Mitchell, Lucy M.: A history of ancient sculpture (New York, 1883)

656 SCULPTURE UNDER ROMAN DOMINION.

By this glimpse at the amount, variety, and uses of sculpture in Rome,
we are naturally drawn to think of the men who must there have executed the
works required. Were they great creative masters, borne on the shoulders of
popular sympathy and interest ? or were they strangers in a strange land ?
Judging from the small number of Romans mentioned as sculptors, their capa-
bilities in this direction would seem to have been very limited. The sculptors
were, we know from inscriptions and history, mainly Greeks, and seem to have
been looked upon with little respect by the proud Romans. Seneca says,
"While the figures of the gods are worshipped, those who make them are
despised ;" and Cicero, that the Romans left art to foreigners and slaves, that
they might find in it forgetfulness of, and consolation in, their servitude.I246 It
was customary for the Romans to own families of slaves, who should decorate
their houses, and work for others as well, thus becoming remunerative to their
masters. When an artist slave was freed, it was often done on the condition
that he should continue to work for his former owner.12-*" Inscriptions on
two statues in the British Museum state that they are by a frcedman. How
little the spirit of these men was appreciated by the practical Romans, is shown
by the enumeration of a slave's faults, one of which consisted in being too fond
of looking at pictures. The fact that slave-labor was so much in vogue, doubt-
less, explains in part the great cheapness and vast amount of the work. In the
time of Alexander the Great, three thousand drachms (about five hundred and
ninety-two dollars) had been the average price of a statue ; but in the time of
Hadrian, a bronze statue could be obtained for from one thousand to five hun-
dred drachms.12*8 Under Diocletian (300 A.D.), bronze statues were paid for
by weight, about four drachms being reckoned to the pound.

But how great must necessarily have been the change in the position and
character of art, no longer the spontaneous outgushing of a free spirit, but
torn from its native soil, and serving to gratify the caprice of foreign task-
masters ! The ceaseless drain upon Greece, for the works of great masters of
old, in time had its effect, for the mine of Greek originals was not exhaustless ;
and so innumerable copies were made, and often palmed off for originals. This
practice seems to have been common, even in the early part of the empire ;
the poet Phsedrus of that time telling us that he affixed the name ^Esop to his
fables, just as many artists did that of Praxiteles to their marbles. Ideal art,
at least, was confined, then, to reproduction ; its types being traceable to the
happier, more creative days of the past. One sculptor inscribes on his statue
of Aphrodite, that it is a copy of the Aphrodite of Troas, a work otherwise
unknown to us ; but far the greater number omit to mention the works they
have copied. Agrippa, according to Josephus, adorned the whole Phoenician
city Berytus (modern Beirut) with copies of old works. In the Augusteum
built by Herod in Cresarea, the colossal statue of the emperor was a copy of
Pheidias' Olympic Zeus, which, Josephus says, did not fall short of the original;