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CHAPTER IV
THE PUTA SCIFO A SHIPWRECK I COTEXT:
MARBLE QUARRIES AD SEA TRASPORT I THE SEVERA AGE
When the citizens of Chios showed Cicero their city walls made of the beautiful
pinkish-white marble quarried on the island, he wittily remarked: “I would be much more
amazed if you had made them of travertine.” 220 Cicero noticed that there was nothing
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special in building walls with a particular stone quarried only 2 km away, however fine and
spectacular it might be. Rome, on the other hand, had already demonstrated its capacity to
import white and colored marbles from every corner of the Mediterranean.
In the last two centuries of the Republic some members of the senatorial class,
following the “ancestors’ way,” tried without success to oppose the introduction of marble,
which was seen as a symbol of useless luxury. Yet, while Cicero was alive Caesar traveled
from camp to camp carrying with him mobile mosaic floors, 221 and shortly afterwards
Augustus boasted to “have found [Rome] a city of bricks and left [it] one of marble.” 222
Thus between the end of the Republic and beginning of the Empire there appeared a
remarkable shift in cultural attitudes toward the use of exotic building stone.
In the first century A.D. the amount of marble Rome consumed was so impressive
that Pliny the Elder dedicated almost an entire book of his Historia aturalis to
220 Plin. H 36.5.46.
221 Suet. Iul. 46.
222 Suet. Aug. 28.