|
10
|
THE BOOK OF THE PEARL
|
||
|
|
|||
|
called
them. Even then, as now, there were some faultfinders. The immortal
Caesar interdicted their use by women beneath a certain rank; Martial
and Tibullus inveighed against them; the witty Horace directed his
stinging shafts of satire against the extravagance. Referring to a
woman named Gellia, Martial wrote : "By no gods or goddesses does she
swear, but by her pearls. These she embraces and kisses. These she
calls her brothers and sisters. She loves them more dearly than her two
sons. Should she by some chance lose them, the miserable woman would
not survive an hour."1 Hear what stern old Seneca had
to say : "Pearls offer themselves to my view. Simply one for each ear?
No! The lobes of our ladies have attained a special capacity for
supporting a great number. Two pearls alongside of each other, with a
third suspended above, now form a single earring ! The crazy fools seem
to think that their husbands are not sufficiently tormented unless they
wear the value of an inheritance in each ear!"2 The prices
reported for some choice ones at that time seem fabulous. It is
recorded by Suetonius, that the Roman general, Vitellius, paid the
expenses of a military campaign with the proceeds of one pearl from his
mother's ears : "Atque ex aure matris detr actum unionem pignera-verit ad itineris impensas." In his "Historia naturalis," Pliny says that in the first century a.D., they ranked first in value among all precious things,3 and reports sixty million sestertii4
as the value of the two famous pearls—"the singular and only jewels of
the world and even nature's wonder"—which. Cleopatra wore at the
celebrated banquet to Mark Antony. And Suetonius6 places at
six million sestertii the value of the one presented by Julius Caesar
as a tribute of love to Servilia, the mother of Brutus, who thus wore
The spoils of nations in an ear, Changed to the treasure of a shell.
Or, as St. Jerome expressed it in his "Vita Pauli Eremitse" :
Uno filo villarum insunt pretia.
We
are told by AElius Lampridius that an ambassador once brought to
Alexander Severus two remarkably large and heavy pearls for the
empress. The emperor offered them for sale, and as no purchaser was
found, he had them hung in the ears of the statue of Venus, saying: "If
the empress should have such pearls, she would give a bad example
1 Martial, "Epigrammata," VIII, 81. worth about $1,300,000 at the present time,
2 Seneca, "De beneficiis," Lib. VII, c. 9. but of far greater value in Roman days. ' Pliny, "Historia naturalis," Lib. IX, c. 35. 5 "Divus Julius Caesar," c. 50.
4 Equivalent to 1,875,000 ounces of silver,
|
|||
|
|
|||