Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/452

444 A friend in Rome came to me one day with a request that I would go with him to see a Scarabæus which he had taken a fancy to, and had engaged to buy if it were counted genuine by good judges. It was a superb stone, a deep carnelian, nearly opaque, exquisitely elaborated, and with an intaglio which I doubt not was Greek. It was the most beautiful one I had ever seen, and I gave my opinion, such as it was, in favor of its antiquity. It was purchased, and afterwards shown to a well-known dealer, by whom it was pronounced a cheat; and on inquiry it was discovered that the seller had had a copy made of the original, and, while he offered the latter for sale, delivered the former, which was so carefully and perfectly copied as to puzzle the eye even of the best-instructed amateur.

A merchant of antiquities with whom I have occasional dealings—we will call him A. because that is not his initial—brought me one day a large intaglio, which had the appearance of an archaic Etruscan work. A. is known as one of the piu cognoscenti of Rome; and his dictum is worth any other two. He declared it an original antique of the rarest quality; and Odelli, the best gem-cutter in Rome, coincided in the opinion. He held it at two thousand francs, but would have sold it to me for eighteen hundred, I suppose. I didn't bite, and after a few weeks lured the collector of whom he had bought it—one of those who make it a business to haunt the markets, and visit distant cities and excavations, to purchase and sell again to the Roman antiquaries—to boast his prowess as compared with that of A., who had bitten him severely several times in their dealings; and, in the full tide of his self-glorification, I turned the conversation on the black agate, now become famous among the dealers. He could not resist the temptation, and told me all about it. "A. believes it to be antique, don't he?" "O, he is certain of it," said I. "Well, I'll tell you how it is: I bought the thing of the man who made it, and paid him three scudi for it. I took it to A. and offered it to him for six; but he refused it, thinking it to be a paste. I took it away again, and, having had it tested as a stone, offered it to him for twenty. After examining it and keeping it a few days, he offered me twelve. I said no,—eighteen. He said no. I said sixteen, and he offered me fourteen, which I took. The fact is," said he, "no one is able to say for certain if a stone is antique or not. A. has the best judgment in Rome, but you see how he is deceived." I bought of the same man a small engraved emerald, which he had just purchased of a peasant, and, without much examination, sold me for one scudo, as a basso-impero of ordinary quality. My eyes were better, and had seen, in what he thought a handful of flowers, a cross; and on cleaning it we found it to be an early Christian stone of much greater value than he supposed, to his great chagrin.

If the perfections of our Scarabæus give us a glimpse of Etruscan existence, we may perhaps gather from the gems some notion of what Rome was, beyond what historians have written, or the ruins of her palaces and tombs have shown. The quantity of intaglii alone, such as they are, which are dug up in the gardens and vineyards around Rome every year, is incredible to one who has not watched day by day the acquisitions of the antiquity shops, and the stalls of the Piazza Navona. Very few of them are of any artistic value; but the fact that so many were made use of is a marvel in itself, and implies a greater luxury than marble palaces even hint at. I one day remarked to a peasant who brought me some intaglii to sell, that the ancients must have worn a great many rings; and he replied, that in his country the richer people wore so many that they had to hold their hands up to keep them from falling off. On inquiry I found that he came from the Abruzzi, where it seems that the people still hold on to something of the antique customs; for we know that the Romans began the fashion of covering the fingers to that