This is a convenient place for dealing with the great series of Hellenistic reliefs, though it is no longer possible to maintain that these have a uniform and common origin either in Alexandria or in Imperial Rome.[49] We have seen their beginning in the Telephos frieze, the first to show us a pictorial background and an episodic mythological treatment. The appearance of the relief panel as a self-sufficient whole without architectural background is an invention of the Hellenistic age as early as the third century B.C., but it continues as an artistic force right through Roman into mediaeval and modern art. Certainly not even the Hellenistic reliefs have a common origin, but it is not impossible that Alexandria was the home of one class of them, the pre-eminently pastoral scenes like the Grimani reliefs in Vienna (Fig. 23). Alexandria was the greatest city of the Hellenistic world and the farthest from any conception of the pastoral life of the country. It is, therefore, possible that the rise of the pastoral tendency in art was connected with the Alexandrian craving for novelty and variety in a sphere of which it knew nothing. It is certain that the pastoral poems of Theocritos delighted the citizens of Alexandria, and the Hellenistic pastoral relief is strictly analogous to the poems of Theocritos. It shows a countryside of the Watteau type with satyrs and nymphs to correspond to the shepherds and shepherdesses of the court of Louis XIV. It is an artificial country without a touch of the reality of nature. Thus the pastoral reliefs and the poems of Theocritos represent the one element of idealism in the materialistic culture of Alexandria. [Illustration: 21] [Illustration: 23] [Illustration: 22] [Illustration: 24]