also occurred in various other places such as Egypt and the Balearic Islands. It has been suggested from time to time by various scholars that the miltos of Sinope was not red ochre at all, but the rarer and more costly red pigment, cinnabar. This opinion is maintained, for example, by Leaf,396 mainly because it would have been so expensive to transport such a common product as red ochre through the difficult country lying between Cappadocia and Sinope that it could not have been sold at a profit in Greece, where it would have had to compete with the red ochre found abundantly in much nearer localities such as Ceos and Lemnos. Though some of his other arguments are also ingenious, it is not at all likely that his identification is correct. A very serious objection is that cinnabar does not occur within the confines of ancient Cappadocia, though various iron minerals such as brown iron ore and the ochres are found in many places.397 Moreover, cinnabar is not found in the localities listed by Pliny as sources of sinopis, but red ochre occurs in these places. The argument that red ochre imported from Sinope would have been too costly to compete with the product from neighboring places is easily refuted. In the first place, natural red ochres differ greatly in quality and in suitability for use as paint pigments, so that an imported ochre of high quality could easily have been sold at a considerably higher price than ordinary red ochre. Even today, natural red ochres which have a particularly desirable hue, brilliancy of tone, or tinting strength are brought great distances to be marketed in direct competition with domestic ochres selling at a much lower price. Thus, for example, the red ochre found at Ormuz on the Persian Gulf is exported in large quantities to England, the United States, and other distant countries. Moreover, the Sinopic red ochre may have been a pigment of very high iron oxide content, so that much less was needed when it was diluted with white pigments to produce light-red or pink colors, and thus it may have been cheaper for this purpose than ordinary ochres selling for a third or a fourth as much. The remark of Dioscorides398 that Sinopic miltos was liver-colored definitely suggests that
1MW. Leaf, Journal of Hellenic Studies, XXXVI (1916), 10-15. 397 Schmeiszer, Zeitschrift jiir prafyische Geologic, XIV (1906), 190. 898 V, in (Wellmann ed., V, 96).
