Paros
About
Underground galleries called the Quarry of the Nymphs and the Quarry of Pan produced lychnites, a marble so translucent that quarrymen worked by lamplight even in daytime. This stone became the Venus de Milo and Praxiteles' Hermes, prized above every rival white marble in the ancient world. Extraction on Paros had continued for nearly three thousand years by 117 CE, still shipped from this small Cycladic island to buyers across the Roman Mediterranean.
What happened here
The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.
In ancient writing
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.14
Parian marble, the sculptors' stone, and the seam called lychnites — quarried underground by lamplight, which is where the name came from.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →