ian, is that
which is known to the Italians as Marmo Greco livido. It was called by
the ancients _Marmor Thasium_, from Thasos, now Thapso, an island in
the north of the AEgean Sea, off the coast of Thrace. The marble dug
from the rocky sides of Mount Ipsario--a romantic hill thickly covered
with fir trees, and rising three thousand four hundred and
twenty-eight feet above the sea--enjoyed considerable reputation among
the ancients. In Rome it must have been very common, if the name of
Thasian is to be given to all the fragments of nondescript dusky white
marble which are found among the ruins. Seneca says that the
fish-ponds in his day were formed of that Thasian marble, with which
at one time it was rare to adorn even temples. It was considered the
least valuable of the white Greek marbles, and was used for the more
ordinary purposes; Statius mentioning, in order to show the
surpassing splendour of a particular building, that Thasian marble was
not admitted into it. But there are not many well-defined monuments of
it remaining in Rome. The chief are the bust of Euripides in the
Vatican, and the outside casing of the pyramid of Caius Cestius, near
the Protestant cemetery, now so weather-beaten and stained with dusky
lichens that it is difficult to identify the material of which it is
composed.

From this marble, by a slight tinge of yellow and a little darker
shade, the livid white marble of Lesbos, the _Marmor Lesbium_, or
Marmo Greco Giallognolo, may be distinguished. It is not a beautiful
material; and yet, strange to say, the statues of some of the most
beautiful women of antiquity, such as those of Julia Pia in the
Vatican, and of the Capitoline Venus in the Museum of the Capitol,
were made of this marble, obtained from the birthplace of Sappho. More
beautiful is the kind known as the _Marmor Tyrium_, or the
Greco-Turchinicchio, which has a light bluish tinge. It was shipped by
the ancients at the port of Tyre from some unknown quarry in Mount
Lebanon, which supplied the marble used without stint in the building
and decoration of Solomon's Temple and Palace. In this quarry every
block was shaped and polished before it was sent to be inserted in its
place in the Temple wall, which therefore, as Heber beautifully says,
sprang up like some tall palm in majestic silence. In Rome this marble
was very rare. The doors in the great piers which support the dome of
St. Peter's are each flanked by a pair of spirally-fluted