Thessalian Verde Antico Quarries
About
A quarry at Chasambali, 12 kilometers northeast of Larissa, produced a mottled green-and-white breccia that Romans called Lapis Atracius after the nearby town of Atrax. The stone commanded roughly three times the price of plain gray-white marble from Thasos, a measure of how highly Roman buyers rated its swirling pattern. Clasts of serpentinite bound in a calcite matrix gave the marble a look unlike any other colored stone quarried in Roman Greece. Blocks cut here traveled south to decorate villas and public buildings across the Aegean world.
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.
Sources
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