Читать книгу The Book of the Pearl. The history, art, science, and industry of the queen of gems онлайн

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The prices reported for some choice ones at that time seem fabulous. It is recorded by Suetonius, that the Roman general, Vitellius, paid the expenses of a military campaign with the proceeds of one pearl from his mother’s ears: “Atque ex aure matris detractum unionem pigneraverit ad itineris impensas.” In his “Historia naturalis,” Pliny says that in the first century A.D., they ranked first in value among all precious things,^[17] and reports sixty million sestertii^[18] as the value of the two famous pearls—“the singular and only jewels of the world and even nature’s wonder”—which Cleopatra wore at the celebrated banquet to Mark Antony. And Suetonius^[19] places at six million sestertii the value of the one presented by Julius Cæsar as a tribute of love to Servilia, the mother of Brutus, who thus wore

The spoils of nations in an ear,

Changed to the treasure of a shell.

Or, as St. Jerome expressed it in his “Vita Pauli Eremitæ”:

Uno filo villarum insunt pretia.

We are told by Ælius Lampridius that an ambassador once brought to Alexander Severus two remarkably large and heavy pearls for the empress. The emperor offered them for sale, and as no purchaser was found, he had them hung in the ears of the statue of Venus, saying: “If the empress should have such pearls, she would give a bad example to the other women, by wearing an ornament of so much value that no one could pay for it.”