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Crystallus, Rock-crystal

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CRYSTALLUS.
105
the satirists. An equal mania possessed the fashionable Romans for the acquisition of each sort, the Crystal being appropriated to iced, the other to boiling liquors. Thus Pliny instances a lady, and she not a wealthy one, who had then lately bought a Crystal trulla (flat bowl) for a sum equivalent to 1500Z. of our money. Nero, to revenge him­self upon mankind by preventing any one else from drinking out of the unique vessels, when informed that all was lost, dashed upon the floor and smashed two Crystal deep basins (scyphi) engraved with designs from Homer. Seneca tells a story (De Ira, iii. 40) that strongly illustrates their enor­mous value ; how Augustus punished his friend Vedius Pollio, who had ordered a boy for having broken a crystal vase to be thrown into the pond where the lampreys were kept (to be oaten alive by them): the culprit, flying to the emperor's feet, petitioned for a less horrible death ; Augustus, as a punishment commensurate with the cruelty of the sentenco, ordered all Pollio's vases of the kind to be broken to pieces in his presence, and the pond to be filled up. Some idea of the various employments of these two materials amongst the Romans, with whom they filled the place now occupied by Sevres and Dresden porcelain, may be derived from Fauno's account of the articles found in the sarcophagus of the child Maria, the betrothed bride of the Emperor Honorius, discovered in making excavations at St. Peter's in 1544. "Within a silver box were vases and articles in Crystal, thirty in all, big and little ; amongst which were two middling-sized cups, one round, the other oval, engraved with the most beautiful figures in intaglio. Also a snail-shell (or Nautilus) in Crystal, fitted up with fine gold as a lamp. The gold covered the orifice of the shell, leaving only an opening in the middle for pouring in the oil, by the side of which is fixed on a pivot a golden fly, moving to and fro for the purpose of covering the
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