Perry, Walter Copland: Greek and Roman sculpture: a popular introduction to the history of Greek and Roman sculpture (London, 1882)

572

ITALIAN ART.

Such presents they said were unworthy of a city full of the arms and
bloody spoils of barbarians—a city which was rightly called, in the lan-
guage of Pindar,1 ' the temenos of blood-stained Mars.' But the people
in general were delighted with the beauty, or rather the novelty and
strangeness, of their new acquisitions, and the example of Marcellus
was followed by Fulvius Flaccus after the taking of Capua (211 B.C.);
by Flaminius, who despoiled Philip of Macedon (197 B.C.) of the
works of art which he had taken from Greek cities ; by Fulvius
Nobilior, who sent (189 B.C.) more than five hundred bronze and
marble statues to Rome from the city of Ambracia alone, which had
once been the residence of King Pyrrhus of Epirus ; by Cornelius
Scipio, who defeated Antiochus at Magnesia (190 B.C.), and stripped
that city of its works of art; by Paullus yEmilius, who, after the battle
of Pydna (186 B.C.), transported his rich booty of paintings and
statues (among which was an Athene by Pheidias) in 250 waggons
through the streets of Rome ; by Metellus Macedonicus, the con-
queror of Pseudo-Philip (B.C. 148), who brought to Rome the famous
group of twenty-five equestrian statues representing the heroes of the
Granieus, which Lysippus made for the city of Dion.2 Two years
later (B.C. 146) Mummius took Corinth, in which he left no works of
art but the archaic statues for which the Romans had as yet no taste.
The work of spoliation was carried on with ever-increasing vigour
during the wars of Sulla against Mithridates, at which period Athens,
the cities of Bceotia, Olympia, Delphi, and Epidaurus were all plun-
dered. The Emperors followed suit, and Augustus turned his atten-
tion to the hitherto neglected works of archaic art. He adorned the
Temple of the Palatine Apollo and other buildings with the works of
Boupalos and Sthamis, and with the Athene Alea of Ettdceus, and the
Dioscuri of Hegias? But it was the works of the younger Attic school
which appealed most successfully to the blended martial Dionysiac
and erotic tendencies of the great military leaders of Rome in the last
century of the Republic—tendencies which go far to make up the cha-
racters of the Catilines, the Julius Caesars, and the Antonies. Mars,
Bacchus, and Venus were the ruling deities of the day, and it was in

1 J'yt/i. ii. 2. Plut. Marc. xxi.

» Vide supra, p, 483.

3 Vide supra, p. 96.