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Updated: May 15, 2025
The wall which surrounds the unique choir or presbytery of this most interesting old church is also composed of great slabs of Hymettian marble, taken from the original subterranean church and hastily put together.
Hymettian marble was one of the first if not actually the first species introduced into Rome. In the year of Rome 662, Lucius Crassus the orator brought to the city six columns of it, each twelve feet in height, with which he adorned his house on the Palatine Hill, receiving, on account of this circumstance, from Marcus Brutus the nickname of the Palatine Venus.
Clement are supposed to lie, is covered by a canopy supported by elegant columns of pavonazzetto marble; while the high altar of the upper church is similarly surmounted by a double entablature of Hymettian marble, supported by four columns of pavonazzetto. The extra-mural church of St.
What say you to Cicero’s, in the Carinæ? or the grand portico of Quintus Catulus, rich with the Cimbric spoils? or, better yet, that of Crassus, with its Hymettian columns, on the Palatine? Aye! aye! the speech of Marcus Brutus was prophetic; who termed it, the other day, the house of Venus on the Palatine! And you, my love, shall be the goddess of that shrine!
Yet how needless! were he to come near while your eyes were closed, and unbar those Hymettian lips to the voice that dwells within, you could not want the thought that this was none of us who munch the fruits of earth, but some spirit from afar that on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise.
Some of the ancient pillars of Hymettian marble belonging to the peristyle of the temple of Ceres and Proserpine, still as widely spaced as they used to be, adorn the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, built on the foundation of that shrine; while twenty-four remarkably fine fluted Corinthian columns of the same material divide the triple nave of Santa Sabina on the Aventine, and are supposed to have belonged to the ancient Temple of Juno Regina, erected by Camillus after the destruction of the Etruscan city of Veii.
Similar rows of fluted Doric columns of the same marble, ten on each side, adorn the Church of St. Pietro in Vincoli. They are ancient, and belonged to some temple or basilica of the Forum. There are also five ancient pillars of Hymettian marble in the upper Church of San Clemente, taken from the same prolific source.
That corner of the world smiles in my eye beyond all others; where the honey yields not to the Hymettian, and the olive rivals the verdant Venafrian: where the temperature of the air produces a long spring and mild winters, and Aulon friendly to the fruitful vine, envies not the Falernian grapes.
At the present day the marble is used for corner-stones in the ordinary houses of Athens. Another livid white marble, somewhat resembling the Hymettian, is that which is known to the Italians as Marmo Greco livido. It was called by the ancients Marmor Thasium, from Thasos, now Thapso, an island in the north of the Ægean Sea, off the coast of Thrace.
Nothing too can be finer than the two rows of Ionic columns of Hymettian marble which divide the immense nave of Santa Maria Maggiore from the side aisles. There are eighteen on either side, each upwards of eight feet in circumference, and are supposed to have been taken from the Temple of Juno Lucina, whose site is assigned by antiquaries to the immediate vicinity.
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