On the sale of the house they were not allowed to be destroyed or removed, but passed with it, and were bought by “novi homines” (men of no family), and passed off by them as the portraits of their own ancestors,—just as the portraits of Wardour Street are at the present day. Cicero in his invective against Piso cries out, “Obrepsisti ad honores errore hominum, commendatione fumosarum imaginum, quarum simile habes nihil præter _colorem_;” and Sallust in his Jugurtha says, “Quia imagines non habeo, et quia mihi nova nobilitas est.” Nor were the Romans singular in this custom of draping figures with real stuffs. The images of the gods in early Greece also were draped and dressed in clothes, and crowns were placed on their heads. They had false hair, too, which was dressed regularly by attendants, and at stated times they were washed and adorned with jewels and had their dresses arranged, just as if they were alive. In later times this custom died out; but the colossal Athena’s solid drapery of gold was washed at a certain festival appointed for the purpose, called Plyntheria. In Rome, however, the custom was maintained to a late day. The images of the temples were adorned with real drapery, and purple mantles were hung on the statues of the emperors. The Greeks did not thus treat their portrait statues, and in this the Romans were peculiar. The Roman “imagines” and “ceræ” were probably executed in plaster or some such material, certainly not in marble, or otherwise they would have been too heavy to be carried about in procession. Apparently they resembled the figures which Lysistratus first began to make, and the process of coloring them, if we understand “cera” to mean color, was little else than the old practice, called “circumlitio,” of covering marble statues with an encaustic varnish of color so as to give them a delicate and tinted surface. The most salient example of this is to be found in the anecdote told of Praxiteles, who, when he was asked which of his statues he most admired, answered, “Those that Nicias has colored,”—“quibus Nicias manum admovisset,”—Nicias, who in his youth was celebrated as a painter of statues, ἀγαλμάτων ἐγκαυστής, having assisted him, “in statuis circumliendis.” A similar process, called καύσις, was also employed in finishing walls, and is thus described by Vitruvius: After the wall had received its color, it was covered with Punic wax and oil, which was laid on evenly with a hard brush, and then half melted or infused into a smooth surface by moving a “cauterium,” or pan of hot coals, close over it; and after that it was rubbed with a candle and a clean linen cloth. This process, then, was old as applied to marble statues and to plaster walls. What was new in the work of Lysistratus was that he united the two methods, by modeling in plaster the general likeness and then finishing the surface in encaustic. It was an old process with a new application.