Another livid white marble, somewhat resembling the Hymettian, 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 columns of Tyrian marble, supposed to have been brought to Rome by Titus from the Temple of Jerusalem.  They originally decorated the confessional of the old Basilica.  The twenty-eight steps of the Scala Santa at the Lateran, said by ecclesiastical tradition to have belonged to Pilate’s house in Jerusalem, and to have been the identical ones which our Saviour descended when He left the judgment-hall, are made of this marble; so that, whatever we may think of the tradition itself, there is a feature of verisimilitude in the material.