Loath to depart, I linger by the beach of the Ionian Sea beyond the new
town. It is littered with shells and holothurians, with antique tesserae
of blue glass and marble fragments, with white mosaic pavements and
potteries of every age, from the glossy Greco-Roman ware whose
delicately embossed shell devices are emblematic of this sea-girt city,
down to the grosser products of yesterday. Of marbles I have found
_cipollino, pavonazzetto, giallo_ and _rosso antico,_ but no harder
materials such as porphyry or serpentine. This, and the fact that the
mosaics are pure white, suggests that the houses here must have dated,
at latest, from Augustan times.

[Footnote: Nor is there any of the fashionable _verde_ _antico,_ and
this points in the same direction. Corsi says nothing as to the date of
its introduction, and I have not read the treatise of Silenziario, but
my own observations lead me to think that the _lapis_ _atracius_ can
hardly have been known under Tiberius. Not so those hard ones: they
imported wholesale by his predecessor Augustus, who was anxious to be
known as a scorner of luxury (a favourite pose with monarchs), yet spent
incalculable sums on ornamental stones both for public and private ends.
One is struck by a certain waste of material; either the expense was
deliberately disregarded or finer methods of working the stones were not
yet in vogue. A revolution in the technique of stone-cutting must have
set in soon after his death, for thenceforward we find the most
intractable rocks cut into slices thin as card-board: too thin for
pavements, and presumably for encrusting walls and colonnades. The
Augustans, unable to produce these effects naturally, attempted
imitation-stones, and with wonderful success. I have a fragment of their
plaster postiche copying the close-grained Egyptian granite; the oily
lustre of the quartz is so fresh and the peculiar structure of the rock,