being mixed in, translucent streams of a new liquid flowed, and this was the origin of glass.

192| Soon, as skill is inventive, it was not content with having mixed in natron; the magnet stone began to be added too, since it is believed to draw the liquid of glass to itself as it does iron. In a similar way shining pebbles began to be burnt in many places, then shells and fossil sands. Authors state that in India glass is made from broken crystallus and that for this reason none is compared with the Indian.

193| It is cooked, moreover, with light and dry woods, with cyprus and natron added, especially Egyptian. In continuous furnaces it is melted as bronze is, and masses are made, blackish in a rich color. The sharpness is so great anywhere that without any feeling it cuts through to the bones whatever of the body it has breathed on. From the masses it is again melted in the workshops and dyed, and one thing is shaped by blowing, another is ground on the lathe, another is engraved in the manner of silver, Sidon once being famous for these workshops, since it had even devised mirrors.

194| That was the old way of making glass. Nowadays, however, in Italy too, at the river Volturnus, a white sand found along six miles of shore between Cumae and Liternum is taken where it is softest and ground with pestle or mill. Then it is mixed with 3 parts of nitrum, by weight or by measure, and once melted is poured off into other furnaces. There it forms a mass which is called hammonitrum; this is melted again, and becomes pure glass and a mass of white glass. Nowadays sand is treated in a similar way throughout the provinces of Gaul and Spain as well.

195| They say that in the principate of Tiberius a way of tempering glass was devised which made it flexible, and that the craftsman's whole workshop was destroyed, so that the value of copper, silver and gold should not be lowered; but this story was for a long time more widespread than reliable. Yet what does it matter, when in the principate of Nero a technique of glass-making was discovered that sold two modest cups, which they called petroti, for 6,000 sesterces?

196| Under the heading of glass are also counted the obsiana, so called from their likeness to the stone which Obsius found in Ethiopia. It is of a very black colour, sometimes translucent as well, but cloudy to the eye, and when set in walls as mirrors it gives back shadows instead of images. Many make gems from it; we have also seen solid statues of the deified Augustus in this material, which allows of such thickness, and he himself dedicated 4 obsian elephants in the temple of Concord as a marvel.

197| Tiberius Caesar, too, restored to the cult of the Heliopolitans an obsian statue of Menelaus that had been found in the estate of Seius, who had been prefect of Egypt; from this it appears that the material has an older origin, though it is now debased by the glass made to resemble it. Xenocrates reports that obsian stone occurs in India, in Samnium in Italy, and on the Ocean coast in Spain.

198| Obsian glass is also made by a kind of dyeing, for tableware, and also a glass that is entirely red and not translucent, called haematinum. Glass is also made white, and in imitation of murrina, or of hyacinthi and sapphiri, and in every other colour; nor is there any other material nowadays more pliant, or even better suited to painting. Yet the highest esteem goes to colourless translucent glass, as near as possible in likeness to crystallus.

199| Its use for drinking has driven out the metals silver and gold. It cannot, however, bear heat unless cold liquid is poured in first; yet glass balls with water put in them, when set facing the sun, become so hot that they set clothes on fire. Fragments, when warmed, can only be stuck together; they cannot be melted down again whole, except into separate drops broken off from one another, as when the little counters are made which some name after eyes, some of them multicoloured in various ways. — Glass melted down with sulphur fuses into stone.

200| And now that we have finished with everything that depends on human ingenuity, where art reproduces nature, one is moved to marvel that there is almost nothing that is not brought to completion by fire. Fire takes sands, and from them it pours out, in one place glass, in another silver, in another minium, in another kinds of lead, in another pigments, in another medicines. By fire stones are melted into copper, by fire iron is born and tamed, by fire gold is perfected, by fire stone is burnt so that the rubble in buildings is bound together.

201| Some things benefit from being burnt again and again, and the same material produces one thing at the first firing, another at the second, another at the third; for charcoal itself begins to have its powers only when it has been quenched, and when it is thought to be dead, it gains greater strength. Fire is a boundless and unruly part of nature, and one of which it may be doubted whether it destroys or creates the more.

202| Fires themselves also have a medicinal power. It is certain that in a pestilence brought on by a darkening of the sun, fires lit in many places are a help. Empedocles and Hippocrates demonstrated this in different places. For internal organs that are wrenched or bruised, Marcus Varro — I shall use his very words — says: 'Let the hearth be your medicine-chest.'

203| For the lye-ash from it, taken as a drink, is a remedy. One can see gladiators, when they have finished their bout, helped by this drink. What is more, carbunculus, the kind of disease of which, as we have mentioned, two men of consular rank recently died, is cured by oak charcoal ground with honey. So true is it that even things condemned and now worthless have some uses — charcoal, for example, and ash.

204| Nor shall I pass over one instance of the hearth that is famous in Roman literature. They relate that in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus a male member suddenly appeared out of the ash on his hearth, and that Ocresia, a captive, handmaid of Queen Tanaquil, who had been sitting there, rose up pregnant. In this way, they say, Servius Tullius was born, who succeeded to the throne. Later, too, as he lay asleep in the palace as a boy, his head blazed with fire, and he was believed to be the son of the household Lar. For this reason, they say, he was the first to institute the games of the Compitalia in honour of the Lares.

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