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Vitrum Annulare, Pastes

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354                              VITRUM ANNULARE.
Whoever desires to understand the real nature of this game, often erroneously supposed to be chess, let him read (and make out if he can) the minute account of a famous match played between the Emperor Zeno and the poet Agathias, and immor­talised in an epigram of the latter's (Anthol. ix. 482).
The art of making Pastes was never lost ; it afforded too great facilities to fraud of the most lucrative kind, " nequo est ulla fraus vitas lucrosior," says Pliny, ever to have fallen into disuse in the jeweller's atelier.3 Pliny alludes to the numerous treatises on the subject then current. Heraclius, who wrote a manual ' De Artibus Eomanorum,' flourished, as his editor Easpe thinks, in the 7th century, and appears to have been a Spanish Goth, to judge from his barbarous dialect, in which quœrere is used in the sense of posse. Amongst others, he gives a recipe for making Pastes, but has unfortunately chosen to clothe his meaning in such obscure and corrupt hexameters that a translation is alto­gether beyond my powers, and therefore I can only present my readers with a transcript of the original to exercise their sagacity upon :—
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