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Vitrum Annulare, Pastes

Vitrum Annulare, Pastes Page of 384 Description Woodcuts Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
364
Í ATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
tellers with the legend of King Jamshid's famed Ruby Cup, of which Hafiz sings :—
" My wanderings brought me to the fast-closed niche Where Jamshid's cup of sculptured Ruby lay ; Blushed through the porphyry wall its radiance rich, As through the curtains peeps the rising day.
Earth and earth's gifts were graven on its round, Her cities, nations, of all tongues and kin, The various treasures in her bosom found : And words of power the buried wealth to win."
Note on the Portland Vase. That this work is due to the Ptolemaic school at its best time is deducible not merely from the purity of the style, but yet more from the recondite character of the designs and their enigmatical expression of some well-known myth, all bespeaking the over-refined genius of the age when flourished Callimachus and Lycophron. Roman composi­tions, on the other hand, always tell their own story under the thinnest possible mythological disguise. If the court­ship of Peleus and Thetis be really intended by the one relievo, her bereaval of her son by the other, the vase may reasonably be supposed a commission from some prince ol the Macedonian line, like Perseus,—
" proavi simulantem pectus Achillis,"
That its latest ancient owner—the Roman whose ashes it ac­companied (not contained)—was the virtuous but ill-starred Syrian, must be a mere antiquario's fiction. That emperor was murdered, with his mother and all his friends, in some remote part of Gaul, or perhaps Britain (Lampridius is uncertain which) ; and his successor, the instigator of the crime, was the last person to honour his remains by trans­mitting them to Rome for imperial sepulture.
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