Other places on the island give evidence of ancient operations, and the stone is still available for quarrying at the present day. From a dazzling white to a creamy white in color, it had such an attractive appearance that a number of ancient authors thought it worthy of mention. This was the marble which was regarded as most suitable for statuary and was used by many of the most celebrated sculptors of antiquity.
Scarcely less famous was the Pentelic marble, so named from Mt. Pentelicos near Athens. The ancient quarries were at a place called Spilia about twelve miles northwest of the Acropolis. This stone is still quarried at the present time, and most of it is used in the construction of buildings in modern Athens. In ancient times it was widely used for architectural purposes, as is shown by the Parthenon and other surviving structures. Pentelic marble is as fine-grained as marble from Paros, but it takes on a yellow tone on weathering, and there are occasional dark streaks running through it. It was apparently less esteemed than Parian marble for the purposes of sculpture, probably because of its less uniform character, though many of the remains of ancient sculpture that have been found in Attica are of Pentelic marble. It is curious that Hill remarks in reference to this marble, "The Pentelican ... is now wholly unknown, and has been so for many ages."29 The earlier statement of De Laet, "I don't remember that I have read about Pentelic marble anywhere else,"27 also reflects the general state of ignorance in Western Europe concerning Greece under Turkish occupation.
Less is known with certainty about the nature of the marbles or other stones obtained in ancient times from the island of Chios. Pliny28 states that in his opinion variegated marbles were first discovered in the quarries of Chios. From another passage,29 where the reading is uncertain, some have inferred that Chian marble was uniformly black, though Mayhoff adopts another reading (Melo) in his edition of Pliny and does not think this refers to Chios. Theophrastus implies in the next section that the
26 J. Hill, Theophrastus''s History of Stones (London, 1746), p. 21.
27 de Pentelico non memini me alibi legisse; see J. De Laet, Theophrasti De lapidibus Graece et Latine cum brevibus annotationibus (Leyden, 1647), p. 4.
28 XXXVI, 46.
29 XXXVI, 49.
