Murrhinas, Mopines, in antiquity, an appellation given to a delicate sort of ware, brought from the east, whereof cups and vases were made, which added not a little to the splendor of the Roman banquets.

Critics are divided concerning the matter of the porcella, or vasa murrhina, murrina, or murrea. Some will have them to have been the same with our porcelain or china-ware.

The generality hold them to have been made of some precious kind of stone, which was found chiefly, as Pliny tells us, in Parthia, but more especially in Carmania. Arrian tells us, that there was a great quantity of them made at Diopolis in Egypt. This he calls another sort of murrhina work; and it is evident, from all accounts, that the murrhina of Diospolis was a sort of glass-ware, made in imitation of the porcelain or murra of India. There is some difference in the accounts given by Pliny and Martial of the murrhina vasa. The first author says, that they would not bear hot liquors, but that only cold ones were drank out of them. The latter, on the other hand, tells us, that they bore hot liquors very well. If we credit Pliny's account, their porcelain was much inferior to ours in this particular. Some conjecture them to have been of agate, others of onyx, others of coral. Baronius, doubtless, was farthest out of the way, when he took them to be made of myrrh, congealed and hardened. Some have supposed these vessels to be made of crystal; but this is contrary to the account of all the ancients. The Greeks had the words ἀπολαμβάνειν for crystal, and ἀπολαμβάνειν for myrrh, very common among them; and therefore, if these vessels had been made of either... of these substances, they would in some places have called them Smyrna or crystallina. On the contrary, the most correct among them call them murrhina or morrhea. The cups made of crystal, which were also in use at those times, were called crystallina, and these murrhina or murrhea, by way of keeping up the distinction; and Martial tells us, that the stone they were made of was spotted or variegated, calling them pocula maculatae muriae. And Statius mentions the crystalline and murrhine cups in the same sentence, but as different things, not the same. Arrian mentions also the myrrha; which his interpreters censure as an error of the copies, and would alter into myrrha, the name of the gum myrrh.

Pompey is recorded as the first who brought these murrhine vessels out of the east, which he exhibited in his triumph, and dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus. But private persons were not long without them. So fond, in effect, did the Roman gentry grow of them, that a cup which held three sextariæ was sold for 70 talents. T. Petronius, before his death, to spite Nero (or as Pliny expresses it, ut neminem ejus exhiberet, to disinherit his table), broke a bason, trulla murrhina, valued at 300 talents, on which that emperor had set his heart.