CHAPTER IV
THE BLOWN GLASS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
It is after all in the development of the art of blowing glass that the principal merit of the glass-workers, in the age immediately preceding our era, is to be found. By this method the real capabilities of the material, both practical and artistic, were first disclosed. The art was probably first practised on the Phœnician coast, perhaps at Sidon, not long after the time of Alexander. Beside the moulded flasks of which I have spoken above, there are others of plain globular form, with simple short necks, which we may perhaps look upon as among the earliest work of the Phœnician glass-blowers. Some of these are little more than spherical vesicles of the glass as it came from the blowing-tube. With these are associated certain plain spheres of thin glass of various colours, which may have been used as balls by jugglers, as mentioned in a passage in one of Seneca’s letters. But the balls of cool glass, mentioned by other writers, held in their hands by ladies in summer, must surely have been solid, like the spheres of rock crystal put to a similar use by the Japanese. The next step was to give the bulb of glass a ‘kick’ at the base, and to prolong the neck; we have then the type of the so-called lachrymatories, perhaps the commonest and best known form of classical glass.
There is in the British Museum an important collection of blown glass vessels which have been found in Syrian tombs. The actual provenance is here, as indeed in the case of so many other finds of glass, very difficult to ascertain. Some of the pieces are said to come from the neighbourhood of Nazareth, but the majority were probably found nearer to the coast, not far from Sidon and Tyre. The forms are on the whole classical, but Oriental influences may be seen in some cases, as in the double unguentaria which resemble certain Egyptian kohl-pots ([Plate VII.]). The apparent abundance of this Syrian glass, and the clear, nearly colourless material, point to a time rather after than before our era.
We know that soon after the middle of the first century, all the various forms and applications that we associate with the blown glass of the Romans were in general use in Italy. The proof of this lies in the vast collection of ancient glass in the museum at Naples. There were some years ago in this collection more than eight thousand pieces of glass, and it is constantly being added to. By far the greater part of this glass comes from Pompeii. Now that town was destroyed in the year 79 A.D., and it had sixteen years previously suffered so seriously from an earthquake that little glass can have survived; we are thus able to fix within exceptionally narrow limits the date of most of the glass discovered in the ruins. Apart from a few elaborate examples extracted from the tombs—some of these may well be of an earlier date—we find a vast series of vessels adapted to various domestic purposes, but more especially to uses connected with the storing and drinking of wine. These are for the most part made of a transparent and often colourless blown glass. By this time, then, the art of the glass-blower must have been fully developed in Southern Italy. The Pompeian glass has been well preserved by the thick bed of dry ashes, and has suffered little from surface decomposition.
SEPULCHRAL GLASS FROM THE SYRIAN COAST
FIRST CENTURY B.C. TO FIRST CENTURY A.D.
From a few scattered references in Roman writers we can in a measure trace the rapid change in the position of glass at Rome, say between the latter days of the Republic and the end of the reign of Augustus. Cicero mentions glass as an article of merchandise brought from Egypt, together with paper and linen. Strabo, writing under the rule of Augustus, says that at Rome every day new processes were invented for colouring glass and for simplifying its manufacture, so that ‘a successful imitation of crystal may now be made so cheaply that a drinking-glass with its stand can be sold for a copper coin’ (xvi. 25).
It is not, however, from Italy, or even from Mediterranean lands, that the greater part of the Roman glass in our collections comes, and this is especially the case if we confine ourselves to the ‘hollow ware’—the true blown glass with which we are at present concerned. Already in Pliny’s time the new industry had spread to Spain and Gaul, where, before long, favoured no doubt by the cheapness of the fuel and of the raw materials, important centres of manufacture must have sprung up. We learn from Strabo that not long before his time the Britons obtained what little glass they used—this was confined, indeed, to articles of verroterie—from the Continent. But though we have no direct evidence on this point, there can be little doubt but that glass-works were established at least by the second century in the southern parts of England, and that, to give one example, the large globular and quadrangular urns of greenish glass were made at glass-works not far from the tombs in which they are found.
Indeed, the bulk of this northern glass is of a sepulchral character. The large size and the graceful shapes of the well-known cinerary urns argue a complete mastery of the technical processes, and point to works on an extensive scale where large glass pots must have been in use. These spherical urns owe their preservation for the most part to the fact that they were enclosed in ‘coffins’ of lead or stone. The somewhat prosaic and ungainly square bottles that often replace them must have been blown into a mould of some kind.