It is not to be doubted that such an influx of excellent statues and pictures caused a revival of the taste for the arts. And accordingly there grew up new schools of painting in Italy as a matter of course. But no name of note has been preserved. Pliny, to be sure, tells us of one Ludius, in the time of Augustus, who first devised the decoration of the walls of houses with rural scenery; and nearly at the same time lived Arellius, a man of talent, but of dissolute manners. These were followed by Aurelius, Cornelius Pinus, and Actius Priscus, who were employed by Vespasian to decorate some temples which he rebuilt; but their pictures are said scarcely to have attained mediocrity, much less excellence. In sculpture there is proof still existing that great manual dexterity had survived the genius that produced the ideal Jupiter of Phidias, and the Venus of Praxiteles. That dexterity was happily applied to portraits. There is an individual expression, notwithstanding some hardness, in the Roman portraits in marble down to a very late period, that must satisfy us that they are genuine likenesses, and that enables us to read the characters of the men as truly as if we sat in their company. But the artists that wrought in and for Rome were now Greeks, and with the exception of some of those who engraved gems[56], their works are universally of an inferior character. Under the magnificent Hadrian there was indeed a temporary revival of art. All that the patronage of a Roman Emperor, ambitious of distinction as the reviver of art and elegance could do, was done. The portraits of Antinoüs, which he caused to be executed, whether with a flowery garland, and beautiful as Adonis, or in the character of an Egyptian priest, or as a Greek huntsman, rival the youthful gods and heroes of the sculptors of Greece[57]. But with Hadrian and the Antonines this prosperity ended[58]. The arts could not flourish where tyranny, vice, and civil war alternately reigned. They withered almost to death; and had Constantine not pillaged the monuments of his predecessors his own would have remained mere masses of deformity, to mark the degradation of art[59].