Roman sculpture and Roman imperialism—these two things are indissolubly connected. That is the proposition, expressed in the baldest terms, that must now be established. As long as the Republican system sufficed for the needs of Rome, her sculpture was entirely Hellenistic in character. It was only with the advent of the Augustan age (between, let us say, 50 B.C. and the year of Our Lord) that traces of a distinctively national spirit began to show themselves. A complete imperial system had commenced to exert its influence upon society. From that time onward, and throughout the three following centuries, characteristics can be traced which clearly differentiate the work of the Roman sculptor from that of any Hellenic or Hellenistic artist. It was only when “the pale Galilean” triumphed and the ideals of Christianity supplanted those of an outworn imperialism that “Roman sculpture,” too, became a thing of the past. The how and the why suggested by our major proposition must be faced boldly. Reducing the problem to its elements, we require, in the first place, to gain a clear idea of what “Roman imperialism” denotes. In the second place we must distinguish clearly between “Roman sculpture” and, an entirely different thing, “sculpture produced in Rome.” The one is organically Roman. The parentage of the other is Greek; its birthplace is an accident. It precedes the national art of imperial times by at least a century. That so widely diffused an appreciation of sculpture existed long before the growth of a native art is in itself highly significant. An imported art is not a rare phenomenon in history, but it rarely persists for the length of time it did in Rome. In the sixteenth century, England welcomed an invasion of Italian “noveletti” and romantic poetry. In a very short while, however, the alien art was replaced by a vigorous national drama. Earlier in the same century, France for a time suffered the Italian school of painting (the school of Fontainebleau). But the stranger never quite made herself at home, and was finally supplanted by an artistic canon which was entirely French in spirit.