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Alabastrites

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58
ALABASTRITES.
serving the perfume unchanged for a great length of time was perfectly deserved, a convincing testimony is offered by certain large alabastra from Pompeii (now in the Museo Borbonico) still diffusing a strong odour of their ancient contents : whereat the Emperor Nicholas on his visit " rimase sorpreso," as the custodf tells you ; and not without reason. The inferior sort chiefly used for this purpose was quarried, says Pliny, near Thebes in Egypt, and Damascus. Vast numbers of Canopi, or sacred jars, of a squat form, with the head of a mummy for a lid, still exist in this Egyptian stone, which is identical in quality with the Derbyshire Alabaster so much worked up now into cheap ornaments.
This common Alabaster certainly deserves the name of " Finger­nail stone " better than the more precious substance that has usurped its original title, for it often exhibits layers, slightly curved, of flesh colour and opaque white arranged like the shades in the human original. The Greeks however made a subtle distinction in the appellations of the two species, not observed by the Latin, mineralogists; giving the name of Όνύχίορ to the gem, and of Όνυχίτης to the marble. Όννχιτίς Χίθος, in the feminine, to distinguish its precious quality, is used by Appian for the gem, in speaking of the treasures of Mithridates.
The Oriental Alabaster, when first imported into Rome, was considered a highly valuable material, and to be produced in Arabia alone. Brought over in such small pieces as only to be worked up into.cups and the feet of couches and chairs (the lion's-paws so often seen serving in that capacity), some amphoras, as large as the Chian wine-vessels, exhibited by P. Lentulus Spinther, were regarded, says Corn. Nepos, as wonderful curiosities.1 Yet, five years later, so greatly had the importation of it increased, he had seen himself columns 32 feet long of that very marble. Four small columns were placed by Balbus in his theatre as an unpre­cedented ornament; this was under Augustus, whereas Pliny's contemporaries had admired thirty such of larger size in the banqueting-hall built by Callistus, the most powerful of the freedmen of the Emperor Claudius. Superb examples of such
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