stronger; for when he says, and truly, that Socrates was the son of a sculptor, he forgets that Socrates was himself a sculptor,—and some have supposed him to have been a painter also, but Pliny is of another opinion. The three Graces in the court before the Acropolis of Athens were his work; and it is probably to the demands these Graces made upon his thoughts the philosopher alluded in his dialogue with Theodote the courtesan. She had invited him to her home; he excused himself that he had no leisure from his private and public affairs,—“and besides,” he adds playfully, “I have φἴλαι—female friends—at home who will not suffer me to absent myself from them day or night, learning, as they do from me, charms and powers of enticement.”[47] So that we may suppose him to have been no mean statuary. Yet, considering that his mother followed the humble occupation of a midwife, and that consequently his father was not very rich, it may not be an out-of-the-way conjecture to suppose that the family trade may have had its humbler employments, of which the painting images may have borne a part. Ships had their images as well as temples, and we know that the ship’s head was “Μιλτοπάρἤος.” The custom has descended to our times. But we are not to take the word put by Plato into the mouth of Socrates—ανδριαντας—necessarily in the highest sense, and imagine he speaks of such works as those of Phidias or Praxiteles. Although the Greeks did distinguish the several words by which statues were understood, they were not very nice in the observance of the several uses. Ανδριαντας may have been applied to any representation of the human figure.[48] Ανδριαντοποιος, says the Apologist, was a statuary—so may have been said to be Ανδριαντοπλάσης the modellist in clay or wax; but neither word is used by Socrates—simply Ανδριαντας, (images). There is not a hint as to how, or with what materials, they were made. The scholiast on the passage in Aristophanes respecting the work of Socrates (the Graces), makes a distinction between ανδριαντας and αγαλματα—noticing that Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, λιθοξόou, with whom he took his share in the polishing art, adding that he polished ανδριαντας λιθινouς ἐλαξεύε, and that he made the “αγαλματα” of the three Graces. Now, let ανδριας be a statue, or human figure, of whatever material, and grant that some such figures had painted eyes, and probably partially coloured drapery, possibly the whole body painted—what then? they might have been low and inferior works. Who would think, from such data, of inferring a habit in the Greek sculptors of painting and plastering all their marble statues—asserting too, so audaciously, that we the moderns have, and not they, a prejudice in favour of white marble? But Mr Lloyd, in his note on this passage, with respect to Socrates (_vide_ “Apology”), admits that it is no evidence of the colouring the flesh. “The passage is decisive, as far as it goes,