Paros

, a celebrated island among the Cyclades, about 7½ miles distant from Naxos, and 28 from Delos. According to Pliny, it is half as large as Naxos, that is, about 36 or 37 miles in circumference, a measure which some of the moderns have extended to 50 and even 80 miles. It has borne the different names of Pactia , Minoa , Hiria , Demetrias , Zacynthus , Cabarnis , and Hylea a . It received the name of Paros, which it still bears, from Paros, a son of Jason, or, as some maintain, of Parr has i us. The island of Paros was rich and powerful, and well known for its famous marble, which was always used by the best statuaries. The best quarries were those of Marpesus, a mountain where still caverns of the most extraordinary depth are seen by modern travellers, and admired as the sources from whence the ♦ labyrinth of Egypt and the porticoes of Greece received their splendour. According to Pliny, the quarries were so uncommonly deep, that, in the clearest weather, the workmen were obliged to use lamps, from which circumstance the Greeks have called the marble Lychnites , worked by the light of lamps. Paros is also famous for the fine cattle which it produces, and for its partridges, and wild pigeons. The capital city was called Paros. It was first peopled by the Phœnicians, and afterwards a colony of Cretans settled in it. The A then i ans made war against it, because it had a isted the Persians in the invasion of Greece, and took it, and it became a Roman province in the age of Pompey. Archil och us was born there. The Parian marbles, perhaps better known by the appellation of A run deli an , were engraved in this island in capital letters, B.C. 264, and, as a valuable chronicle, preserved the most celebrated epochas of Greece, from the year 1582 B.C. These valuable pieces of antiquity were procured originally by M. de Peirisc, a French man, and afterwards purchased by the earl of Arundel, by whom they were given to the university of Oxford, where they are still to be seen. Prideaux published an account of all the inscriptions in 1676. Mela , bk. 2 , ch. 7 .— Strabo , bk. 5 .— Cornel i us Nepos , Miltiades & Alcibiades .— Virgil , Æneid , bk. 1 , li. 593 ; Georgics , bk. 3 , li. 34 .— Ovid , Metamorphoses , bk. 3 , li. 419 ; bk. 7 , li. 466 .— Pliny , bk. 3 , ch. 14 ; bk. 36 , ch. 17 .— Diodorus , bk. 5 , & Thucydides , bk. 1 .— Hero dot us , bk. 5 , . — Horace , bk. 1 , ode 19, li. 6 . ♦ ‘labryrinth’ replaced with ‘labyrinth’