According to Pausanias, Callimachus made a golden lamp for the Temple of
Minerva at Athens, with a wick composed of asbestos, which burned day
and night for a year without trimming or replenishing with oil. If this
was true, the font of the lamp must have been large enough to have
contained a year's supply of oil; for, though some profess that the
economical inventions of the ancients have been forgotten, the least
knowledge in chemistry proves that oil in burning must be consumed. The
perpetual lamps, so much celebrated among the learned of former times,
said to have been found burning after many centuries, on opening tombs,
are nothing more than fables, arising perhaps from phosphorescent
appearances, caused by decomposition in confined places, which vanished
as soon as fresh air was admitted. Such phenomena have frequently been
observed in opening sepulchres.