these matters, or if he had ever shown any critical doubts about the authorship of any work, a statement by him on such a subject would be entitled to more consideration; but as it is, in view of the facts that no other author before him has ascribed the Aphrodite Urania to Phidias, and that if it be by him it is his only marble work of which we have any clear testimony, little faith can be placed in the statement by Pausanias. Add to this that no contemporary of Phidias, and no writer anywhere near his age, has ever spoken of any marble work of his, and I think we must reject this statue as we have rejected the others. In estimating the value of any such statements as to the authorship of statues, we must keep in mind the fact that it was not only not the custom for the ancient Greek sculptors to inscribe their names on their own statues, but it was not ordinarily permitted to them to do so on any public work; and undoubtedly it was for this reason that Phidias himself made his own likeness as well as the portrait of Pericles on the shield of the Athena, to indicate that the work was done by him while Pericles had the administration of affairs at Athens. In the same way Batrachus and Saurus, two Lacedæmonian artists who built the temples inclosed in the Portico of Octavia, being prohibited from inscribing their names on the walls, adopted the device of sculpturing on the spirals of the columns a lizard and a frog, which their names signified,—thus punning in marble, to perpetuate their names as architects of the temples. So also Myron is said to have inscribed his name on the thigh of his Discobolos in such minute characters as to be visible only on the closest inspection. In the case of some of the great statues, the names of the authors were exceptionally allowed to be inscribed after their deaths; and this was probably the case with the Zeus of Phidias. Ordinarily no such practice was permitted. Such being the case, the authorship of Greek statues at the time of Pausanias would rest entirely upon tradition—and tradition is little to be trusted. Besides, what adds to the difficulty is that it was the custom in later times to put the names of ancient sculptors on works not made by them, to give them a higher value; it is of this practice that Phædrus speaks in one of his Fables:— “Æsopi nomen sicubi interposuero Cui reddidi jampridem quidquid debui Auctoritatis esse scito gratia; Ut quidem artifices nostro faciunt sæculo Qui pretium operibus majus inveniunt, novo Si marmore adscripsere Praxitelem suo Trito Myronem argento.”