All this seemed innocent enough; but Pliny was not satisfied. "I judged it necessary," he writes to the emperor, "to try to get at the real truth by putting to the torture two female slaves who were said to officiate at their religious rites; but all I could discover was evidence of an absurd and extravagant superstition." So he refers the whole matter to the emperor, telling him that the "contagion" is not confined to the cities, but has spread into the villages and into the country. Still, he thought it could be checked: nay, it _had_ been checked; for the temples, which had been almost abandoned, were beginning to be frequented again, and there was also "a general demand for victims for sacrifice, which till lately had found few purchasers." The wise Trajan approved the course of his representative. He tells him, however, not to go out of his way to look for Christians; but if any were brought before him, why, of course he must inflict the penalty unless they proved their innocence by invoking the gods. The remains of Roman literature have nothing so interesting for us as these two letters of Pliny and Trajan of the year 103. We may rest assured that the walls of every Roman town bore testimony to the contempt and aversion in which the Christians were held, particularly by those who dealt in "victims" and served the altars--a very numerous and important class throughout the ancient world. CHAPTER II. AMONG THE GREEKS. Greece was the native home of all that we now call art. Upon looking over the two hundred pages of art gossip in the writings of the elder Pliny, most of which relates to Greece, we are ready to ask, Is there one thing in painting or drawing, one school, device, style, or method, known to us which was not familiar to the Greeks? They had their Landseers--men great in dogs and all animals; they had artists renowned in the "Dutch style" ages before the Dutch ceased to be amphibious--artists who painted barber-shop interiors to a hair, and donkeys eating cabbages correct to a fibre; they had cattle pieces as famous throughout the classic world as Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" is now in ours; they had Rosa Bonheurs of their own--famous women, a list of whose names Pliny gives; they had portrait-painters too good to be fashionable, and portrait-painters too fashionable to be good; they had artists who excelled in flesh, others great in form, others excellent in composition; they took plaster casts of dead faces; they had varnishers and picture-cleaners. Noted pictures were spoken of as having lost their charm through an unskillful cleaner. They had their "life school," and used it as artists now do, borrowing from each model her special beauty. Zeuxis, as Pliny records, was so scrupulously careful in the execution of a religious painting that "he had the young maidens of the place stripped for examination, and selected five of them, in order to adopt in his picture the most commendable points in the form of each." And we