Murrhinus, Megger, 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 splendour of the Roman banquets. Critics are divided concerning the matter of the pocula or vasa murrhina, murrina, or murrea. Some will have them to have been the same with our porcelain or china ware. The generality held 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 Diospolis 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 murrha 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 our's in this particular. Some conjecture them to have been of agate, others 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 ἀγαθούς, for crystal, and ὄψις 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 crystalline. On the contrary, the most correct among them call them murrhina or morriona. The cups made of crystal, which were also in use at those times were called crystallina, and these murrhina or murrhae, 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 maculose murrhae. And Statius mentions the crystalline and murrhine cups in the same sentence, but as different things, not the same. Arrian mentions also the λευκός πράσινος, which his interpreters censure as an error of the copies, and would alter into μύρρα, 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 sextaries was sold for 70 talents. T. Petronius, before his death, to spite Nero (or as Pliny expresses it, ut mensam ejus exhaeraret, to disinherit his table), broke a bason, trulla murrhina, valued at 300 talents, on which that emperor had set his heart.