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Crystallus, Rock-crystal

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174
CRYSTALLUS.
dashed upon the floor and smashed two Crystal deep bowls (scyphi) engraved with designs from Homer. Seneca tells a story (De Ira, iii. 40) that strongly illustrates their enormous value ; that Augustus punished his friend Vedius Pollio, who had ordered a boy who had broken a crystal vase to be thrown into the pond where the lampreys were kept : the culprit, flying to the emperor's feet, petitioned for a less cruel death : Augustus, as a punishment commensurate to the cruelty of the sentence, ordered all the 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 materials amongst the Romans, with whom they filled the place now occu­pied by Sèvres and Dresden porcelain, may bo derived from Fauno's account of the articles found in the sarcophagus of Maria Honorii 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 opening. In the same way the nozzle and hole for the wick are drawn out in a sharp projection with the greatest elegance, and so united with the crystal that it appears all one piece naturally. The cover too is equally well wrought. The shape of the shell is like a large sea-shell (Nautilus) encompassed all round with its points, which in this vessel are polished and very smooth, the crystal being so well worked. There were also vases and different articles in Agate, with certain little animals, eight in all. Amongst these, two very beautiful vases, one like those glass ampullas made big and squat for holding oil or such like liquid, so wrought, so elegant, so thin, that it is a marvel to behold ; the other, in the shape of those brass ladles with long handles used in Rome to bale the water out of cisterns, and sup­posed to have been a vessel used in sacrifice by the ancients."
These Crystal vases were either embellished with raised
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