used with ore, are followed by verbs in the present tense instead of the imperfect, which would be usual. The manuscripts have εκκαίεται, which Aldus changed to xaierai, and τότε παύεται. It would be possible to emend the text and to read εκαίετο and τότ βπανζτο, but it is not certain that Theophrastus would have felt obliged to follow the strict sequence of tenses. It is, however, necessary to translate εκκαίεται as "it burnt" rather than "it burns." It seems better to restore εκκαίεται, the reading of the manuscripts, especially since εκκαυ^είη follows; here Wimmer has taken the reading of Aldus.
18. anthrax. This appears to have meant originally a glowing live coal; the word was used later, as Theophrastus uses it here, to mean a transparent precious stone of a deep red color. It appears to have been first used as the name of a gem by Aristotle, who says that "the seal-stone called anthrax is the least (affected by fire) of all the stones."83 Theophrastus, however, is the first to give descriptive details by which the stone can be identified. Though anthrax was probably a generic term that could have been applied equally well to the ruby, red spinel, or red garnet, it is fairly certain from the evidence available that the stone designated by this name was nearly always red garnet at the time of Theophrastus. In the first place, no engraved rubies or spinels dating from the Hellenistic period are known with certainty, whereas many engraved garnets have come down to us and exist today in various museums.84 In the second place, the ruby, with its high degree of hardness, could not normally have been used for seals by the Greeks, since they would have experienced great difficulty in engraving this stone with the abrasives then available. Garnet, on the other hand, with its lower degree of hardness, offered no such technical difficulty.
It is worth noting that when Theophrastus begins to discuss incombustible stones, he mentions a variety which seems to be related to combustible stones by its name and appearance, and thus he makes an easy and not illogical transition from one class
83 Meteorologica, IV, 9, 387B (17).
84 Blumner, Technologic und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Kiinste bet Griechen und Romern, Vol. Ill, p. 245; A. Furtwangler, Die antigen Gemmen (Leipzig and Berlin, 1900), Vol. II, pp. 130-46, 153-73.
