In a wall-painting, once in Pompeii, now in the National Museum at Naples, a picture represents a woman actually painting a statue. It is a “Herma,” one of the popular figures of Dionysus set on a quadrilateral base. The god’s hair is dark brown, the beard is grey and the mantle yellow. A study of the wall paintings and mosaics unearthed at Pompeii and Herculaneum gives the following result. Out of eighty-one pictures of statues, fifty-nine are coloured completely. The male figures are painted a ruddy brown, the female pink and white. Of the others, fourteen are of a greeny brown tinge suggesting bronze. Returning once again to our main argument: we have referred to Julius Cæsar, as the father alike of Roman imperialism and Roman sculpture. Roman national art was created when Cæsar and Augustus established a political system which gave Italy peace after close upon a hundred years of strife. It is not difficult to realize the relief with which Italy must have greeted the new era. In the last few lines of the First “Georgic,” Virgil has drawn a picture of the Roman world as it had been until the imperial visions of Julius Cæsar had become living realities for every Roman citizen under Augustus Cæsar. War was raging everywhere. Corruption was rife. Agriculture was languishing. “The crooked scythes are forged into rigid swords,” says Virgil. With the advent of peace came the same desire to build which followed the Persian war in Athens. The Augustan age changed Rome—to use the well-worn metaphor—from a town of bricks to a city of marble. The student of sculpture will do well to associate both events—the coming of peace to the sorely tried Empire and the era of Augustan building—with a slab of the great Ara Pacis which has been preserved by a strange chance. The fragment shows Augustus, accompanied by his family and the leading citizens and senators, going to the consecration ceremony on July 4, 13 B.C.—the Independence Day of Roman Imperialism. The Ara Pacis was built to honour the Goddess of Peace, in the style of the Altar on the Acropolis of Pergamus. Just as the Altar at Pergamus memorized the delivery of the Hellenistic state from the Gauls, the Ara Pacis enshrined the fact that Rome was at last the acknowledged mistress of the civilized world. Men could now dream of an era of eternal peace; Rome set itself to enjoy the pleasures of intellectual existence in a way that had been impossible amid the perpetual march and remarch of armies and the rise and fall of factions.